Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion

Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, Linn Marie Tonstad, Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, Linn Marie Tonstad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780367313494
• eBook ISBN: 9781003818205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book takes the groundbreaking work of Lee Edelman in queer theory and, for the first time, demonstrates its importance and relevance to contemporary theology, biblical studies, and religious studies. It argues that despite extensive interest in Edelman's work, we have barely begun to understand the significance of Edelman's ideas both in their own right and with respect to the study of religion. Therefore, it offers fresh approaches to Edelman's work that necessarily complicate the established interpretations of his thinking. With essays by rising and established scholars, as well as a response by Edelman himself, it contends that by fully engaging Edelman, scholars of religion will have to confront negativity and its consequences in ways that will contribute to reshaping the terrain of scholarship on religion, race, sexuality, and social change. The insights provided in this book are new territory for much of the study of religion. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious studies, theology, and Biblical studies, as well as gender studies and queer, feminist, and critical race theory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface: Nothing to Lose
• 1 Fuck the Survivor: Refusing the Future Promised by the Sanctified Cancer Patient
• 2 Sexual Violence and the “End” of Subjectivity: Queer Negativity and a Theopolitics of Refusal
• 3 Conquest’s Compulsion: Against the Promise of the Promised Land in the Hebrew Bible
• 4 Qohelet’s Queer Negativity
• 5 “He Changes Times and Seasons”: Daniel, Sinthomosexuality, and Queer Time
• 6 Flaming Faggotry, Fractured Futurities, and Horizons of Hope in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca
• 7 Losing Ground: From Anti-Gang Apocalypticism to Social Dis/Repair
• 8 Queer Negativity and Racial Antagonism: Edelman, Afro-Pessimism, and the Limits of Recognition
• 9 Revolutionary Grace: Insisting, with Edelman, on Bataille’s Deep Subversion
• 10 Queering the Death of God
• 11 Cripping Image: Disability, Queer Negativity, and God the Sinthomosexual
• 12 Saying Nothing
• Afterword: Giving God the Trigger Finger: Theology, Queer Negativity, and the U.S. Culture of Guns
• Index