In Search of Queer Theology Lost

Abstract

In History of Sexuality 1, Foucault tried to represent—as allusion, satire, dream—the difficulty of finding new speech for telling the lives of sexed bodies. On his account, triumphal claims to have liberated both sex and the speech about it do no more than restage existing regimes for sexual regulation. They dress up biopower in bolder colors. Foucault’s effort at analysis should be recalled by anyone trying to write queer theology—much more, to write about it in the past tense. Whatever queer theology has managed to do, it has not yet been able to sustain new forms for speech about bodily pleasures in lived time. One theological writer who exerted herself to write into this difficulty was Marcella Althaus-Reid. This chapter looks in her chief works for telling moments of compositional failure—which are, not coincidentally, the moments of greatest promise. These passages suggest how to write queer theology more intentionally, especially in the direction of the indefensible boundary between theology and what is now called “literature.”