Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community by Daniel Shank Cruz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community by Daniel Shank Cruz Peter Miller Daniel Shank Cruz, Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019) In Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community, Daniel Shank Cruz explores "how the queer theoretical project of the past thirty years has manifested itself within a Mennonite literary context" (2). Building his case on close readings of recent prose works by nine Mennonite authors, Cruz argues that "queer theory, which is concerned with the marginal in terms of both fighting oppression and investigating elements of culture that the mainstream ignores, helps illuminate a field [Mennonite literature] on the literary margins" (2). In one sense, as Cruz notes, North American Mennonites have always been queer. When the term is taken to mean "strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric,"1 it aptly characterizes a religious and ethnic group that has historically been viewed, and often presented itself, as functioning outside the cultural mainstream due to its commitments to simple living, pacifism, and adult baptism, and its skepticism toward nationalized religion. Tracing Mennonite beliefs back to their [End Page 106] sixteenth-century Anabaptist origins, Cruz proposes that "early Anabaptists' theology was inherently politically queer because disagreeing with the doctrines of the state church was a treasonous act" (10). On the other hand, when "queer" is taken in the more recent sense of denoting non-conforming gender or sexual identity, Mennonites on the whole appear far less queer. Most Mennonite congregations that now welcome LGBTQ members came to that position relatively recently and after sustained, often painful, campaigning by queer constituencies. Many conservative Mennonite congregations remain largely opposed to LGBTQ membership. Orienting his study around this tension—between what we might call Mennonitism's queer spiritualism and its anti-queer social praxis—Cruz identifies recent queer Mennonite literature as a site where traditional Mennonite ideals, such as "a rejection of binaries, the importance of creative approaches to conflict resolution, and the practice of mutual aid, especially in resisting oppression" (11), might be reclaimed and deployed in an increasingly diverse, multicultural present. Cruz offers lucid chapter summaries in his introduction, as does Maxwell Kennel in a 2020 review of the book,2 and rather than reprise those here, I want to consider a word from Cruz's title: Archives. "Two levels of archiving are present in the book," Cruz writes: "it investigates how the texts it studies archive the everyday ephemerality of queer experience, and it archives the books and their archiving endeavors" (25). Neither of these two uses of "archive" quite aligns with the conventional sense of the term. To describe a single book as an archive, whether that book is a work of fiction or an academic monograph, is to deploy "archive" in a figurative sense to mean preserve, document, or record. These are related concepts, to be sure, but they are less concerned with the issues of preservation, record hierarchy, public access, institutional politics, and so forth that bear on archives as such. Cruz acknowledges as much when he notes that "objects become archival in an institutional, and therefore more permanent, sense through their documentation" (18). This permanence, it bears mentioning, is not a physical condition per se. Had Emily Dickinson's poems remained locked in a chest after her death, stored, perhaps, in some Amherst attic, those queer (in multiple senses) manuscripts would likely still exist intact. Rather, the permanence an institutional archive can bestow is at root social, a function of the complex, evolving relation of staff people and technicians, the textual objects themselves, and their more or less public body of users. [End Page 107] I dwell on the social nature of archives, their blending of private value and public space, because it parallels the liminal social position that both Mennonites and queer people have long occupied in the United States. (The phrase "in the world but not of it" has long been a Mennonite mantra.) Yet as Cruz acknowledges, quoting queer theorist Maggie Nelson, "'the binary of normative/transgressive [… is] unsustainable' because eventually North American society will accept queer lives" (7). Indeed, queer identities have been increasingly embraced...