The Possibilities and Limits of Queer Strategies of Denaturalizing and Resignifying Gendered Symbolics

Abstract

In this article, I take up Marcella Althaus-Reid’s queer strategy that pairs disaffiliation with intimate identification in order to draw out the possibilities and limits of queer strategies of resignification and denaturalization. I will use David M. Halperin’s work on gay femininity, abjection, and camp as the primary site to investigate these queer strategies. This article’s considerations have implications for recent directions taken in contemporary queer theology by challenging projects that presume a certain limitless capacity for queering or that seek to appropriate almost anything – marriage, celibacy, or orthodoxy – as queer. Rather than seeking to mitigate complicity in misogyny or trying to recuperate misogynist theological positions by highlighting their subversive queerness, Althaus-Reid’s demands from queer theologians a prophetic, denunciatory posture that turns away from the imperial theological highways towards the queer ways of knowing and relating to the God at the margins of T-theology.