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This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.

This introduction situates the entire collection within key historical and conceptual turns in queer theories, marking along the way how the various chapters apply, challenge, extend, and complicate what queer theory was, is, and will be. In particular, it focuses on some of the most significant, and most discussed works in queer theory and their interrogations of both temporality and affect. To map the impact of these, the bulk of this introduction provides a summative sketch of four “turns,” orienting the reader to some of the more recent disorientations that have complicated the field of queer theory. Thus, this introduction narrates four, interrelated turns—an antinormative, an antisocial, a temporal, and an affective turn—signaling where the chapters of the collection turn and twist these in new and important ways, not only within biblical, theological, and religious studies, but within queer studies at large. Indeed, the twist is that these turns have long carried theological resonance and echoed religious themes, all while the religiously oriented have grappled in still other queer ways with apocalypse and memory, utopia and trauma, apophasis and violence, affect and desire. This more explicit coupling already feels like a long time coming.