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This chapter makes queer and feminist interventions in contemporary political theology. It uncovers the temporalities and affects nurtured by the eschatological and counter-eschatological orientations within radical orthodox and radical democratic theologies. It then places such orientations into dialogue with: Shelly Rambo’s Holy Saturday theology; the queer temporalities of Lee Edelman, Heather Love, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman; Ann Cvetkovich’s work on depression; and Robert McRuer’s critical disability theory. From this dialogue the concept of “bipolar time”—a Holy Saturday temporality and a mode of affect-laden resistance to profitable time—is constructed. Bipolar time is birthed from the interpenetrating feelings of depression occasioned by the neoliberal present and those of manic hope for alternative futures. Bipolar time does not seek a final end to its penetrative flows of despair and desire or to become efficiently and sufficiently ordered; instead it seeks out the insights on offer by disorder. It is a dream of a temporally reordered world—a Queerdom of Heaven on Earth—where worth is divorced from work, and purpose is divorced from profitability.

This introduction argues that New England regionalism included not only fiction writing but a range of women-dominated cultural practices including colonial home restoration, history writing, antique collecting, colonial fancy dressing, and photography. Using the example of Elizabeth Bishop Perkins, this introduction demonstrates the alternative intimate forms and temporalities central to New England regionalism's history-making project. It explicates how regionalist writers placed the unmarried daughter at the center of New England history, representing her as cosmopolitan, mobile, and queer. In foregrounding the unmarried daughter of New England as the ideal inheritor of a legacy of dissent, these regionalists theorized modes of white belonging based on women's myriad alternative desires rather than marriage and maternity.

The themes and arguments of this book are introduced in this chapter through a consideration of a contemporary artist and video-maker’s engagement with the archive through a practice of “full-body quotation.” The concept of fabulation—drawn from the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson—is introduced, and related to black feminist theories of “critical fabulation.” Feminist and queer theories of embodied memory are introduced in relation to the critique of post-humanism.

This chapter considers how four films, Looking for Langston (directed by Isaac Julien, 1989), The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye,1996), Brother to Brother (directed by Rodney Evans, 2005),and The Aggressives (directed by Daniel Peddle, 2005), involve related, but different organizations of time. While all of the films offer insights into the temporality of a present sense of political possibility, the first three films evince a desire for a usable past that might work in the service of the present, while The Aggressives organizes time idiosyncratically in a strategy that provides an opportunity to consider how queer temporality carries spatial implications that might anchor another orientation toward the past, present, and the future—one in which listening for “poetry from the future,” without insisting it be recognizable as such, is an ethical demand of and for our times.

This chapter explores how the aims of feminist theological projects are (or are not) sought/accomplished through their methodologies, turning to futurity as a rubric and Sarah Coakley’s théologie totale as a case study. This chapter argues that despite her laudable desire to reframe systematics under a formational frame that she sees as liberative, the teleological thrust and attendant onto-epistemological assumptions undergirding théologie totale (and the role of contemplation within it) betray and thwart precisely what her approach seeks to engender—the inculcation of un-mastery, attentiveness to otherness, and awareness of the complex interrelatedness of sexual and spiritual desires. In assuming and proffering a narratively-cohering and linear account of subjectivity that takes as given a clear telos of desire, Coakley’s methodology adheres to what José Esteban Muñoz calls “straight time’s choke hold.” The latter half of this chapter suggests that a feminist theological imagination (and method) that aligns with the aims of théologie totale approaches “the future” not by asking “how do we secure or obtain it?” but rather, “who are the ‘we’ that make up and enact it?” This chapter concludes by proposing potential hallmarks of a feminist theological method in a queer time and space.

Chapter two, “Unsaved Time,” uncovers the temporal structures nurtured by the eschatological and counter-eschatological orientations within radical orthodox and radical theologies. It then places such temporalities into dialogue with: Shelly Rambo’s Holy Saturday theology; the queer temporalities of Heather Love, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman; and Robin James’s feminist critique of resilience. From this dialogue is constructed the concept of bipolar time as a Saturday and mad resistance to neoliberal time. Bipolar time, a time saturated by unnerving feelings, can offer ways in which we might better learn to touch and feel a counter-capitalist hope in mania, depression, and their interpenetration. In practicing both the fall into the bed and the flight into the world, bipolar time seeks not a final end to its penetrative flows of despair and desire (a Sunday for its Friday), but rather questions the very nature of resurrection. It gravely attends to, or pauses to care for, our own damage in ways that reveal what has been, what might have been, and what might be.

This chapter situates the book as a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. The study is described as a post-Foucauldian history of sexuality that aims to sustain the radical implications of Foucault’s foundational work in History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Volume 1. The chapter articulates the book’s approach in terms of queer historiography. One of its key strategies is the endeavor to suspend present-day sexual knowledges in the encounter with early films and other extrafilmic archival materials. To presume, at least before critical work commences, the sexual opacity of early cinema is to start from the position that the past is different from the present, particularly in terms of sexual subjectivity, but not to accede to a homophobic denial of the historical existence of same-sex desire or queer ways of living and being. The chapter explores the consequences of this approach for critical modes of identification, and queer articulations of historical time, in the context of recent debates concerning queer temporality.

In tracing the afterlife of a fictive WWI poet based on Rupert Brooke across a century, Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child explores both the political power of the archive and its arbitrary and contingent nature. The novel’s depiction of an archival quest owes a debt to Henry James’s The Aspern Papers and his conceit of the “visitable past”. Like Aspern the novel ends with a fire in the archive. The sacred origins of art and nation that biographers and historians seek in the archive are nothing but myths, and the figure for time that the novel favours is ultimately not the Jamesian “visitable past” but the Tennysonian “ stranger’s child.” The Stranger’s Child evokes a future inheritor who will neither know nor care what came before, and it thereby resembles contemporary theories of queer temporality that repudiate a reproductive futurism summoned forth in the name of the child.

This essay examines the epilogue of Revelation (22:8-21) as an intervention for new imaginations of, and actions toward, a new heaven and new earth that can be realized in the present. It names the ways that Revelation (indeed, the Bible) is used to make outsiders of queer people. More importantly it suggests that the author/narrator John is not the only one who can be filled with the spirit on the Lord(e)’s day with something to say to those “with ears to hear.” The particular “queer time and place” of this investigation occurs at the intersection of queers of color critique, theories of queer temporality, and Sankofa—the Akan concept that we take what is beneficial from the past in order to work toward a more pleasurable future. Composite sketches of the lives of queer folks in the African Diaspora are gathered to create a “deep archive” (following Judith Halberstam) from which Muñoz’s call for new visions of a utopian “then and there” can be articulated in resistance to their apocalyptic “here and now.” Consequently, a re-vision of the death-dealing epilogue can become a life-restoring prologue toward the enactment of Africana queer utopian futures outside of apocalyptic Christo-heteronormativity.

Some theologians and queer theorists prescribe what this chapter terms the “ecstatic-ascetic subject of self-loss” as the only answer to the discontinuous autonomous subject of late modernity. Such thinkers miss the way the self is already shattered by the infinite demands placed on it by late capitalism: vulnerability, finitude, risk-taking, and failure are endemic to the global economic order and characteristic of the entrepreneurial self. Other strategies than the affirmation of these shared features of human existence are therefore needed to redirect capitalism’s pressures toward a better future. This chapter suggests that queer temporal relations with the demands of those who have gone before—lesbian-feminists, persons with HIV-AIDS, and others who refuse the logic of generational succession—can redirect the future beyond what global capitalism offers, without denying the reality of death and loss that characterizes finitude.

This brief response catches glimpses within Karmen MacKendrick’s work, glimpses of what one might call a queer-incarnational apophasis. In her attention to mourning, melancholia, and haunting, MacKendrick attunes us to the queer temporality of a past that never quite was, for the sake of a future that might be genuinely new: such would be the structure of “the possible.” Reading MacKendrick through Laurel Schneider and José Muñoz, this essay attends to flashes of enfleshment—of livability and even justice—in the midst of an unbearable present. Here incarnation becomes promiscuous, ordinary, and spatio-temporally queer: not-quite, but not-quite-not; almost and all over the place.

Chapter 1 further situates queer approaches to history and temporality as a way forward and out of persistent debates about whether and how the past is different from the present. These debates have been of particular interest in the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This project charts and performs a third way of approaching figures from the past, presenting options beyond a stress on identity or alterity, as positioned by scholars of ancient materials like Bernadette Brooten and David Halperin. Queer thinkers focused on other premodern periods provide insights for this approach, particularly Carolyn Dinshaw’s conceptualization of “touches across time.” Inspired by this approach, each of the following chapters is structured by a specific anachronistic juxtaposition that provides an alternative angle on those who have been marginalized and vilified in both the past and the present.

This chapter engages queer and black feminist debates over recovery, reparation, and the archive to offer a new account of the controversial film Portrait of Jason and its afterlives. Taking the metaphor of “crushed blacks” to consider the value of obscurity, blur, and opacity in the archive, the chapter critiques positivist demands for historical legibility and veracity as hostile to the world-making survival stratagems of afro-fabulation.

This chapter revisits key debates over documentation and authenticity in the emergence of queer studies, which it considers through the work of a contemporary choreographer who engages in a process of what he calls “fictional archiving.” By reimagining black queer aesthetics as always already central to the development of postmodern dance and other contemporary aesthetic innovations, the chapter shows how this performance enacts a form of “critical shade” on white normative histories and pedagogies of dance, fashion, and performance.

This chapter inquires into the untimeliness of Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff’s art, focusing on Alexander’s baroquism in Pavane royale and Clotilde’s modernist minstrelsy in Chanson nègre. It argues that Pavane royale constitutes what Mark Franko calls an “auto-critique of power,” and Chanson nègre a release from categories that blurs the lines between man/woman, black/white, human/animal, and balletic/popular. Together, these modes of performance are considered a type of “gestural drag.” Retheorized through current notions of queer temporality, the untimeliness of the Sakharoffs speaks to contemporary interests in a transnational, and potentially cross-genre rethinking of dance history, and to continued explorations of dance modernism in the plural.

This chapter analyses Bainbrigge’s Latin dialogue between two schoolboys, in which an older boy introduces the younger to the pleasures of sex. It explores Bainbrigge’s treatment of sex in the light of much less sexually frank contemporary examples of clandestine homoerotic writing (including E. M. Forster’s Maurice), and argues that Latin was crucial in allowing Bainbrigge to discuss homoerotic desires and acts in a frank, yet still coded manner. It explores parallel examples of Latin’s use as a homoerotic language and interrogates how Bainbrigge’s sexual vocabulary draws on classical Latin as well as a longer tradition of neo-Latin pornographic works. The chapter’s conclusion explores the queer temporality of Bainbrigge’s hybrid classical/modern world and his parody of erotic pedagogy. It also analyses Bainbrigge’s comments on the censorship of sex in the classical schoolroom, and on classical education more broadly.