Disidentification and/as Queer Theological Method

Two methodologies dominate queer theologies: an apologetic hermeneutics that seeks to normalize queer people, and a paranoid hermeneutics that seeks to upend systems of determining and validating what is normal. The apologetic approach fails to dismantle insider-outsider systems of recognition; it merely redraws the borders. The paranoid approach reduces the ethical value of queerness to an antisocial ascetic ideal; it thus eclipses the pleasures of queer worldmaking. This paper describes an alternative methodology that I call (with apologies to José Esteban Muñoz) reparative-disidentification. Two recent texts exemplify this approach: Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues and Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters. These texts offer what neither the paranoid nor the apologetic mode can achieve: a queer economy of representation that circumvents straight, white, capitalist systems of recognition altogether, clearing ground for otherwise worlds in which queers receive the wahi of their queerness as an invitation to experiment with new relational forms.