This article provides an introductory guide to queer scholarship in religious studies and theology. It also outlines approaches to queer studies and how they have been, and might be, appropriated in religious studies and theology. Finally, the article argues that greater clarity is needed when naming projects as ''queer,'' given that the terms ''queer,'' ''queer theory,'' and ''queer studies'' cover such a wide variety of approaches.
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.
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