How Soon Is (This Apocalypse) Now? Queer Velocities after a Corinthian Already and a Pauline Not Yet

Abstract

Joseph A. Marchal,’s chapter examines the unexpected value of two ancient apocalyptic perspectives for rearranging queer approaches to temporality, affect, history, and the bible. Carolyn Dinshaw’s imaginative conceptualization of a “touch across time” provides a frame for staging this anachronistic juxtaposition between the first and twentieth century. Thus, after surveying key insights from queer theorists of temporality like Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman, and José Esteban Muñoz, this chapter turns to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, an exchange stuffed with alternative futures of the past. While Paul insists upon one apocalyptic vision of “not yet,” his letter indicates that the Corinthian women prophets lived and moved out of an alternative, if overlapping apocalyptic vision in their “already.” Both ancient parties engage in contingent varieties of temporal drag and of a critique of reproductive futurity, but the prophetic females are proceeding at a different velocity. Their prayer, prophecy, and withdrawal from social expectations around sex, marriage, and children register significant changes in a relatively short period of time. Greater attention to these changes provides a prophetic sort of apocalyptic praxis, long marginalized and dismissed, yet potentially resonating, if not exactly corresponding, to other more recent orientations to temporality, activism, and urgency in a time like now.

The ‘Temporal Turn’ in New Testament Studies

“…Building upon Freeman’s thought to read against the grain of Pauline literature, Joseph A. Marchal has argued that Paul’s address to the prophetic women of 1 Corinthians represents an alternative temporality that challenges Paul. The orientation to time of the Corinthian women represents ways of ‘gathering, mixing, and moving in time that were also apocalyptically conditioned, as Paul’s thought was’ (Marchal 2018: 46). Commenting on the implications of his work, Marchal sees queer historical desire as ‘an impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomenon left out of sexual categories back then, and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now’ (2018: 47).…”

“…The orientation to time of the Corinthian women represents ways of ‘gathering, mixing, and moving in time that were also apocalyptically conditioned, as Paul’s thought was’ (Marchal 2018: 46). Commenting on the implications of his work, Marchal sees queer historical desire as ‘an impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other cultural phenomenon left out of sexual categories back then, and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now’ (2018: 47). He sees that the emphasis in queer theory on that which is out of sync is helpful to illustrate that queer readings can give prominence to those who are not tied to the precedents of the past or invested in a reproductive future.…”

“…He sees that the emphasis in queer theory on that which is out of sync is helpful to illustrate that queer readings can give prominence to those who are not tied to the precedents of the past or invested in a reproductive future. As a consequence they embody a concentration on the present (2018: 47).…”

“…Against Paul’s arguments based on a primordial past that would require the women’s heads to be covered, the women experience the future as already broken into the present. While Paul seems to want to slow down the rate of change during this period of expectation, the women are in a now place, and they do not wish to slow down the change but rather to embrace its urgency (2018: 53-56).…”