Queer (Non-) Method and Eschatological Imagination: An Experiment

Abstract

Scholars and theologians have often noted the futural and even outright eschatological perspective of significant strands of queer theory and queer theology. In their book After Method, theologian Hanna Reichel also notes this resonance. They do so in the course of analyzing what they take to be a methodological impasse that has stymied theology in several ways and in making a queer theological intervention as an attempt to address it. What they do not do, however, is apply what they call their resulting “method after method,” with its future-oriented outlook, directly to eschatological theology itself. That is what I attempt to do here: to think with Reichel’s suggestive provocations in order to explore the affordances of eschatological imagination in the terms Reichel proposes and to suggest the transformative, real-world epistemic and material difference that a queerly conceived eschatological imagination might make for those who espouse it.