Queering the Futures of the Past: Reading Ancient Jewish Eschatology and Apocalypticism with Queer Theory

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Modern scholars like José Esteban Muñoz have used queer theory to interrogate the imagined future, whether utopian or dystopian, and explore how the concept of "queer time" offers new possibilities for those who have been written out of the past and present. Other queer scholars, like Carla Freccero and Elizabeth Freeman, have turned their gaze on historiography and how the past is conceptualized. Thinking broadly, Jack Halberstam defines "queer time" as "a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance" (IN A QUEER TIME AND PLACE, 6). In this context, "queer restaging of the past helps us imagine new temporalities that interrupt straight time" (Muñoz, CRUISING UTOPIA, 171).

Yet postmodernity is not the only space in which innovative thinkers have left those "bourgeois temporal frames" behind. In ancient Jewish eschatological literature, writers let their imaginations run free as they envisioned a mystical future, one in which divine intervention would bring about the end of Jewish exile and suffering. This future would have transformative effects on bodies, families, and life cycles; in short, it represented a queer future, one that intersected in non-linear ways with the Jewish past and present. The apocalyptic view of time also shaped ancient authors' depiction of the past and present, offering new configurations for how time and reality co-constituted each other.

In this panel, scholars of the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism will ask how modern queer theory can both illuminate and trouble our understanding of ancient Jewish eschatology and apocalypticism. What does a queer lens reveal about the ways that ancient Jewish writers conceived of time, space, and human embodiment? Does the eschatological worldview align more with queer optimism or queer pessimism? In short, how can queer theory expand our understanding of the ways that Jews imagined time in the past?

Sub Unit

• Gender & Sexuality Studies

Chair

• Shayna Sheinfeld, Augsburg University

Individual Presentations

• Queer Futures Among Ezekiel’s Dry Bones: Is the Grave a Rectum? - Esther Brownsmith, University of Dayton

• Queer Past as Prologue: EX EVENTU Prophecy, Eschatology, and Non-Linear History in the Book of Daniel - Caryn Tamber-Rosenau, University of Houston

• Metatron’s Transitions: A Transgender Posthumanist Reading of Sefer Hekhalot - Jaeda Calaway, Illinois College

• Queering Reproductive Time in 4 Ezra - Sari Fein, Smith College

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 05