| dc.description.abstract | Examining the turn to practices in contemporary theological method, a trend that has its roots in postliberalism but has become common in feminist theology, this dissertation identifies and challenges the ways in which methodology and ethics function together teleologically in accounts of formation, as methodological-ethical frameworks, in ways that undermine these accounts’ aims of inclusion/faithful community amidst difference. More specifically, this project explores the claims and ramifications of this methodological-ethical turn to, on, and for non-normative gender and sexuality, turning to two feminist theological accounts of formation (Sarah Coakley, Serene Jones) as case studies.
Placing theological analyses of postliberal methodology in conversation with queer theoretical reflections on temporality, this project argues that, and explores how, temporality, teleology, and normativity are marshalled together in methodological-ethical frameworks in ways that undermine their aims and that produce and reify formational processes that ultimately undermine gender and sexual difference, as a particular vision of normative religious identity functions as the telos that other markers of difference are assimilated into or subordinated to. This dissertation argues that these feminist methodological-ethical frameworks of formation function according to what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz names as straight time, and in doing so, they obscure and fail to fully contend with negative subjectivizing effects of positive identity formation within the sphere of Christian formation, limited epistemic access on theological grounds (anthropology, eschatology) and how such limits might impact a stable telos of flourishing, and that they thus foreclose on the theological and ethical possibilities of and in un-formation.
Placing queer insights on sociality and ideals alongside theological reflections on these themes, this project ultimately seeks to wrest these accounts of identity, community, and formation from “straight time,” and proposes an alternate frame, an anti-telos, of belonging in difference. This dissertation argue that an ethical-methodological account of formation that engenders flourishing approaches “the future” not by asking “how do we secure or obtain it?” but rather, “who is the ‘we’ that make up and enact it?” | |
