To Be Loved While We’re Living: Queer Trauma, Resilience, and Spiritual Practice Open Access
Menhinick, Keith A (Summer 2022)
Abstract
This dissertation counters the conflation of queerness and trauma by positing queer resilience as a view of the subject and a method of care that responds to trauma without totalizing it. Queer resilience is a relational process of reworking our conscriptions and traumas such that new configurations of subjectivity, community, and care come into view. As a method, queer resilience interrogates universal diagnostics, politicizes the distinction between victim and perpetrator, and prioritizes bodily practice over narrative coherence. Pastorally, queer resilience shifts the focus of care from “what is wrong with you” to “what is right with you”—inquiring into the practices, resources, and wisdom of local communities.
Queer resilience intervenes in the entangled histories of trauma and queer studies. In psychology, models of sexual difference and the unconscious emerged concurrently, creating an association between queerness and unhealth, abnormality, and illness. In queer studies, a wave of theorists asserted the “queer” as the embodiment of anti-relationality, the rejection of the future, and the figure of abjection and trauma. Theological and pastoral interventions into this trend inadvertently idealized queer folks as perfect victims and queerness itself as salvific, thereby ignoring our complicity in violence against others.
The lived experience of queerness troubles these totalizations. Through qualitative research, including interviews, participant observation, arts-based group work, and case studies, this dissertation focuses on the fraught relation to family, kinship, and housing in the queer experience to construct a pastoral and socio material reconceptualization of trauma and resilience. Queer trauma refers to the ways that queerness disorients us, prompting a divergence away from the conventional lines of family and faith community (including other social configurations) and the consequential cut-off from the resources and protections of those affiliations. Queer resilience indexes the ways that queerness orients us towards previously foreclosed modes of thinking, being, and relating.
By tracing queer resilience in the ways that queer folks engage spiritual practices, rework their traumas, and create networks of care, this dissertation celebrates the gifts of queerness for building resilient communities, while also expanding the portrait of LGBTQ+ religious life beyond its typical association with stigma and trauma.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Queer Resilience & Community Care .........................................................................................1
Chapter 2
Trauma, Queerness, and the Demand for Narratability ...........................................................56
Chapter 3
Orienting Community Towards Resilience................................................................................98
Chapter 4
Queerness Cannot Save Us ......................................................................................................134
Chapter 5
Queerness and other Practices of Resilience...........................................................................168
Chapter 6
Conclusion: Resilience-ing Queers and Queering Resilience....................................................203
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................218
About this Dissertation
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