More Than a Feeling: A Queer Notion of Survivance

• Main Author: Schneider, Laurel C.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Fordham University Press 2017
• Subjects: Indian; anishina*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823277513.003.0013

This essay explores, in part, queer theory's queerness in relation to the religious (Christian) and ethnic (European) frame that largely produced it. Although affect and temporality theories offer important possibilities—finally—for queering Christian theology, I suggest that even these may not escape the ossifying tendencies of conceptual closure so dominant in the trajectories of European and Christian thought. Gerald Vizenor's (Anishinaabe) theory of survivance, developed out of a Native American "postindian" philosophical context, opposes settler colonial closures of "the Indian" and may help illuminate and break through queer theory's (and theology's) entrapping reliance on ethnic European concepts to work through persistent problems of identity, eschatology, and ontology.