Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires

CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE FINALIST, THE RANDY SHILTS AWARD FOR GAY NONFICTION, THE PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARDS A passionate exhortation to expand the ways we talk about human sex, sexuality, and gender. Twenty-five years ago, Mark D. Jordan published his landmark book on the invention and early history of the category "sodomy," one that helped to decriminalize certain sexual acts in the United States and to remove the word sodomy from the updated version of a standard English translation of the Christian Bible. In Queer Callings, Jordan extends the same kind of illuminating critical analysis to present uses of "identity" with regard to sexual difference. While the stakes might not seem as high, he acknowledges, his newest history of sexuality is just as vital to a better present and future. Shaking up current conversations that focus on "identity language," this essential new book seeks to restore queer languages of desire by inviting readers to consider how understandings of "sexual identity" have shifted—and continue to shift—over time. Queer Callings re-reads texts in various genres—literary and political, religious and autobiographical—that have been preoccupied with naming sex/gender diversity beyond a scheme of LGBTQ+ identities. Engaging a wide range of literary and critical works concerned with sex/gender self-understanding in relation to "spirituality," Jordan takes up the writings of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, Samuel R. Delany, Audre Lorde, Geoff Mains, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maggie Nelson, and others. Before it's possible to perceive sexual identities differently, Jordan argues, current habits for classifying them have to be disrupted. In this way, Queer Callings asks us to reach beyond identity language and invites us to re-perform a selection of alternate languages—some from before the invention of phrases like "sexual identity," others more recent. Tracing a partial genealogy for "sexual identity" and allied phrases, Jordan reveals that the terms are newer than we might imagine. Many queer folk now counted as literary or political ancestors didn't claim a sexual or gender identity: They didn't know they were supposed to have one. Finally, Queer Callings joins the writers it has evoked to resist any remaining confidence that it's possible to give neatly contained accounts of human desire. Reaching into the past to open our eyes to extraordinary opportunities in our present and future, Queer Callings is a generatively destabilizing and essential read.

Table of Contents:
Prologue: Our Names, Our Destinies! 1 Linguistic Orientations 21 Part I: Identifying Selves 1 A Quarrel of Queer Glossaries 41 2 Inventions of Identity 68 Interlude with Exercises: How We Talk Now 87 3 Identities at Prayer 102 Part II: Recalling Spirits 4 Ancestral Prophecies, Future Myths 119 5 Other Regimens of Bodies and Pleasures 139 6 Pulp Poetics 157 7 Sex Beyond 177 Epilogue: The Impossibility of Being E(a)rnest 195 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 205 Index 223

About the Author :
Mark Jordan is R. R. Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School. His recent books include Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality and Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault. He is also author of the groundbreaking work The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology.

Review :
. . . [P]rofoundly insightful and beautifully written. Highly recommended.-- "Choice Reviews" In this profound and profoundly intelligent book, Mark D. Jordan probes the protocols as well as the frequently violent debates that surround queer names and naming: the names we call ourselves, the names we are called by others. Along the way, Queer Callings not only defamiliarizes current ways of naming sexual and gender identities; it also loosens the grip of the very imperative to catalogue and name our identities in the first place, indeed, as our first place if we are to be at all. Jordan does so in order to open up wider and wilder and more lushly habitable ways of being and becoming and desiring. Lyrically argued and gloriously felt, Queer Callings is a gift of possibility.---Ann Pellegrini, coauthor of Gender Without Identity Capacious in its literary engagements and in its persistence in linking philosophical and literary interventions with time-honored theological perspectives, Queer Callings draws together in a new pattern the threads of Christian theological history and Foucauldian genealogical analysis that have made Mark Jordan a luminary.---Melissa M. Wilcox, author of Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody A lively and incisive historicized linguistic study of how the habit of naming ourselves after sex/gender has been built up and cemented, Queer Callings is an expertly alert and finely textured investigation of the archives of queer speech.---Richard Rambuss, author of Closet Devotions and Kubrick's Men