Description
Book SynopsisExamines the ways queer theory and Mennonite literature have intersected over the past decade and how these two traditions hold fundamental commitments to social justice in common.
Trade Review“Queering Mennonite Literature takes up the intersections of two cultures (and academic fields) that rarely address one another—queer theory/literary studies and Mennonite/religious studies. In so doing, this engaging and accessible study makes a much-needed, highly original, and very important intervention. Cruz has an impressive familiarity with both queer theory and Mennonite studies, and he brings a wide selection from both fields to bear on his analysis.”
—Christopher Castiglia,author of The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times
“Daniel Shank Cruz uses the radical call of his Anabaptist heritage to embrace the notion of an ‘upside-down kingdom,’ a place in which order and boundaries might be overturned in the name of compassion and grace for every person’s (queer) story. Using a theoretically nuanced approach to an emerging group of writers of Mennonite identity, Cruz’s close readings invite the reader to understand how the personal and the public are always at play with one another, especially in the stories religious communities tell (or seek to omit) about themselves.”
—Todd Davis,author of Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade; or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism
“Close to the bone and out on a limb, Daniel Cruz asks what Mennonite and queer have in common. The answer is traumatic bodily memories, dissent, and dreams of just and loving relationships. Critical necessity and personal urgency compel his readings of nine authors to demonstrate that ‘Mennonitism is queer,’ and prophetic provocations speak from the intersection of these minoritized identities.”
—Julia Spicher Kasdorf,author of The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life
“Early in this provocative and illuminating book, Daniel Shank Cruz observes that literature provides the space that allows us ‘to begin reconciling the identities of queer and Mennonite.’ He populates his fresh, richly documented analysis with a memorable array of writers and texts, all the while offering his readers a timely and compelling archive of queer memory in the context of Mennonite literature and life.”
—Hildi Froese Tiessen,coauthor of Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada: A Mennonite Artist in the Canadian Landscape, 1925-1995
“Queering Mennonite Literature is both entirely new and long overdue in the field of Mennonite literary studies. It is the first collection of literary criticism that analyzes the small but burgeoning field of queer Mennonite creative writing. This book feels new because the major works it discusses (mostly novels) are all recent, published between 2008 and 2017. It also feels long overdue because, as the author notes, there have been queer people and queer impulses in Mennonite spaces forever, and it is past time to bring these perspectives into the wider conversation in Mennonite literary and theological circles.”
—Anita Hooley Yoder Conrad Grebel Review
“Claims a whole new set of social possibilities and, in doing so, makes them feel that much more durable.”
—Peter Miller American Religion
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Queering Mennonite Literature
1. Building a Queer Mennonite Archive
2. Searching for Selfhood in Jan Guenther Braun’s Somewhere Else
3 Queering Tradition in Jessica Penner’s Shaken in The Water
4 Stephen Beachy’s Boneyard, The Martyrs Mirror, and Anabaptist Activism
5 The Queer Ethical Body in Corey Redekop’s Husk
6. Trans Mennonite Literature
Epilogue: The Future of Queer Mennonite Literature
Notes
Bibliography
Index
