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| author | Karen Bray |
| title | Unredeemed: A Political Theology of Affect, Time, and Worth |
| abstract |
This dissertation is a queer feminist challenge to neoliberal narratives of redemption. Its methodology relies on reading political theology anew through feminist
work on affect and disability. Employing contemporary affect and crip theories, I construct theological reorientations of time, feeling, and value. My research
uncovers deep resonances between political theology's critique of the neoliberal economy and the rethinking of value endeavored by affect and crip theorists.
Surfacing the importance of emotion, mood, feeling, and affect for constructions of the political and the theological I propose counter-redemptive narratives.
This dissertation further understands affects such as madness, depression, mania, anxiety, and boredom as crip sensibilities and quotidian laments against systems
that demand we feel good about being oppressed. A framing assumption is that neoliberalism relies on narratives in which not being in the right mood, means a cursed
existence. Its opening provocation is a diagnosis of soteriological and theological impulses in neoliberalism that demand we be productive, efficient, happy, and
flexible in order to be of worth and therefore get saved out of the wretched existence of being considered worthless. The theological underpinnings of neoliberalism
offer a caged freedom in the guise of opportunity. Counter to this cage, affect theory helps me to offer a Holy Saturday theology that surmises that sticking with
the moods of what it means to have been crucified by neoliberal capitalism is both an act of resistance and the refusal to give up on life in crucifixion's wake.
Hence, this dissertation offers a critique of neoliberal redemption narratives through constructions of what it might look and feel like to go unredeemed. To go
willfully unredeemed might be to stick with those who neoliberalism has already marked as irredeemable. In gravely attending--being brought down by the gravity of
what is and listening to the ghosts of what might have been--to what it is to go unredeemed it is my hope that new theological and political landscapes of becoming
together differently might arise. At its core this dissertation attempts to construct a political theology attendant to moody and material life. It offers affect
theory as a hermeneutical lens from which to read contemporary political and postmodern theologies. It asks what new questions, insights, sources and modes of
doing political theology might take shape in an encounter with affect.
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| school | Drew Theological School |
| degree | Ph.D. (2016) |
| advisor | Catherine Keller |
| committee | Traci West
Stephen Moore |
| full text | KBray.pdf |
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