Historical Theory as Religious Sacrament

Where “lesbian” once signaled the avant-garde, it now is often interpreted as quietly normative, as pre-post-modern in comparison to “queer.” Freeman plays around with the semantics of “pre” and “post” for a while. She considers how the roots of historical theory are found among medievalists but that the primary texts and their analysis are often ignored by current theoreticians. She makes a comparison suggesting that lesbian/feminist scholarship occupies a similar relationship to queer theory: the concrete roots of the theory are ignored or unknown to those working in current theory. Freeman calls for a re-valuing of those roots, if only to better evaluate and critique the theory. There follows much discussion of that process of evaluation and critique. Freeman considers historical theories as “secular” but points out that this framing excludes a definition of religion as “a set of knowledge practices and embodied rituals.” From that point of view, secular modernity is a “habitus” of religion rooted in Protestantism, and conversely the critical avant-garde has a sort of sacramental approach to the concept of history as a systematic whole. In this framing, “sacramental” history includes more subjective “ways of knowing” that include desires, bodies, and fantasies. The acceptance of theory becomes like the experience of the Eucharist: a passive transformative acceptance. Can texts be treated as sacraments and experienced via transformative incorporation? Could this result not in expertise over, but community with, the past? The paper ends with an extensive discussion of how this framing would apply to the various papers in the volume.