is delighted to be hosting the book launch of , by Researcher-in-Residence
advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources, namely Babylonian Enuma Elish and Nahua creation myths. In this radically unconventional work, investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, ’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that has been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.
At the heart of ’s argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences.
By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in , and , departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
is a researcher at Potsdam University, Germany with the DFG Research Training Group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms.” He has a cotutelle Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (summa cum laude) from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and Université de Perpignan Via Domitia. From 2014–2016, he was a research fellow at ICI-Berlin, Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
His research intersects feminisms and queer theories, literary and visual studies, philosophical and religious inquiries in their decolonial variants in , and . His publications have appeared in scholarly, artistic and journalistic milieu on topics such as camp, feminist theology, the darkroom, (de)coloniality, translation, Nahuatl, photography, , masculinity, and the toilet. He curated the “minor cosmopolitan weekend” at the HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (December 2018). Recently he has co-edited the special issue “Hyperimage” for (vol.32, 2018); and a special issue at , (vol.25 no.2, 2019). He is working on two projects, respectively dealing with the concepts of “transdualism” and “counterfeit” which will result in two monographs and an exhibition. He frequently speaks at different artistic and academic venues.