Becoming Queer In/Human in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (2017)

Abstract

This article examines the way in which Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s novel Außer sich (2017) blurs the boundaries between the human and the inhuman to challenge normative notions of humanity as clearly gendered. Focusing primarily on the protagonist’s transgender body, I analyze the textual instances in which inhuman entities (animals, parasites, objects) disrupt ambiguously gendered anatomies, materializing their dehumanized position under normativity. Drawing on the theorizations of queer inhumanism by Dana Luciano, Mel Y. Chen, and Eunjung Kim, I show how the novel turns the inhuman into an instrument of resistance against the coercive logics of the human through what I term “becoming queer in/human.” By letting the inhuman suspend the prerogatives of human morphologies, “becoming queer in/human” allows for alternative ontologies beyond the binary to become possible. In activating the productive potential of confusion, the narrative opens up the human and its genders to rearticulation, contributing to contemporary German debates in envisioning a different future for the transgender subject.