Below Either/Or: Rereading Femininity and Monstrosity Inside Enuma Elish

Abstract

Often seen as a typical Chaoskampf, the cosmic struggle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish, looked at closely belies this reading that has been dominating scholarship since the nineteenth century. Through a close-reading of the epic’s narrative against its modern/colonial reception, the article argues that Enuma Elish provides a rich and complex narrative in which motherhood and monstrosity do not oppose each other (as some early feminist critiques would like), nor do they run together with each other (as misogynist readings would like). The textual, historical and philological analyses, as well as reception-critiques, ultimately serve to theorize from within the ancient cosmology an immanent and decolonial logic that is beyond ‘either/or’.