Queer Approaches Research Articles

Coming Home: Lesbian Poetics and Homelessness

As a poet of the Irish diaspora, Cherry Smyth queers the environment of her construction (Northern Ireland) by examining the experiences and perceptions of her non-heteronormative orientation when she returns home from London. Smyth delves into memory, nostalgia, forgetting and remembering to articulate her search for a home. This can be read most vividly in her poem “Coming Home”. The visibility of lesbian poets has been historically displaced, silenced and eradicated by the patriarchal domination of lyric poetry, often leaving lesbian poets homeless in the tradition. Rather than ever arriving at home, Smyth is continually coming home and this coming is painful, shameful and erotic all at once and thereby makes a home out of being queer. These, and other issues, are discussed using an auto-theoretical queer approach.

Development of Czech feminist and queer geographies: identifying barriers, seeking progress

In this contribution we discuss the obstacles and share our opinions about the causes of delayed development of feminist and queer approaches in Czech and to some extent also Slovak human geographies. We primarily focus on a critical description of causes and factors that affected and continue to hinder their presence within local mainstream geographical thought. Among the most pressing problems, we identify the historically conditioned isolation of local geography from the ‘Western’ developments, the continued conservativism of the mainstream geographers, and we attempt to open up a discussion about several types of ‘disciplinary anxieties’ that may perpetuate these problems. Further, we stress the continued shared development of the Czech and Slovak geographies and contextualize it within recent advancements in other neighboring countries where scholars also ‘fight for recognition’. Our contribution concludes with a call for intensification of cooperation and networking within (and outside of) the Central and Eastern European region which we believe is a crucial factor required for building up vibrant feminist and queer geographies with both local and international recognition.

Global care chains and the spectral histories of care migration

This article unearths hidden narratives that have been ignored in care migration research by using intersectional, decolonial and queer approaches. I examine the following: the accounts of a child of a migrant caregiver versus the child of a migrant caregiver’s employer; caregiver ‘Clara’s’ experience when working for an employer who was a surrogate grandmother; and caregiver ‘Linda’s’ lived experiences of being in a same-sex partnership in Canada while still being legally married to a man in the Philippines. Ultimately, I show how care migration research benefits from considering the ‘spectral histories’ that are part of people’s encounters with care migration.

Queering German Culture by Leanne Dawson

 Reviews Queering German Culture. Ed. by L D. (Edinburgh German Yearbook, ) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. £. ISBN ––– –. Although Queer Studies and German Studies have historically shadowed each other, it is surprisingly rare that they are in direct conversation. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, the English word queer shares a root with a German one, quer (Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), p. xii). More, as Leanne Dawson shows in the Introduction to this volume, both contemporary transnational queer theory and contemporary queer culture are indebted to German contributions, from early sexologists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, who first researched and theorized homosexuality, to cultural icons such as Marlene Dietrich, omas Mann, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which remain generative for contemporary queer cultural production. ese traces and affiliations remain underexplored, both within German Studies and within transnational Queer Studies—which has oen taken Anglo-American culture as its objects and anglophone or francophone theorists as its guides. Dawson rightly argues that, as LGBT rights discourses take centre stage in German politics, it is more than timely to probe the cultures and histories that underpin and are oen in tension with these discourses. is volume offers eight eclectic essays that take queer approaches to various aspects of German culture from the early twentieth century on. While the title ‘Queering German Culture’ suggests a systematic approach to German culture as a whole, the editor states that the structure of the volume is intended to resist linear structures that might imply a narrative of progress. Dawson’s Introduction provides a compressed overview of queer German history and theory from the mid nineteenth century on, a useful if necessarily simplified point of orientation for the following chapters. Dawson’s first chapter offers a compelling transnational comparison between the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and Spinnboden in Berlin, arguing that such community-led archives queer the concept of ‘home’ by creating an alternative intergenerational community of knowledge and values. Cyd Sturgess’s fascinating and theoretically rich ‘“Die zarte Haut einer schönen Frau”: Fashioning Femininities in Weimar Germany’s Lesbian Periodicals’ explores the different ideological underpinnings of the rival publications Frauenliebe and Die Freundin. Sturgess suggests that Frauenliebe’s association with Magnus Hirschfeld led to a more liberal and more commercial approach to gender and sexuality, whereas Die Freundin advocated bourgeois moral standards and a culture of assimilation. At the same time, Sturgess demonstrates how the regular trans supplements published by each paper undermine any simple opposition between the two queer approaches. Kyle Frackman’s essay examines the  documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der DDR, arguing that this ‘throws into relief the contradictory and occasionally grotesque duality of East German gender and sexual discourse’ (p. ) while its queer stylistic effects emphasize the artificial nature of the documentary medium. In the second section, ‘Queering the Other’, John Plew’s diagnosis of a homopho- MLR, .,   bic double bind in omas Mann’s aesthetics works within the established queer German canon, unlike Nicholas Courtman’s discussion of queer politics and homophobia in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen () and Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (). Courtman’s essay argues that, while Mora’s text opens up space for a queer migrant heterotopia, Erpenbeck’s celebrated novel is imbricated in a heteronormative temporality which erases queer migrants. Sarra Kassem’s essay also discusses the transnational queer via the oen erased figure of the lesbian political refugee in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (). e final two essays, by Lauren Pilcher and Gary Schmidt, survey how performative femininity undermines the patriarchal logic of cinematic looking in Fassbinder’s cinema, and analyse the ways in which three novels—by Jonathan Franzen, Phillip Roth, and omas Brüssig—renegotiate the boundary between homosocial and homosexual desire. It would be highly un-queer to demand that a volume entitled Queering German Culture adhere to a hegemonic idea of totality or consistency, either of methodology or in reference to a normative, bounded idea of ‘German culture’. e heterogeneity of the at times furtive, unexpected, and aslant readings in this volume is in itself queer. At the same time, the...

Review of Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy, edited by Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers, and Joshua O. Lunn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

In this edited collection, Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers, and Joshua O. Lunn draw together cutting-edge thinkers on queer pedagogy and queer activist praxis in an effort to dismantle the historical underpinnings of education as a tool of oppression. As an alternative to normative education, the editor offer up queer pedagogy as a methodology for "challenging accepted hierarchies, binaries, and hegemonies that have long dominated pedagogy and praxis" (5). The collection features the queering of traditionally normative classroom and academic spaces alongside queer approaches towards less commonly acknowledged sites of learning, such as social media websites, community advocacy meetings, and prisons.

Queering Brechtian feminism: Breaking down gender binaries in musical theatre pedagogical performance practices

This article explores how musical theatre pedagogy might begin to dismantle modes of practice that perpetuate exclusion and a dualistic, gendered perspective. I draw on my experience of directing postgraduate musical theatre students at Mountview in a production of Pippin (1972). Casting a trans man as Pippin – in many respects an archetypal male hero role – set in motion a process of queering and subverting norms. However, casting is only one element of creating an inclusive practice: in this work, I developed a hybrid approach that honoured students’ identities and experiences and took a critical, political view of the material being presented. My approach brings together Elin Diamond’s feminist theoretical framing of Brecht with queer concepts including heteronormativity and chrononormativity, which are then applied to David Barnett’s practical explanation of a Brechtian process. I argue that feminist and queer approaches can work together to meaningfully critique hegemonic forces influencing musical theatre training and production processes.

A Queer Approach to Addressing Gender and Sexuality through Literature Discussions with Second Graders

Utilizing queer theory, this study examines the promises and challenges of addressing gender and sexual identities through literature discussions with second graders.

Controversies and Gender: Feminist and Queer Approaches

Controversies and Gender: Feminist and Queer Approaches

Gower out of time and place

Surviving in more than 50 manuscript witnesses, John Gower’s Confessio amantis poses significant challenges for modern editors. Multiple languages and registers, several versions, and an intricately structured confessional dialogue are just some of the elements of the textual corpus of Gower’s poem that make it particularly striking that the most recent major new edition of the poem was completed at the end of the nineteenth century by G.C. Macaulay, with the early 2000’s edition by Russell Peck arguably being closer to a revision than a completely new effort. This article explores the ways in which the poem itself constructs queer temporalities, both within its frame narrative and in the confessional dialogue between Genius and Amans. These queer temporalities are further complicated by variations across manuscript witnesses, and this article examines a specific case in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 35 that cuts across and flattens the queer temporalities that are found in the majority of manuscript witnesses. The proposition is that the poem’s intricate structure and layout across manuscript witnesses can be opened up for detailed and advanced study once the text and its witnesses are, quite literally, taken out of time and place by a queer approach to editing. Such an approach would embrace the queer temporalities of the poem itself by liberating Gower’s text from the temporal and physical confines of printed editions and physical manuscripts.

Negotiating Theory When Doing Practice: A Systematic Review of Qualitative Research on Interventions to Reduce Homophobia

ABSTRACTWe performed a systematic review of qualitative research on interventions to reduce homophobia. Specifically, we conducted a thematic analysis of participant feedback given in 30 qualitative and mixed-methods studies. Participants often described interventions as “eye-opening.” However, they also criticized many interventions for their mismatch with the social, historical, or institutional context in which they were conducted. Some participants rejected the interventions altogether, describing them as offensive or disgusting. We drew three conclusions. First, participants not only were actively making sense of the interventions but also were often aware of philosophical and political tensions (especially liberal vs. queer approaches). Second, participants sometimes used the perceived inadequacy of the intervention for the local context as an argument to resist change. Finally, tensions in participant feedback (eye-opening vs. disgusting) can be read as evidence that reducing homophobia is “dirty work”: such work is both vital for society and despised by many.

Belonging, desire, and queer Iranian diasporic politics

Recent approaches to the study of queer migration politics and diaspora hold significant potential in advancing the study of the geographies of migration. Most notably, they can help illuminate the impossible positions that migrants often occupy; challenge diasporic norms governing cultural authenticity; destabilize conventional understandings of gender, nation, and home; and situate diasporic experiences within present and future possibilities for new ways of expressing intimacy and kinship beyond the limited scope of nationality and citizenship. In this paper, I will argue for a queer intervention on migration studies that critically expands geographic approaches to migration by denaturalizing and complicating approaches to understanding the emotional diasporic experiences of belonging and home. I will think through the usefulness of such approaches in my own ongoing research on debates concerning Iranian diasporic identities and communities in Iranian diasporic cinema. In analyzing two recent films, I argue for the tremendous creative potential of diasporic filmmaking in imagining complex spaces of home and belonging that otherwise seem impossible. Ultimately, I see queer approaches to migration politics and diaspora as having significant creative, critical, and positive potential to understanding how migrants placed in impossible situations create new lives for themselves.

Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’sBlack Panther, 1998–2016

AbstractThe socially symbolic figure of the superhero comes into close contact with vernacular intellectual critiques of race and modernity through the much-anticipated film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther comics. This article analyzes the implications for queer approaches to black popular cultural production of the knowledge practices that inspire Black Panther’s depiction of an African utopia. The intertexts involved include histories, travel writings, and other comics. Focusing on the divergent treatments by authors Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, this reading interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the text. The term desiring blackness describes an orientation to reading that defers to African Americanist and black diasporic considerations to ground the task of interpretation in conditions that elicit compromise among disparate lines of theoretical inquiry: queer phenomenology, decolonial epistemology, Afrofuturism, and queer of color critique.

Including China? Postcolonial Hong Kong, Sinophone Studies, and the Gendered Geopolitics of China-centrism

Sinophone studies, in Shu-mei Shih’s original formulation, refers to “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness”. This essay contributes to the debate on how to “include China” in the ever-productive task to decentre the hegemonic aspects of Chineseness. In particular, recent Hong Kong literature and popular culture invoke a temporal critique that one can term “nearly historical”. The concept of “nearly historical” describes the recent speculative cultural texts produced in Hong Kong, which are saturated with dystopian visions that indicate how Hong Kong is temporally and spatially threatened with political marginalization, censorship, neoliberal class segmentation, and even hopelessness. On the other hand, near-histories, by imagining how close we are to the dark ending, may also activate insurgent senses of hope, anger, and even activism. Specifically, analysing Chan Koonchung’s (陳冠中) Hong Kong Trilogy (香港三部曲) written between 1978 and 2003, his 2009 dystopian novel about China, Shengshi/The Year of Prosperity: China, 2013 (盛世), and the recent online television drama To Be or Not to Be (來生不做香港人), I illustrate how gender functions as a geopolitical border that mediates the sexual economies already at work across the Mainland China–Hong Kong border. “Including China” in the cultural politics of Hong Kong also means playing with China-centrism at spatial and temporal proximity while taking feminist and queer approaches seriously. Theorizing the Sinophone, Hong Kong, and China-centrism in this mode can open up more productive debates regarding the mutual implication between the centre and the margin through the postcolonial geopolitics of gender.

Acceptable femininity? Gay male misogyny and the policing of queer femininities

While it represents a common form of gender-based violence, misogyny is an often-overlooked concept within academia and the queer community. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship on gay male misogyny, this article presents a theoretical challenge to the myth that the oppressed cannot oppress, arguing that specific forms of gay male subjectivities can be proponents of misogyny in ways that are unrecognised because of their sexually marginalised status. The authors’ interest in the doing of misogyny, and its effects on specific bodies and subjectivities, leads them to discuss the extent to which white gay male misogyny can function to reinforce a particular gender and racial hierarchy that continually confines queer femininities to the status of the abject other, for failing to exhibit their feminine credentials and for making gender trouble. The study also addresses how specific markers of femininity are depoliticised through the workings of this misogyny, exploring what femininity does when it is conceptualised outside a heteronormative framework. To address these ideas, the authors firstly propose a theoretical account of misogyny in order to understand its analytical status as a cultural mechanism within the psychic economy of patriarchy. Secondly, they use queer approaches to effeminacy and subject formation for making the case for gay male misogyny and its connections to femininity within white gay cultures, asking how misogyny might become an essential component of the performance of hegemonic masculinity. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gay male misogyny reinforces white male dominance over women and queer femininities specifically, advocating for resistance to the reproduction of such patriarchal arrangements.

Queering the Minoans

This study evaluates wall paintings at the palace of Knossos, specifically the gender of figures that were previously considered ambiguous due to perceived inconsistences in the representation of their skin color, costume, and physicality. Special attention is paid to the dark skinned individual in the Captain of the Blacks Fresco, the red hand holding a necklace in the Jewel Fresco, and the white-skinned bull-leapers of the famous Taureador Frescoes. Methodologically, this study employs Butler’s theory of gender performativity, wherein repeated stylizations on the body’s surface, such as dress and adornment, are seen to produce gender identity. Since the frescoes are not the product of a modern Western society with dualistic gender categories, using presentist preconceptions to interpret the representation of gender identities in ancient art is unhelpful. Gender is conceptualized here outside binary confines, and I apply instead a queer approach utilizing a perspective of gender fluidity. Moreover, this study refers to Chapin’s (2012) analysis of the naturalistic portrayal of human development in Bronze Age murals, especially with respect to the depiction of primary and secondary sex characteristics, and considers these characteristics, together with skin tone, costume, and gesture as performatives that materialize gender. After analyzing the frescoes, it becomes clear that the gendered components layered upon those ‘ambiguous’ figures are not contradictory, but rather meaningful elements working together to create alternative gender identities.

Comparative queer methodologies and queer film festival research

This paper examines how a critical examination of the queer politics of comparison can inform queer film festival research. The discussion of the queer politics of comparison draws on a qualitative study of five queer film festivals in different European cultural geopolitical contexts which examined these festivals as sites for the reproduction of queer visibility, solidarity and queer space. We propose an approach of relational comparison within a framework that highlights regional contextuality. We further argue that queer approaches to comparative research should be informed by postcolonial critiques that challenge hegemonic notions of temporality and spatiality within political geographical imaginaries of Europe. We therefore suggest that poststructural and postcolonial informed perspectives on ‘cultural translation’ are key to the queering of comparison. Such an approach to cultural translation critical self-reflexivity within a transversal hermeneutics that at the same time pay attention to geopolitics, positionality and difference.

‘Age Transvestism’ in Contemporary Performance and Live Art With Children

In her 2012 paper, Marah Gubar coins the term ‘age transvestism’ to discuss the phenomenon of children impersonating adults on the Victorian stage. Gubar employs the term to argue that children dressing and acting as adults signals a ‘category crisis’ and, in doing so, she articulates a position that deviates from the well-established assumption that nineteenth century audiences liked to watch the child performer because their incompetence highlighted the difference between adults and children (Varty 2008: 15). Age transvestism, a term which she inherits from Marjorie Garber’s notion of ‘gender transvestism’, thus becomes ‘a space of possibility’ (Garber 1992: 11) rather than a reinscription of binarised identities between children and adults.Contemporary performance and live art with children has renewed this fascination with children impersonating or being read in relation to adults. As such, contemporary performance practice both intentionally and unintentionally enacts a crisis of the discursive categories of both children and adults. This article examines age transvestism in contemporary performance as a strategy for destabilizing dominant conceptualisations of the child that persist within contemporary discourses of childhood. Focusing on Film with Hope (2016), a collaboration between UK-based artist Grace Surman and her young daughter, the analysis considers how age transvestism challenges historic perceptions of the innocent child, the child in need of protection, and the child as a subject in formation (Kehily 2004). The article proposes that age transvestism – where it is read as a continuum of age-crossing – has the potential to foreground the body of the child in performance as a body that does not necessarily have to be defined by the nostalgic, erotic or judgemental adult gaze. Instead, it proposes that children’s bodies are afforded the poststructural, feminist and queer approaches to reading their bodies that are ordinarily given to adult bodies onstage.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Reviewed by: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Tjalling R. Valdés Olmos Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, 331 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-16275-1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins functions as an impressive model of critical inquiry into the dominant figure of the "human" subject and the Nature/Culture divide within capitalist times. Tsing, expanding on her earlier work that includes In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993) and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections (2005), incorporates a vast body of academic disciplines—anthropology, critical theory, economics, history, biology—and reorients these through the proposition of an entanglement-based ontology that proves to function as much as a transformation of these sciences as it does as a practice of collective (political) resistance. Within this grand project, Tsing narrates in first-person mode a story of the matsutake mushroom that traces the intricate relations between Nature and Culture. The result is an open-ended, contingent, simultaneously hyperlocal and global picture that eschews dichotomous conceptions of Nature/Culture altogether. In telling this story, she offers an experiment in subversive science, and thus a model of (re) thinking and (re) doing politics, that both repositions human and nonhuman subjectivity and poses fundamental questions about how we might [End Page 127] do science and politics together. The maze-like complexity of this project is at times overwhelming, but also written with a refreshing accessibility and poetic verve. The Mushroom playfully weaves a tapestry of interconnecting patches of "disturbance-based ecologies" (5) surrounding the matsutake mushroom that manage "to live despite capitalism" (viii). It generates an understanding of becoming with and overturning our shared capitalist world that has ample implications for questions surrounding ethics, knowledge production, subversion, and subjectivity as a whole. The start of Tsing's intricate project to seek new worlds among capitalist destruction is playful curiosity. Not for nothing does she interject her prologue with the poetic—"Oh matsutake, The excitement before f inding them" (Yamaguchi Sodo in Tsing, 9)—to underline that it is not a drive for "scientific" illumination and discovery that is important here, but rather the experimental process of the "arts of noticing" (24–25): learning to listen to events and entanglements across times that might, or might not, lead to the possibility of other, more liveable worlds. In order to get attuned to the arts of noticing, The Mushroom works through the colonial and Cartesian predicaments inherited by contemporary capitalism. Temporality in general, but more specifically progress, scalability, and accumulation, are turned on their heads in favor of more queer approaches that allow Tsing to notice and retell the world differently. As such, she takes the much debated condition of precarity—the insecurity and vulnerability that define global capitalist economies—and refigures it in order to show how it becomes the condition for radical change. Precarity comes to function as that which also makes us vulnerable and noticeable to one another, whether human or not. In noticing this vulnerability and insecurity that defines contemporary life, Tsing suggests that we become aware of transformative "unpredictable encounters" that throw us into the midst of unstable human and nonhuman assemblages that are constantly in flux and escape the linear temporality of progress (20). Consequently, the questions she raises about precarity as a mode of "freedom" are challenging grounds to be taken up for further exploration. Tsing's analysis of precarity, time, and freedom in the multiethnic and multispecies matstutake-picking communities of Oregon, for example, opens toward discussions about inhabiting multiple temporalities. In this, the book adds richly to decolonial and critical black studies' recent ventures into temporality, agency, confinement, and race. Tsing's development of human and nonhuman assemblages—with the matstutake mushroom as a connecting node—and the visceral-semiotic experience of multi-temporality does much to complicate notions of freedom as connected unquestionably to accumulation, progress, and control. The book continues into...

Queerly Sectarian: Jewish Difference, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Marital Disciplines

Queerly Sectarian:Jewish Difference, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Marital Disciplines Maxine Grossman (bio) In her essay, "Queer and Now," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explores the potential for queer theory to identify and deconstruct uninterrogated categories of cultural power. Modern heterosexuality, she explains, gains social authority in large measure from its apparent naturalness.1 "If we are receptive to Foucault's understanding of modern sexuality as the most intensive site of the demand for, and detection or discursive production of, the Truth of individual identity," she writes: … it seems as though this silent, normative, uninterrogated "regular" heterosexuality may not function as a sexuality at all. Think of how a culturally central concept like public/private is organized so as to preserve for heterosexuality the unproblematicalness, the apparent naturalness, of its discretionary choice between display and concealment. …2 The category of heterosexuality, from this perspective, so defines the norm that it eclipses the constructions and power dynamics that underpin it, while ensuring its own status as "natural" and "unproblematic." Uninterrogated categories have discursive power within academic disciplines as much as they do in larger social contexts. Scholarly treatments of the Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period—provide evidence for such layerings of academic assumption. Attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in the scrolls appear to fall "between" Judaism and Christianity (the former often understood as sex-positive and the latter as a site for ascetic or sex-negative attitudes), in ways that have led scholars to understand the scrolls as evidence for a sectarian Judaism, at most a marginal cul-de-sac in the narrative of Jewish history. Queer treatments of these categories, however, provide an opportunity to read the scrolls back into the narrative of Jewish history while calling into question the binary foundations that underpin certain aspects of that narrative. This essay begins with a brief introduction to the scrolls and an interrogation of the term "sectarian" as used in reference to them. Tensions around "normative" and sectarian Judaism will then be explored, particularly in light [End Page 87] of treatments of marriage and sexuality within the rule texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In lieu of a framework that distinguishes between (Jewish) marriage and (Christian) celibacy, this treatment will highlight the complexity of attitudes toward sexuality in the Judaism of the Second Temple period. A queer approach to these social norms, in turn, will provide for a reconsideration of the larger cultural framings of religion, sect, and Jewishness in scholarly discourse around the scrolls and their contributions to Jewish history. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Some Opening Observations The term "Dead Sea Scrolls" refers to the more than 900 manuscripts, many highly fragmentary, that were discovered in the mid-twentieth century in eleven caves in the Judean Desert, not far from the northern tip of the Dead Sea.3 The caves are all within walking distance of the ancient ruin of Khirbet Qumran, which many scholars understand as a habitation site, and from which arises the designation "Qumran Scrolls." The scrolls and the site of Qumran both date from the first centuries BCE and CE, and the scrolls themselves reflect an interesting range of Second Temple period Jewish literature, including close to three dozen manuscripts of the book of Deuteronomy, roughly twenty each of Genesis and Isaiah, and more than a dozen each of Exodus, Leviticus, and the books of Enoch and Jubilees (which are elsewhere preserved among the Pseudepigrapha but are not included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible). In all, the scrolls include some 200 copies of biblical manuscripts, reflecting an uneven representation of all the books of the modern Jewish Bible, with the notable exception of the Book of Esther.4 Another large proportion of manuscripts reflects previously unknown texts that expand on biblical themes, including dozens of legal texts (especially the Temple Scroll); narratives and so-called Testaments of biblical figures (the Genesis Apocryphon, the Testament of Kohath); hymns; and prayers. Calendars, horoscopes, and cryptic texts are also found among the scrolls. The texts are almost exclusively written in Hebrew and Aramaic (with a small number in Greek), and they are diverse but not comprehensive in their representation of...

Narrativas arqueológicas e museológicas sob rasura

Historicamente, as práticas arqueológicas e museológicas estiveram associadas à construção de identidades nacionais, nas quais despontava uma forma de cidadão pleno: homem, branco, heterossexual e proprietário. Nesses contextos, as narrativas elaboradas pela Arqueologia e pelos museus podem ser compreendidas como mais um eixo de normatização e opressão. Nesse texto, percorro as reciprocidades entre a Arqueologia de Gênero e a Arqueologia Feminista, trazendo algumas provocações feministas inspiradas em abordagens queer e decoloniais no que concerne à construção de identidades e representações. Destaco, ainda, a necessidade de narrativas plurais e descentradas, constantemente deslocadas e recriadas nos processos de Musealização da Arqueologia.