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Debele, Serawit:
The Politics of "Queer Reading" an Ethiopian Saint and Discovering Precolonial Queer Africans.
In: Journal of African Cultural Studies.
Bd. 34
(2022)
Heft 1
.
- S. 98-110.
ISSN 1469-9346
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1975265
Abstract
This article asks what it means to discover Africans through our sexual desires, and how that might shape the way the West knows both women and queer people. I closely read Wendy Belcher’s interpretations of the sexual life of Wälättä P̣eṭros, a seventeenth-century Ethiopian female saint. While the article draws on postcolonial, African feminist and queer scholarship, it takes a cue from Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” to raise speculative questions related to the opacity of the text. I argue that Belcher’s interpretation of carnal desire produces the saint as a hysterical subject, and attaches to the saint’s life the claim of discovering queer people in pre-colonial Africa. I argue that this interpretation assimilates the saint into our contemporary ideas of sexuality and thereby invents a modern subject through a reading that is divorced from historical and geographic specificities. The article also explores the benevolent intentions of discovering pre-colonial queer Africans for the cause of present-day struggles against persecution. It is not my intention here to discount the translation of the hagiography, nor is it to dispute the possibilities of reading same-sex intimacies. I am interested in thinking about the presentist preoccupations of the interpretation.
Weitere Angaben
| Publikationsform: | Artikel in einer Zeitschrift |
|---|---|
| Begutachteter Beitrag: | Ja |
| Keywords: | Walatta Petros; carnal desire; queer reading; queer Africans |
| Institutionen der Universität: | Fakultäten Fakultäten > Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät Fakultäten > Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät > Lehrstuhl Gender, Sexualität und Religion (Schwerpunkt Afrika) Fakultäten > Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät > Lehrstuhl Gender, Sexualität und Religion (Schwerpunkt Afrika) > Lehrstuhl Gender, Sexualität und Religion (Schwerpunkt Afrika) - Univ.-Prof. Dr. Serawit Debele Forschungseinrichtungen Forschungseinrichtungen > Sonderforschungsbereiche, Forschergruppen Forschungseinrichtungen > Sonderforschungsbereiche, Forschergruppen > EXC 2052 - Africa Multiple: Afrikastudien neu gestalten |
| Titel an der UBT entstanden: | Ja |
| Themengebiete aus DDC: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
| Eingestellt am: | 26 Okt 2026 13:30 |
| Letzte Änderung: | 27 Okt 2026 08:03 |
| URI: | https://eref.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/99734 |