Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration

Front matter

JN Y

AASB OY

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Contents

Preface 13 PART I: THE WATERS

Below Either/Or: Rereading Femininity and Monstrosity inside Enuma Elish 27

Queer Divine Waters 65 PART 0: NULLA Creatio ex Nihilo Contested 105 PART Il: THE EARTH The Strange Case of Tlaltecuhtli 161 Coatlicue Mayor: Or, Other Ways of Rereading the World 203 Acknowledgments 241 a8

Chapter 1. Tiamat’s Anger: Feminization and Monstrification inside/outside the Enuma Elish

This chapter takes the femininity of Babylonian goddess Tiamat for granted and sets out to show how the feminized Tiamat has been monstrified in both modern reception and in the epic Enuma Elish itself. A close analysis of several instances of Tiamat's anger reinstates her motherliness against the stunning distortions it has undergone in the reception history. Without associating motherliness with benevolence or monstrosity, the chapter concludes that in Enuma Elish, Tiamat’s motherliness and monstrosity do not oppose each other (as the feminist critique would have it) nor run together (as the misogynist receptions would like).

16 Ibid.

Chapter 2. Queer Divine Waters

The salt-water and sweet-water deities Tiamat and Apsu (often reduced to the heterosexual couple of the “fertility myth”) have constantly intermingled. Contextualized in the longue durée of the personification of watery beings and their (gendered) transformations from the Sumerian Nammu to the Biblical tehom, the queerness hinted at in the ancient texts has remained unattended to in the reception history. This chapter will explore the queer deification embodied by the ancient waters for a contemporary queer politics urgently in need of a theory of porosity and passivity that is unclean, non-identitarian, and un/differentiating.

Part O: Nulla is one long section uninterrupted by chapter divisions. Situated between the two buttressing parts of the book on the Babylonian Water (Part I) and the Nahua Earth (Part ID), this long section, deliberately named Nulla, aims to debunk the theo-political concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness). It provides an analysis of this concepts decisive influence on colonialism and coloniality and its persistence in the scholarly reception of mythologies and even queer theory. This chapter shows the interweaving of colonial logic with creatio ex nihilo, which historically and discursively links the seemingly unrelated Mesopotamia with Mesoamerica inside their creation myths and outside, through their receptions.

Chapter 3. The Strange Case of Tlaltecuhtli

Part II moves from the land in the middle of rivers (Mesopotamia) to the land “surrounded by water Cemanahuac. The first chapter of this part examines the coercive translation of the Nahua name Tlaltecuhtli as “goddess of the earth” which denies the semantic signification of tecuhtli, Nahuatl for “lord; not “goddess.” Through a discussion of the particular tlacuilolli writing/painting system of Nahuatl alongside a survey of the debate on the grammatology of non-alphabetic writing, especially in terms of the Western reception of Chinese writing, this chapter shows that Nahua tlacuilolli, which is congruent with Nahua cosmo-philosophy, allows a “gender transgression” of a rather queer motherly lord of the earth: Tlaltecuhtli Tonantzin (Lord of the Earth, Our Benevolent Mother).