#3935. The Politics of “Queer Reading” an Ethiopian Saint and Discovering Precolonial Queer Africans

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 20-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Literature and Literary Theory;
Visual Arts and Performing Arts;
Music;
Cultural Studies;
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
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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 Walatta Petros, 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 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. is not my intention here to discount the translation of the hagiography, nor is it to dispute the possibilities of reading same-sex intimacies.
Keywords:
carnal desire; queer Africans; queer reading; Walatta Petros

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