TY  - CHAP
A1  - Preser, Ruth
T1  - Things I learned from the "Book of Ruth" : diasporic reading of queer conversions
T2  - De/constituting wholes : towards partiality without parts / edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F.E. Holzhey ; Cultural inquiry ; vol. 11
N2  - Ruth Preser's essay 'Things I Learned from the "Book of Ruth": Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions' performs a queer appropriation of history. The "Book of Ruth" is a biblical narrative that opens with two women, Naomi the Israelite, a bereaved woman who wishes to return from Moab to Judea, and her no-longer-daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, who pledges to follow Naomi, turning away from her gods and people. This laconic tale of nomadic intimacies and speech-acts of pledges and conversions has become an iconic narrative and a seminal text in Judaism, and it has also been appropriated by contemporary feminist and lesbian readings. Indeed, since it is not fully narrated but rather full of gaps, voids, and 'ghostly matters', the "Book of Ruth" provides apt ground and a malleable vessel for contemporary appropriation by stories seeking incarnation beyond linear or teleological constraints. In Preser's 'palimpsest reading', the biblical tale continues to communicate a story of successful assimilation of the poor and the foreign, and of a 'home-coming', but it is troubled by displacement, unresolved diasporic longing, and an acute and continuous sense of vulnerability. Thinking with Avery Gordon's modality of haunting, Preser's reading aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when their oppressive nature is denied. It reflects on what kind of theory might emerge by remobilizing the category of 'home' through its de-constitution, through movement rather than destination, through disintegration rather than determination. Troubled by questions of race, nomadism, gender, and sexuality, in an era when (some) bodies may traverse national, sexual, and class borders, Preser's investigation asks what happens to bodies that continuously signify precarity and loss.
KW  - Books mentioned in the Bible
KW  - Old Testament
KW  - Displacement
KW  - Loss
KW  - Jewish Diaspora
KW  - Homosexuality
KW  - Belonging (Social Psychology)
KW  - Bibel. Rut
KW  - Diaspora <Religion>
KW  - Judentum
KW  - Homosexualität
KW  - Zugehörigkeit
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55255
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-552552
UR  - https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-11/preser_queer-conversions.pdf
SN  - 978-3-85132-854-7
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 47
EP  - 65
PB  - Turia + Kant
CY  - Wien ; Berlin
ER  -