Between Beast and Angel: The Queer, Fabulous Self
Between Beast and Angel: The Queer, Fabulous Self
Parashat Balak (Numbers 22:2–25:10)
This chapter provides a queerly interpretation of Parashat Balak of Numbers. The text is replete with boundary crossing and ambiguous identity categories: a beast that talked; an angel that interacted with people; and the protagonist-prophet Balaam who was characterized as both friend and foe—an ambiguous hero. These set up of characters connotes that everyone is a queer who consistently improvises one's self. In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Moe Meyer claims that “what queer signals is an ontological challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts.”
Keywords: Parashat Balak, Self, Numbers, Balaam, Moe Meyer, queer
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