Vita
Zairong Xiang is the author of Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (2018). He is assistant professor of comparative literature and associate director of art at Duke Kunshan University. He was the chief curator of the ‘minor cosmopolitan weekend’ at Berlin’s HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2018 and editor of its catalogue minor cosmopolitan: Thinking Art, Politics, and the Universe Together Otherwise (2020). His research intersects feminisms and queer theories, literary and visual studies, philosophical and religious inquiries in their decolonial variants in Spanish, English, Chinese, French, and Nahuatl.
As a member of the Hyperimage Group, he has co-curated the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial. He is working on two projects dealing, respectively, with the concepts of ‘transdualism’ and ‘shanzhai/counterfeit’ in the Global South, especially Latin America and China. He was fellow at the ICI Berlin from 2014 to 2016 and postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University from 2016 to 2020. His writings can be accessed at www.xiangzairong.com.
The Ecological/Queer Penis:
A Decolonial Reading of I-Ching’s Body-of-Orifices
ICI Project 2014-16
Is there a different way of looking at the penis than immediately assuming its ‘presence’ as opposed to the vagina’s purported ‘lack’? What if the penis is not phallic but hollow, a ‘lack’ and a cavity? My project intends to theorize the hollow penis through the queer lens with a decolonial learning to learn from the non-phallo(go)centric and non-heteronormative understanding of the penis in Chinese Traditional Medicine via the I-Ching.
Weaving together queer theorizations of embodiment and temporalities, interreligious dialogues on ecology, ancient texts and their modern receptions, the project aims to address the radical implications of the (non-modern) body-of-orifices connected and exchanging with each other and the ‘outside world’. It will bring seemingly unrelated cultures, histories, disciplines, languages and cosmologies into conversation and perversion.
Selected Publications
Books
- Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018)
- minor cosmopolitan: Thinking Arts, Politics and the Universe Together Otherwise, ed. (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2020)
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria, co-ed. (Berlin: Fireflies Press, 2021)
Articles
- ‘The End of Globalization?’, text response to No Avoiding the Apocalypse!, video, 75:00 min (Techno-Poetry Cooperative, 2021) e-flux Video and Film, February 2022
- ‘Oracle from 2018 – Transdualism, or the A/History of Yin-Yang’, Heichi Magazine, 24 December 2021
- ‘Against Supercessionism’, in Arts of the Working Class, 15 (Winter/Spring 2021), special issue Decolomania
- ‘How to Curate a Funeral’, in Not Fully Human, Not Human At All, ed. by Bettine Steinbrügge and Émilie Villez (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021)
- ‘Siempre hay un nuevo amanecer’, Bitacora del encierro, diecisiete, UAM Cuajimalpa
- ‘Radical Indifference’, PASS: Journal of the International Biennial Association, (2020)
- ‘Freedom in Quarantine’, blog ‘In the Midst’, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 26 May 2020
- ‘Shanzhai: A Theory of the South?’, Times Museum Journal, 1 (2020), special issue South of the South
- ‘COVID-19: On the Epistemic Condition’, Open Democracy, 6 April 2020
- ‘The Ontology of the Couple, or, What Queer Theory Knows about Numbers’ (co-authored with S. Pearl Brilmyer and Filippo Trentin), GLQ: A Journal for Lesbian and Gay Studies, 25.2 (2019), pp.223–256
- ‘Transdualism: Towards a Materio-discursive Embodiment’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 5.3 (2018), pp. 425–442
- ‘Below Either/Or: Rereading Femininity and Monstrosity Inside Enuma Elish”, Feminist Theology, 26.2 (2018), pp.115–132
- ‘”adam is not man’: Queer Body before Genesis 2:22 (and After)’, in Unsettling Science and Religion: Contributions and Questions from Queer Studies, ed. by Lisa Stenmark and Whitney Bauman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), pp. 183–197
- ‘Camp as a Critical Strategy in Gu Changwei’s and the Spring Comes’, in The Dark Side of Camp – Queer Economy of Dust, Dirt and Patina, ed. by Franziska Bergmann, Ingrid Hotz-Davies, and Georg Vogt (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 56–70
- ‘The (De)Coloniality of Conceptual Inequivalence: Reinterpreting Ometeotl within Nahua Tlacuiloliztli’, in Decolonial Readings of Latin American Literature and Culture, ed. by Juan Ramos and Tara Daly (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 39–55