This article examines queer feminist knowledge production as thematized and performed in Kim de l'Horizon's debut novel Blutbuch (2022). I define "queer feminist knowledge" as an alternative (Halberstam), affective (Ahmed), ephemeral (Mu & ntilde;oz), nomadic (Braidotti), and metaphorical (Preciado) experimentation. This knowledge production revisits relationality as ever-changing and fluid, rendering it as an act of defiance against norms. Blutbuch tells the story of its non-binary character, also named Kim, through a fragmented narrative and delves into family history, witch figures, language construction, and different modes of writing. Offering a close reading of the novel, this paper analyzes representations of relationality, the body, and knowledge, and considers how these can be challenged and reimagined. After first outlining how queer feminist knowledge can transform the notion of lineage toward a more inclusive understanding of kinship, I then reflect on the narrator's self-expression to (re)create alternative forms of knowledge about family, language, and themself.
This article examines Judith Hermann's exploration of embodied vulnerability in Alice (2009) and Aller Liebe Anfang (2014), drawing on vulnerability studies, feminist care ethics, phenomenology, and narratology. Alice addresses vulnerability through the experience of witnessing loved ones dying, while Aller Liebe Anfang explores it through the embodied practices of maternal and professional care work. Across both novels, Hermann's modulation of focalization and her attention to bodily presence and absence reveal vulnerability in moments of crisis as well as in the temporal textures of daily care. In Alice, prolonged illness and sudden death articulate a phenomenology of loss, disclosing how bodily breakdown transforms perception for both the dying and those who attend to them. In Aller Liebe Anfang, the rhythms of caregiving expose vulnerability as a persistent condition, where protection-understood as the ongoing effort to safeguard those who depend on one's care-is inseparable from dependence and ambivalence. Read together, the two texts highlight Judith Hermann's thus-far-overlooked contribution to literary explorations of embodied vulnerability and the human interdependence at its core.
This article explores the community-building activism of the Heinrich-Heine-Klub, an organization devoted to promoting German cultural life among displaced artists and intellectuals in Mexico City in the 1940s. I consider the parallels between reflections on cultural identity in the work of Anna Seghers, a leading member of the Mexican exile community and president of the Heine-Klub, and Hannah Arendt's notion of civic friendship in her 1960 speech Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten. In the 1942 essay "Volk und Schriftsteller," Seghers argues that the process of cultural identification is based not on a connection to place or ethnicity but rather on social bonds that constantly produce and reproduce culture, wherever those bonds may form. Within her own community in Mexico, Seghers sought to put this call to action into practice; in effect, the Heinrich-Heine-Klub became an exercise in what Arendt identified as "friendship," a relationship founded in active "dispute and discourse" rather than defined by a shared diasporic identity. To illustrate this point, I discuss a collection of essays, entitled Heines Geist in Mexico, published in 1946 as a farewell to the club just before many of its members returned to Europe. With contributions from Seghers and other club members, including Egon Erwin Kisch, Paul Merker, Andr & eacute; Simone, and Alexander Abusch, the collection highlights the community's shared purpose of maintaining intellectual exchange across ideological and cultural differences.
In this article I examine notions of fugitivity and fungibility as they are depicted in Jagdpartie (Hunting Party, 1964). Filmed in the German Democratic Republic by Sudanese director Ibrahim Shaddad, the film depicts a white mob's hunt for a lone Black man in a setting rife with visual and nominal referents to the US American West. Shaddad builds a narrative of escape that I read, via Tiffany Lethabo King, as emblematic of the racializing schema of European modernity. Joe's movement in and out of the film's natural spaces makes him visually "porous," in contrast to the fixity of the white figures, who embody settler colonialism and white supremacy. I draw on King's metaphor of shoaling to address the ambivalence of the German-US setting, as well as the film's critique of the Marxist rubric of solidarity. Finally, I consider the absence of Indigeneity in the film and the demands it makes on present-day viewers.
