The Queendom
Ina Dottery
I thought it would be an interesting question or exercise to try to translate this word into Spanish, since the Spanish words for king and queen (rey and reina, respectively) are so similar that is a challenge to deconstruct "reino" etymologically and reconstruct it in a way that a "queendom" is unambiguously distinguishable from "kingdom".
Once there was a young princess who, when she grew tired of beating her head against the male power structure at her castle, would relax by walking into the woods and sitting beside a small pond [...]
To clarify further, this question tries to put you in the shoes of the translator, having to find a word in Spanish for "queendom", having to preserve the connotations of a queendom of being a queen-centric and not a king-centric (male-centric) form of rulership.
I'm not entirely convinced, but given that Spanish rey comes from Latin rex, which gave regnum (Spanish reino), then from Latin regina (Spanish reina) we could have reginanum that could give a hypothetical Spanish reginano, or maybe a simplified version such as rgino, or even reinano, closer to reina.
CH: So this brings me to my next question, which is about our ability to change our minds. In the book you talk about the queendom value of changing our minds, of cultivating an openness to the shifts in our internal landscape that emerge from within. What have you been changing your mind about lately?
CH: That feels both beautiful and true. Well, to end on a note of more beauty and hope, let me ask: When it comes to the world of feminist theology and activism, where are you finding hope right now?
IA: My work is research-based. The project started from the archive of David Storm Rice, an art historian and archaeologist who specialized in Islamic art. Over time, Rice fell into obscurity, and his archive was nearly forgotten. It was quite literally about to be thrown out into the trash.
I tried to understand the archive materials and the way Rice looked at the objects from the perspective of a Western researcher. As there is little biographical information about him and my focus is primarily visual, I was quite interested in his actual gaze: his method of scanning the photographs. What kind of data did he try to unearth through this research?
IA: Yes, it's super different from being invited to show with a museum or a gallery. It was challenging. And that's what led Shelley Harten, who curated the pavilion, and I to think about queendom. We thought that we needed to address the issue of an anachronistic power structure and make it a space that is above and beyond the nation-state. Queendom was the perfect name for it.
Boaz Levin is a Berlin-based writer, curator and editor of Cabinet Magazine's Kiosk. He was co-curator of the Biennale fr Aktuelle Fotografie in 2017, which takes place in Heidelberg, Mannheim and Ludwigshafen, and was co-curator of the third Chennai Photo Biennale, 2021. He is the author of On Distance, 2020, published by Atlas Projectos, Berlin/Lisbon.
The queendom was ruled by female anophelii, who required a steady supply of blood from its subjects in order to maintain their considerable intelligence. The queendom's rule was enabled by the complex machinery that the anophelii were able to create and maintain.
The queendom collapsed rapidly roughly 50 years after its founding, once there were no more easy conquests for the queendom. Once the blood sacrifices ran out, the female anophelii quickly degenerated into mindless predators.
The story underlying this ethnography began with the recent discovery and commercialization of the remnant of an ancient queendom on the Sichuan-Tibet border. Recorded in classical Chinese texts, this legendary matriarchal domain has attracted not only tourists but the vigilance of the Chinese state. Tenzin Jinbas research examines the consequences of development of the queendom label for local ethnic, gender, and political identities and for state-society relations.
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