Christopher Breu
Biographic Data
| ID | 371950 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Breu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Breu |
| SIGNATURE | BREU C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Illinois State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1550-3925 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
On In Defense of Sex
Donovan Schaefer and Christopher Breu discuss the latter's book, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire
Attention to the Body
In this article, New Testament scholarship on embodiment and corporeality is discussed, systematized and evaluated. The example of the Judas kiss and its reception in Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ demonstrates that the lens of embodiment is important in the analysis of New Testament texts. This lens focuses on bodies, and their relational construction through texts. It shows that an approach to gesture, based on Judith Butler’s theory of gest…
Gender in the Apocalypse
Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction , this article examines the function of the text of Revelation as a container and the depiction of containers in the text. The assessment that containers do not hold tight but enable a process of transformation helps to deconstruct the gendered binary between container characters like the Whore of Babylon, the heavenly Jerusalem, and the Messianic hero. If Revelation is conceived as a c…
Reading Gesture in John 20.16–17 and Its Afterlives
In research literature and works of art, the textual gap of Mary’s bodily action, implicit in Jesus’ phrase μή μου ἅπτου (John 20.17b), is frequently filled either with a proskynesis or a standing embrace. Against the background of Judith Butler’s theory of gesture, this article analyses attempts at filling in the gaps in the text. The notion of gesture as bodily quotation helps to interpret Mary and Jesus not as counterparts, but as a performati…
Melancholic Man and the Encrypted Earth
This essay argues that much of humanity is in a state of interminable mourning in relationship to the climate emergency. The endlessness of this mourning suggests that what we are experiencing is not merely mourning but its more troublesome sibling, melancholia. Freud theorizes melancholia as a form of interminable mourning that involves an unconscious, internalized lost love object or ideal. The melancholic incorporates this lost object into the…
Compulsory dandyism
This contribution features a conversation between Dr Christopher Breu, Dr Celeste E Orr and Dr Casey Burkholder at the On Intersex Joy (2025) event held at Concordia University, USA in July 2025. We asked a series of questions to centre the opportunities and limits to intersex joy, like 'what are the limits to joy or accessing joy?' and 'in what ways can intersex embodiment be a source of strength, affirmation and celebration?'. The article also …
Double Turning and Other Duplicities. A Performative Reading of John 20
In John 20:11–18, Mary Magdalene meets Jesus after his death. She turns around twice, a double gesture that has puzzled New Testament scholars. In this article, I offer a performative reading of Mary Magdalene’s turns based on Judith Butler’s theory of gesture and the literary inventory of ancient recognition scenes. I argue that the double gesture does not emphasize the difference between a physical and an inner status of recognition. Instead, i…
The Mother as Receptacle
In Gal 4:19, Paul describes himself asamother in travail until Christ is formed among the Galatians. In Gal 4:27, he quotes Isa 54:1, the praise of a barren woman who is not in travail. A look at these two verses as part of a (Middle) Platonic discourse on motherhood shows that they depict Paul and the barren woman as intermediary receptacles. The divine promise is materialized through, not by, them. This article draws discursive lines between Pa…
The Exposure of Violence
The sacrificial story in Genesis 22:1–19, the Aqeda or “Binding of Isaac,” has generated a large body of research literature. This is due to its irresolvable ambiguity: God commands the sacrifice of Isaac and stops it. The reader is not informed about reasons or intentions of the characters involved. After analyzing some possible approaches to the text’s ambiguity, I offer a new performative reading of the passage with Giorgio Agamben’s and Judit…
Female Seed as a Metaphor
New Testament texts frequently use the metaphor of family as a concept that structures a social and religious experience of kinship. They thus point to the socially constructed aspect of family ties and can be connected to current queer notions of kinship. Not only notions of families are construed, but already the seemingly natural process of procreation. The metaphor of female seed exemplifies this. Female seed in the sense of sperm and offspri…
Noir Affect
Autorschaft in der Johannesoffenbarung
Clarissa Breu liefert mit der vorliegenden Studie einen Diskussionsbeitrag über die Kategorie des Autors in der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft, indem sie Anwendungsmöglichkeiten postmoderner Autorschaftstheorien im Neuen Testament erforscht, vorwiegend in der Johannesoffenbarung. Die Autorin sucht nach Momenten der abwesenden Anwesenheit des Autors, in denen er scheinbar für die Interpretation greifbar wird, und die zeigen, inwiefern gerade dort…
The Modernist Corpse
What happens when an emergent theoretical or critical approach stops being oppositional and becomes a dominant position in its own right? This is perhaps the status of posthumanism in the present conjuncture. Originally emerging as an oppositional position in the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, posthumanism now finds itself, ten more years into the century, one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies in the presen…
The Humanities as Contradiction
This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals-such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique-is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by re…
Of Markets and Materiality
Work and Death in the Global City
Breu examines how Kirino uses the tropes of transnational noir, and the setting of Tokyo as global city, to focus on those who are on the losing end of global neoliberalism. By telling the stories of downwardly mobile women factory workers whose specifically gendered experiences mark the ways in which neoliberalism colludes with structural forms of sexism, misogyny and economic exploitation, Breu shows how Kirino challenges and disrupts the boost…
The Neoliberal University. A review of Jeffrey Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education
Subject and Substance
Banality in Comics Studies
Disinterring the real
The article argues that Bellamy's experimental novel represents a privileged text for understanding the persistence of the material (especially the materiality of the body) in the era of ‘immaterial production’. In making the case for the importance of Bellamy's narrative, the article also addresses contemporary debates about the death of the postmodern, the value of Lacan's notion of the real for thinking about materiality in contemporary cultur…
Morocco Bound
Book Review| August 01 2007 Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express Brian T. Edwards Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005 376 pp., $84.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper) Christopher Breu Christopher Breu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle…
Going Blood-Simple in Poisonville
This article examines the representation and critique of what it terms hard-boiled masculinity as an exemplary form of modern masculinity in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. The novel presents hard-boiled masculinity as violent, rationalized, and largely purged of interiority and affect. Its representation of masculinity is organized around a form of split narration in which the affective detachment and seeming rationality of the firstperson narra…
Freudian Knot or Gordian Knot? The Contradictions of Racialized Masculinity in Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go
This article situates Chester Himes' hard-boiled excoriation of American racism, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in relationship to larger critical and political debates about the value and limitations of negative representation. Taking Himes' use of the forms of negative representation associated with the hard-boiled narrative as its jumping off point, the article argues that Himes' novel, in its representation of the violence that overdetermines blac…
The Humanities as Contradiction
This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals-such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique-is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by re…
Female Seed as a Metaphor
New Testament texts frequently use the metaphor of family as a concept that structures a social and religious experience of kinship. They thus point to the socially constructed aspect of family ties and can be connected to current queer notions of kinship. Not only notions of families are construed, but already the seemingly natural process of procreation. The metaphor of female seed exemplifies this. Female seed in the sense of sperm and offspri…
Freudian Knot or Gordian Knot? The Contradictions of Racialized Masculinity in Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go
This article situates Chester Himes' hard-boiled excoriation of American racism, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in relationship to larger critical and political debates about the value and limitations of negative representation. Taking Himes' use of the forms of negative representation associated with the hard-boiled narrative as its jumping off point, the article argues that Himes' novel, in its representation of the violence that overdetermines blac…
Going Blood-Simple in Poisonville
This article examines the representation and critique of what it terms hard-boiled masculinity as an exemplary form of modern masculinity in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. The novel presents hard-boiled masculinity as violent, rationalized, and largely purged of interiority and affect. Its representation of masculinity is organized around a form of split narration in which the affective detachment and seeming rationality of the firstperson narra…
Morocco Bound
Book Review| August 01 2007 Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express Brian T. Edwards Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005 376 pp., $84.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper) Christopher Breu Christopher Breu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle…
Disinterring the real
The article argues that Bellamy's experimental novel represents a privileged text for understanding the persistence of the material (especially the materiality of the body) in the era of ‘immaterial production’. In making the case for the importance of Bellamy's narrative, the article also addresses contemporary debates about the death of the postmodern, the value of Lacan's notion of the real for thinking about materiality in contemporary cultur…
Subject and Substance
Banality in Comics Studies
Work and Death in the Global City
Breu examines how Kirino uses the tropes of transnational noir, and the setting of Tokyo as global city, to focus on those who are on the losing end of global neoliberalism. By telling the stories of downwardly mobile women factory workers whose specifically gendered experiences mark the ways in which neoliberalism colludes with structural forms of sexism, misogyny and economic exploitation, Breu shows how Kirino challenges and disrupts the boost…
The Neoliberal University. A review of Jeffrey Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education
Of Markets and Materiality
The Humanities as Contradiction
This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals-such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique-is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by re…
Noir Affect
Autorschaft in der Johannesoffenbarung
Clarissa Breu liefert mit der vorliegenden Studie einen Diskussionsbeitrag über die Kategorie des Autors in der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft, indem sie Anwendungsmöglichkeiten postmoderner Autorschaftstheorien im Neuen Testament erforscht, vorwiegend in der Johannesoffenbarung. Die Autorin sucht nach Momenten der abwesenden Anwesenheit des Autors, in denen er scheinbar für die Interpretation greifbar wird, und die zeigen, inwiefern gerade dort…
The Modernist Corpse
What happens when an emergent theoretical or critical approach stops being oppositional and becomes a dominant position in its own right? This is perhaps the status of posthumanism in the present conjuncture. Originally emerging as an oppositional position in the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, posthumanism now finds itself, ten more years into the century, one of the dominant paradigms of literary studies in the presen…
The Exposure of Violence
The sacrificial story in Genesis 22:1–19, the Aqeda or “Binding of Isaac,” has generated a large body of research literature. This is due to its irresolvable ambiguity: God commands the sacrifice of Isaac and stops it. The reader is not informed about reasons or intentions of the characters involved. After analyzing some possible approaches to the text’s ambiguity, I offer a new performative reading of the passage with Giorgio Agamben’s and Judit…
Female Seed as a Metaphor
New Testament texts frequently use the metaphor of family as a concept that structures a social and religious experience of kinship. They thus point to the socially constructed aspect of family ties and can be connected to current queer notions of kinship. Not only notions of families are construed, but already the seemingly natural process of procreation. The metaphor of female seed exemplifies this. Female seed in the sense of sperm and offspri…
Double Turning and Other Duplicities. A Performative Reading of John 20
In John 20:11–18, Mary Magdalene meets Jesus after his death. She turns around twice, a double gesture that has puzzled New Testament scholars. In this article, I offer a performative reading of Mary Magdalene’s turns based on Judith Butler’s theory of gesture and the literary inventory of ancient recognition scenes. I argue that the double gesture does not emphasize the difference between a physical and an inner status of recognition. Instead, i…
The Mother as Receptacle
In Gal 4:19, Paul describes himself asamother in travail until Christ is formed among the Galatians. In Gal 4:27, he quotes Isa 54:1, the praise of a barren woman who is not in travail. A look at these two verses as part of a (Middle) Platonic discourse on motherhood shows that they depict Paul and the barren woman as intermediary receptacles. The divine promise is materialized through, not by, them. This article draws discursive lines between Pa…
Gender in the Apocalypse
Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction , this article examines the function of the text of Revelation as a container and the depiction of containers in the text. The assessment that containers do not hold tight but enable a process of transformation helps to deconstruct the gendered binary between container characters like the Whore of Babylon, the heavenly Jerusalem, and the Messianic hero. If Revelation is conceived as a c…
Reading Gesture in John 20.16–17 and Its Afterlives
In research literature and works of art, the textual gap of Mary’s bodily action, implicit in Jesus’ phrase μή μου ἅπτου (John 20.17b), is frequently filled either with a proskynesis or a standing embrace. Against the background of Judith Butler’s theory of gesture, this article analyses attempts at filling in the gaps in the text. The notion of gesture as bodily quotation helps to interpret Mary and Jesus not as counterparts, but as a performati…
Melancholic Man and the Encrypted Earth
This essay argues that much of humanity is in a state of interminable mourning in relationship to the climate emergency. The endlessness of this mourning suggests that what we are experiencing is not merely mourning but its more troublesome sibling, melancholia. Freud theorizes melancholia as a form of interminable mourning that involves an unconscious, internalized lost love object or ideal. The melancholic incorporates this lost object into the…
Compulsory dandyism
This contribution features a conversation between Dr Christopher Breu, Dr Celeste E Orr and Dr Casey Burkholder at the On Intersex Joy (2025) event held at Concordia University, USA in July 2025. We asked a series of questions to centre the opportunities and limits to intersex joy, like 'what are the limits to joy or accessing joy?' and 'in what ways can intersex embodiment be a source of strength, affirmation and celebration?'. The article also …
On In Defense of Sex
Donovan Schaefer and Christopher Breu discuss the latter's book, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire
Attention to the Body
In this article, New Testament scholarship on embodiment and corporeality is discussed, systematized and evaluated. The example of the Judas kiss and its reception in Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ demonstrates that the lens of embodiment is important in the analysis of New Testament texts. This lens focuses on bodies, and their relational construction through texts. It shows that an approach to gesture, based on Judith Butler’s theory of gest…
Art (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Biblical Studies and Interpretation (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Literature (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)