An interview with Boriana Alexandrova by Richard L. Kramár
How can literature get over what defies words, and when is the literary language threatened by decomposing itself? Boriana Alexandrova, a feminist and queer researcher, asks such questions in her research. In the interview she points out that bodily fluids and their uncontrollability connect the queer and disability cultures, and that our bodies never disappear without trace. In that context she explains the concept of monstrosity and warns against the risk of drowning in another person. Above all she urges us not to be afraid of getting dirty, losing control and submit ourselves to the elusive and the inexplicable what is overbrimming the borders of decency and threat. This is the only way to keep sensitivity to the otherness, the art and the other body.
Your scholarship centers on queer and feminist writing and performance, with a focus on disability, trauma, and artistic research methods. Which core questions currently drive your research?
My core research preoccupations over the past decade and a half have centered around “difficult” and “unreadable” texts: works that resist our efforts to penetrate, master, or confidently translate and explain them away. The unspeakable, the untranslatable, that which haunts us, in memory and body, but which evades verbalization. The unspeakable communicates but not in ways that we’ve been taught to read, and this presents particular challenges for literature: a language-made art. So, a driving question for me is: how can we communicate and read that which resists verbalization and defies comprehension? How can literary language hold a space for realities that threaten to unravel it?
How do writing and reading bodily fluids intersect with or open those central inquiries?
Bodily fluids are essential to representations of, and engagements with, illness, pain, sexuality, and violence, so they are a constant presence in the artworks I study. Bodies are fundamentally porous and leaky; we sweat, we gush, we cry, we bleed, we alchemize and expel fluids, sometimes as a matter of biological necessity, sometimes as an emotional response, sometimes as communication. Queer and disability cultures particularly find each other in this realm of irrepressible bodily leakiness, because for us, it is simply not an option to sustain the phantasy of a pristine, scentless, totally controlled, statuesque body that never leaves a trace of itself, never needs, never draws attention to itself, never feels too much and certainly never expresses any pain or discomfort, never desires out of turn or outside inhumane norms. We are overbrimming with disturbance. We terrorize normative order, and everyone invested in it, and bodily fluids represent both the vulnerability and the power of intimacy – with other beings, ourselves, as well as our environment.
In his opening text for InterAlia’s special issue “Bodily Fluids,” Michael O’Rourke claims that “queer theory does not—despite what it tells itself—like the icky, sticky, yucky, viscous, gloopy, gunky, mascara-streaked, wet, bloody, sweaty, pissy, shitty, leaky, seeping, weeping, sloshing, spurting, spasming, milky.” [1] Can literature be a form of resistance against the urge to exile the messiness of bodily fluids from the discourse? Are there specific writers or works that you feel achieve this particularly well?
To an extent I do agree with O’Rourke that academic discourse in general has squeamish tendencies, and I think we often take for granted that our task as scholars and theorists is to order the precarity of life—our bodies, our politics, our contradictory and volatile feelings, our personal madnesses and neurodivergences, our scrappy memories—into something explicable and accessible for translation and instrumentalization. Theory strains to cohere and comprehend the tentacular excess of our realities to make them legible, moldable, neatly passive and under control. Losing control is terrifying; it requires profound trust in the other and in our shared environment.
There are so many brilliant literary works, but among my favorites are Korean-American artist, disability activist, theorist, and mystic, Johanna Hedva, particularly their first novel, On Hell; and Nigerian-born novelist, poet, audio-visual artist, and ọgbanje, Akwaeke Emezi. Emezi’s debut novel, Freshwater, and their Young Adult fiction, particularly Bitter, brilliantly embody that desirous, foolhardy queer courage to transmaterialize and gush across the borders of respectability and terror … at times to the point of becoming the Terror as a means of liberation and reconnection with one’s invincibility.
In the chapter “Gender and Feminism,” which you contributed to the publication Contemporary Literature and the Body, you describe the monster as one who “makes it impossible to take for granted or transcend the messy, painful, slimy, embarrassing, frightening, exposing, leaky, precarious and unpredictable realities of the body.” [2] Can the presence of bodily fluids in literature be understood through the lens of the monstrous?
It absolutely can! Indeed, that’s what queer feminist phenomenologist and disability scholar, Margrit Shildrick (whom I obsessively cite in and beyond “Gender and Feminism,” because she has influenced me so much), argues lies at the intersection of queerness and disability: the ways in which both queer and disabled bodies have become monstered as abject and fearsome, because we threaten the modernist phantasy of impenetrable, unshakable purity, sanity, and stability. The monster is, by definition, impure: its uncontainable sliminess and alien stink terrorizes the normativized self with contamination and disintegration. As Shildrick puts it in one of my favorite essays of hers, “You Are There Like My Skin,” the monster’s fluidity—like Clarice Lispector’s Água viva (“jellyfish” in Portuguese), literally “living water” capable of slipping through the cracks of every stone, swelling and blurring the borders of sense or knowing, while connoting that gorgeous, poisonous, slippery tentacular alien that is the jellyfish—“betrays the fragility of the distinctions by which the human subject is fixed and maintained as fully present to itself and autonomous.” [3] The queer monster liquefies and defies the borders that distinguish one being from another.
“What is at stake” in encounters with monstrosity, Shildrick argues, is not so much the recognition of difference but rather “the risk of indifferentiation”: the risk of drowning in the other, of becoming consumed and immersed to the point of becoming indistinguishable in the borderless slime. The willingness to get dirty and lose oneself in an immersive encounter, even if (or perhaps especially when) it feels dangerous and potentially lethal to the self as we know it, is essential to being alive, to being present, and to truly, deeply listening, reading, and relating. The fluidity of monstrosity invites us into such vital encounters. I think only the monster can teach us how to remain present and brave in them.
In your chapter, you cite Sara Ahmed’s thesis that “feminism often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against.” Do you think the experience of writing and reading bodily fluids can be an example of this type of intensity?
When citing Ahmed on this point, I was thinking of “arousal” in terms of awakening to notice something that we’ve historically been trained to unsee and repress. But you’re so right to point out that there is also something here about the erotic arousal of experiencing a feminist awakening and feeling our way through it via bodily fluidity. It is epiphanic, exciting, yet terrifying: the intensity of suddenly knowing something that we have viscerally held for longer than we can remember, beyond the limelight of conscious awareness yet skin-crawlingly, ever-presently palpable in the shadows. It’s giving that “Holy Shiver,” as brilliant queer novelist and short-story writer, Carmen Maria Machado, recently talked about in an interview about her new novel-in-progress. [4] As explained in the interview, this archaic but titillatingly poetic phrase signifies goosebumps: the kind “a prey animal gets when it realizes it’s being watched by a predator, but also that the predator gets just before it goes in for the kill.” Machado goes further to describe it as “arousal that … connects things like sex and fear and pleasure and excitement.”
In Living a Feminist Life, where the quote in your question comes from, Ahmed conveys the intensity of sensing the danger of being pursued by a misogynistic, or racist, or homophobic, or xenophobic predator. She argues that it is the intensity of sensing this ineffable “wrongness” that leads us to feminism: the intensity of sensing—i.e. viscerally knowing—something that shouldn’t be happening, but which keeps happening to the point of becoming normalized and unremarkable. Because it’s so unmarked by normativization, we can’t quite put our finger on how it’s wrong or how to explain the violence of it to someone else, but our bodies shudder in proximity to it—the Holy Shiver materializes that unspeakable knowledge.
One could understand that intensity as an erotic arousal in the way Audre Lorde conveys it in “Uses of the Erotic”: violence—both intimate and public—can raise our awareness of the cellularly rooted and transgenerationally, epigenetically remembered power we have within us to not only survive it but to thrive in our resistance. “The erotic functions for me in several ways,” Lorde writes, “and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” [5] I think we could lean into Shildrick’s notion of sticky, slimy, borderless monstrosity, or Lispector’s various poetically and philosophically translingual explorations of the transhuman in Água viva or The Passion According to G.H., to better understand the border-defying power of the erotic Lorde speaks of.
We become aroused by the sudden but unmistakable awareness that a feminist consciousness brings, in all its oceanic intensity. Its intensity rouses us to action, to feeling bigger and louder and spilling over, and affecting—maybe infecting—the world with the otherwise we’re daring to imagine. All of this is to say: yes, writing, reading, and yielding fluidly, stickily, erotically can open up that fearless, joyous, playful, irreverent, and intimate space where the otherwise may materialize and become viscerally experienced and shared.
In your chapter, you speak about the possibility of embodied experience— “especially those aspects of it that evade verbal, visual or conventionally ‘legible’ representation” [6]—becoming an archive when historical voices or names are absent. Can bodily fluids in literature specifically function as this sort of alternative archive, and what might such an archive look like in practice?
One of my favorite contemporary poets, Kimberly Campanello, is someone I consider a unique and inspiring role model for how one could tend poetry as a practice of archiving the ungraspable. Kimberly writes translingually and transculturally: her work archeologically excavates fragments of memory, language, intertextual references, philosophical analysis, and an awareness that somehow sutures and quilts disparate sources with interrupted timelines. A line in her poems will snatch a remnant of a literary text, an image sparked or an uprooted memory conjured by a foreign word, and a sensory signal from the body, and it superimposes them in a way that makes them mutually electrifying, yet non-committal to a single, stable “meaning”:
it continues with rarely
sometimes or often
feeling achingly ancient
*
I continue to await
the perspective this feeling
ought to bring
[…]
Something isn’t circulating
or being produced properly
Something that Flows
in what I used to (still) think
is the very site of me
you see this Something
will not issue forth will not Flow
*
I am avoiding technical language
language in the hope there might
be some double (multiple?) meanings
to be felt Here in the basics
*
meaning the Something
that Flows (or not in this case
doesn’t Flow) in the very
site of me (you) [7]
Kimberly has openly talked about how her multilingual learning, writing, and translation practice is inextricably entangled with her experience of Parkinson’s disease. I cannot claim to “understand” her poetry, but inhabiting it and being co-present with it electrifies my sensibility. I am attuned to what my own neurodivergence feels like and I feel so inspired, and profoundly seen, by how Kimberly entwines her own neurodivergence, and experience of neurological degeneration, with the particular kind of creative neuroplasticity that comes from language learning, code switching, and perpetual estrangement, not only from the “other” but from one’s own body and interoception.
This also gestures to the particular form of intimacy that we polyglots develop with difference—with the foreign tongue: “‘Foreign’: the music in me from elsewhere,” [8] as Cixous beautifully puts it. “[D]on’t forget that all is not here, rejoice in being only a particle, a seed of chance, there is no center of the world, arise, behold the innumerable, listen to the untranslatable. Remember that everything is there; everything (which) is beyond everything. Languages pass into my tongue, understand one another, call to one another, touch and alter one another, tenderly, timidly, sensually; blend their personal pronouns together, in the effervescence of differences. […] Necessity, in the bosom of my language, for games and migrations of words, of letters, of sounds; my texts will never adequately tell its boons: the agitation that will not allow any law to impose itself; the opening that lets infinity pour out.” [9]
I have been curious, in my evolving thinking on multilingual writing, embodied experience, and neurodivergence, about the relationship between the fluidity of translingual code-switching and neurodegeneration. They are both experiences of dissolution: something disappears (like the borders between bodies, languages, cultures, brain centers, meanings) yet in this dissipation, new sensibilities and ways of looking, feeling, knowing, and being emerge. Dissolution becomes simultaneously degenerative and creative.
What knowledge or understanding can be derived from literary encounters with bodily fluids that are erotic in nature?
I’m reminded of a durational performance art piece by Johanna Hedva, called “Everything Is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting,” begun in 2010 and described by the artist as “an attempt to catalog everything erotic in the world.” [10] The text of the piece includes 100 entries, listed alphabetically in the published version but written out on individual pieces of paper in the participatory performances, which would invite participants to take a piece of paper away while whispering in the ear of the artist something the whisperer experienced as erotic. The list includes abscesses; ants on a cake; being read to; being spit on (sic); the bulbs of irises; blowhole of whales, dolphins, porpoises, when it contracts and spits; burying your face in something; certain words and how they’re said…
The piece urges the body to speak in its most secret, most darkly repressed and shamed language: not strictly the language of fetish (which targets a discrete, symbolic object or scene of desire) but of the erotic left undefined and limitless, simply invited to emerge. These kinds of água-vivaesque textual experiences require yielding: becoming open and fearlessly available to whatever may come of the encounter through the melting borders between us; permitting ourselves to be affected, and then curiously exploring how and what this has yielded.
How can we ensure, when thinking and feeling with bodily fluids in literature, that we remain genuinely attuned to the difference(s) of the bodies producing these fluids and texts, and avoid slipping into universalism?
By cultivating the courage to yield. Something I find so endearing and lovable about sticky, slimy, stinky monsters is that they don’t actually mean to repulse or repel us even if they sometimes present as threateningly rageful or destructive. They are usually avidly desirous of touch and connection. That’s why they stick; that’s what their penetrating scent does: it reaches deeply through the pores to touch the other intimately, under the skin, behind the heart, in the gut, coursing through the veins.
I think you are partly asking me about how to remain attuned to the particularity and idiosyncrasy of each body (or text) we encounter, and how to avoid the kind of universalization that closets our differences in a fantasy of a shared language, a sameness promising to facilitate connection. Hélène Cixous asserts that “the most difficult thing to do is to arrive at the most extreme proximity while guarding against the trap of projection, of identification. The other must remain absolutely strange within the greatest possible proximity.” [11] This is a method.
I feel adamant that the most underrated scientific method is learning to suspend knowing and surrender to the precarity and frustrated desire for the untranslatable. How do you, reader, accommodate the unknowable and untranslatable in your methods of learning, listening, knowing? Where do you place the negative, the void of comprehension? Do you treat the untranslatable as a problem to be eradicated, a gap to be filled or masked over? If you do, reconsider your method.
The untranslatable speaks a language of its own; it is a genre. We need to remain open and curious towards it, which requires unrelenting co-presence and a resistance to the habit of translating the strange into something familiar that we can digest.
This interview in Czech translation was published in Plav magazine 9/2026
Dr. Boriana Alexandrova is Senior Lecturer at York’s Centre for Women’s Studies and York’s PI on EUTERPE: a Horizon EU- and UKRI-funded international collaboration between 8 European universities, mapping the theory and practice of transnational queer and women’s literature and translation in Europe today. She is a scholar of European modernism, multilingualism, translation, and contemporary queer and feminist writing and performance, with a focus on disability, trauma, and artistic research methods. Author of Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (2020) and articles on the above themes, her latest project studies the post-war artivist archive of French queer Surrealist couple and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, excavating their unpublished and untranslated post-1937 writings.
Richard L. Kramár is a poet, director, dramaturg, and cabaretier. A graduate of DAMU in Prague and ArtEZ in Arnhem, he is currently pursuing a PhD in Dramatic Arts at JAMU in Brno. Between 2022 and 2023, he worked as a full-time prompter at the State Opera in Prague. The chamber opera TU JE OSTROV, for which he wrote the libretto, is set to premiere at the Janáček Brno 2026 festival. As a poet, Kramár has published four collections. Translations of his work were most recently featured in the anthology Junge Lyrik aus der Slowakei (2025). Since 2024, he has served as co-editor-in-chief of the digital platform Psí víno, focusing on the curation of contemporary poetry and the translation of English-language queer literature.
Footnotes:
[1] O’Rourke, Michael. “The Big Secret About Queer Theory…”. Ed. Kamillea Aghtan, Michael O’Rourke, and Karin Sellberg. InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies 9, Bodily Fluids (2014): 5.
[2] Alexandrova, Boriana. “Gender and Feminism”. Contemporary Literature and the Body: A Critical Introduction. Ed. Alice Hall. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 123.
[3] Shildrick, Margrit. “You Are There Like My Skin: Reconfiguring Relational Economies”. Thinking through the Skin. Ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2001. 163.
[4] Miller, Lulu, autorka, Carmen Maria Machado, hostka. The Holy Shiver. Radiolab, 10. července 2026. Čas 00:40:18. https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-holy-shiver/transcript.
[5] Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Toronto: Crossing Press, 2007. 56.
[6] Alexandrova 2023. 117.
[7] Campanello, Kimberly. “Moving Nowhere Here”. An Interesting Detail. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2025. Lines 21–55.
[8] Cixous, Hélène. “Coming to Writing”. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Přel. Sarah Cornell et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. 21.
[9] Tamtéž. 21.
[10] Hedva, Johanna. “Everything Is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting (2010)”. Minerva: The Miscarriage of the Brain. Saratoga, CA: Sming Sming Books & Wolfman Books, 2020.
[11] Cixous 1991. 171.