Young, queer Tunisian Aïcha Snoussi’s artistic practice deploys decolonial methods by engaging from the margins of geographies, genders, and sexualities. Her depictions of queer bodies and sex practices of deviance, pain, and pleasure disrupt hierarchies of knowledge upon which state and social authorities are built. As Love has argued, deviance challenges “the stability and coherence of [the social world]” (2015). This paper finds affinities between sexual anomalies and deviance in Snoussi’s recent installations Le livre des anomalies (2017) and Bugs (Anticodexxx) (2019) and reads the works as archives of deviance that “perform new histories” (Zaatari, qtd in Gopinath). Such (re)narrativizations decolonize the normalization of the Tunisian state authority, which supersedes various governmental transitions, and where queer desires permeate normalcy (Gopinath). The works evokes surrealism in their intention to disturb the barrier between the conscious and unconscious minds. They thus coincides with the ideology of disturbing the real, exposing it as a construction, a sham, while revealing the real real (Rosemont), that is, the social world and the state stripped bare of illusions that conceal the ever present workings of power and state authority in the most ordinary aspects of life; the arenas where the demands of the state, upheld by society, are enacted most presciently, yet are obscured by their mundanity, such as sex acts. Deviant sex practices and queer bodies in surrealist visuals present an approach from the margins of the somewhat normative view of gender and sexuality often upheld by the male surrealists. Working on the margins of sexuality decenters the conceptualizations of liberated sexuality that are dependent upon the colonial/modern sex/gender system (Lugones). Snoussi re-creates her own embodied sexual aesthetics as a queer, North African woman, repurposing dominant narratives of the state, Tunisian society, surrealism, and queer Ottoman-era sex practices to reveal the arbitrariness within the hegemonic constructions of sex and sexuality, even within surrealist conceptualizations that claim to engage in liberatory social and sexual practices, or within contemporary understandings of Ottoman-era sexuality, and to create an archive that repositions knowledges of anatomy, sex acts, and erotic relationships. Bibliography Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018. Love, Heather. “Doing Being Deviant: Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26 no. 1 (2015): 74-95. Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 no. 1 (2007): 186-209. Rosemont, Penelope, ed. Surrealist Women. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998.