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Saintly Desire? Same‐Sex Relations in Ælfric's Lives of Saints

David Clark

in Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature

The ninth chapter moves into Old English prose literature to study the interaction of different constructions of homosocial desire in Ælfric's Lives of Saints, where same‐sex relations are depicted ... More

The ninth chapter moves into Old English prose literature to study the interaction of different constructions of homosocial desire in Ælfric's Lives of Saints, where same‐sex relations are depicted as simultaneously natural and unnatural. Intense male loyalty inextricably fused with Christian faith is held up as an ideal in the Life of the Forty Soldiers, in contrast to male‐female sexuality which is repudiated. However, there are signs of authorial anxiety over the homosocial intimacy described in the martial saints' lives. A conversion model based on homosocial community in other Lives coexists with the threat of same‐sex desire, and this dynamic is compared to ways in which the eponymous transvestite protagonist of Æfric's Life of Eugenia reflects anxieties about gender and same‐sex intimacy in monastic contexts.Less

A Fine Romance? Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, and The Husband's Message

David Clark

in Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature

The first chapter analyses three poems most often considered to be about heterosexual romantic love as a means of destabilizing at the outset assumptions often made about Old English texts. It argues ... More

The first chapter analyses three poems most often considered to be about heterosexual romantic love as a means of destabilizing at the outset assumptions often made about Old English texts. It argues that such interpretations often rest upon heterosexist and anachronistic preconceptions which are invisible because they lay implicit claim to be normative. It also reviews the arguments which claim male narrators for Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament and the reception of these critical manoeuvres. It concludes with a call to examine more rigorously our cultural assumptions about the Anglo‐Saxon period and its literature, and by acknowledging the primacy of homosocial desire.Less

Destructive Desire: Sexual Themes and Same‐Sex Relations in Genesis A

David Clark

in Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature

The sixth chapter investigates how homosocial bonds are constructed in the Old English poetic version of the biblical book of Genesis, starting with the treatment of the Sodomites in Genesis A and ... More

The sixth chapter investigates how homosocial bonds are constructed in the Old English poetic version of the biblical book of Genesis, starting with the treatment of the Sodomites in Genesis A and the contrast between their relations and the ‘correct’ and praiseworthy homosocial bonds between Abraham and his kinsmen and friends. It argues that, unlike other prose treatments, in Genesis A same‐sex acts are not considered to be the primary sin of Sodom, but that they form part of a network of various forms of unsanctioned sexual desire, presented by the poet as destructive in order to promote by contrast the procreative coupling of Abraham and Sarah, the progenitors of the chosen people.Less

Heroic Desire? Male Relations in Beowulf,The Battle of Maldon, and The Dream of the Rood

David Clark

in Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature

Chapter 7 focuses on the construction of homosocial bonds, looking first at heroic male relations in Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. It argues that the Beowulf‐poet here as in other matters remains ... More

Chapter 7 focuses on the construction of homosocial bonds, looking first at heroic male relations in Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. It argues that the Beowulf‐poet here as in other matters remains ambivalent, but that the Maldon‐poet opposes what he sees as correct homosocial bonds to a cowardice stigmatized by associations with effeminacy and sexual passivity. It then contrasts the radical revaluation of masculinity and heroic passivity in The Dream of the Rood, paving the way for the later chapters' further analyses of vernacular religious texts which re‐envision gender roles and homosocial bonds.Less

Writing the Homophile Self

Heather R. White

in Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights

This chapter examines three overlapping endeavors authored and organized by homosexuals during the postwar years. Each of these efforts shows how the project of articulating a homosexual identity ... More

This chapter examines three overlapping endeavors authored and organized by homosexuals during the postwar years. Each of these efforts shows how the project of articulating a homosexual identity contended with twinned narratives of condemnation and self-actualization found in the Protestant therapeutic orthodoxy. The “homophile movement,” the most well-known of the three efforts, is the main focus of this chapter. The authors of this type of literature took up the dominant therapeutic paradigm to turn that quest for authenticity into a project of homosexual self-acceptance. They contended with the intertwined doctrines of sin and sickness from within it, as its homosexual subjects. This collective carved out a social space that recognized and valorized same-sex attraction. The chapter also investigates how Protestantism provided practices of homosocial kinship and a set of narratives and beliefs that gave language to a homosexual identity.Less

Under the Patriotic Gaze: The Emergence of Non-Normative Sexual Discourses in Post-War Japan

Katsuhiko Suganuma and Siu-lun Wong

in Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures

Chapter 2 analyses the ways in which male writers of perverse magazines attempted to reestablish their masculine pride by transposing their own sense of struggle at being defeated by the powerful ... More

Chapter 2 analyses the ways in which male writers of perverse magazines attempted to reestablish their masculine pride by transposing their own sense of struggle at being defeated by the powerful West, onto other Japanese non-normative sexual customs that had close contact with the West, namely female and male prostitution for the occupation forces. It argues that the discourses concerning those non-normative sexual customs were pivotal to the (re)constitution of Japanese hetero-normative masculine self-esteem in relation to the West. In effect, the chapter attests to the dual nature of the perverse magazines; their twin functions of subverting as well as reaffirming gender and sexual norms in early post-war Japan.Less

Horny Satyrs and Tragic Tetralogies

EDITH HALL

in The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society

This chapter examines what can be reconstructed of the female roles in satyr drama, and how its nymphs and shipwrecked princesses were harassed by the ubiquitous chorus of priapic satyrs. It argues ... More

This chapter examines what can be reconstructed of the female roles in satyr drama, and how its nymphs and shipwrecked princesses were harassed by the ubiquitous chorus of priapic satyrs. It argues that too little attention has been paid to the deeply masculine psychological and somatic orientation of satyr drama, which throughout the 5th century and some of the 4th was the compulsory final element in the tragic tetralogies enacted at the City Dionysia. At a deep psychosocial level, the satyr play functioned to affirm a group identity founded in homosocial laughter and the libidinal awareness of its male, citizen audience.Less

Introduction

Peta Mayer

in Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality and the Queer Nineteenth Century

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac ... More

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.Less

‘My Blundering Way of Learning’: Murry's Still Life

Sydney Janet Kaplan

in Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the ... More

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the impact of Lawrence's ideas about sexuality on Murry's treatment of sex in Still Life, and also takes up the issues of repressed homosexuality and homosocial desire in his friendships with Lawrence, Gordon Campbell, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Mansfield's bisexuality is discussed in relation to Murry's treatment of lesbianism in his novel. The chapter analyses Murry's writing process and his difficulty in following nineteenth-century narrative conventions to write a modernist novel.Less

Still Life and Women in Love

Sydney Janet Kaplan

in Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence

This chapter contains an intertextual reading of Murry's Still Life and Lawrence's Women in Love. It considers the ways that Murry's ambivalent friendship with Lawrence is reflected in Women in Love. ... More

This chapter contains an intertextual reading of Murry's Still Life and Lawrence's Women in Love. It considers the ways that Murry's ambivalent friendship with Lawrence is reflected in Women in Love. Using both the first and final versions of Women in Love, this chapter analyses Lawrence's changing interpretations of the homosocial/homosexual relationship between Gerald Crick and Rupert Birkin and argues that they evoke some of the traumatic incidents that occurred during Murry and Mansfield's visit to the Lawrences in Cornwall in 1916.Less

“How Long Has This Been Goin’ On, This Thang ?”: Centering Race in the Twenty-First Century

Danielle Fuentes Morgan

in Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter examines Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and traditional depictions of horror to highlight the limits of comedic satire to articulate Black ... More

This chapter examines Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and traditional depictions of horror to highlight the limits of comedic satire to articulate Black experiences in the twenty-first century. These works blur the line between satire and horror to express the trauma—the horror—of Black life in the white gaze. Similarly, Issa Rae’s HBO series, Insecure, offers a way to think about Black centrality outside of the white gaze. These texts and performances reveal the necessity of Black friendships and communities in establishing the space to autonomously express Black identity.Less

I'll Be Doing the Giving: The Traffic in Women and Men in Gubijinsō

in An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel

This chapter examines the treatment of the issues of marriage and family succession in Natsume Sōseki's Gubijinsō. It explains that this novel focused on themes rooted in contemporary social ... More

This chapter examines the treatment of the issues of marriage and family succession in Natsume Sōseki's Gubijinsō. It explains that this novel focused on themes rooted in contemporary social morality, particularly the conflict between female desire and patriarchal succession and it also highlighted the fascination of Meiji melodrama for homosocial alliances and heterosexual relations. This chapter contends that the moral exemplar of the novel is brute as can be seen in the final confrontation scene and argues that the ie-seido was not restored through faith but force.Less

Programmed for Seduction: Faulkner’s Fiction and Men’s Magazines of the 1950s

Kristi Rowan Humphreys

in Faulkner and Print Culture

In 1957, two men’s magazines, The Dude: The Magazine Devoted to Pleasure (1956) and The Gent: An Approach to Relaxation (1957), reprinted short stories by William Faulkner: The Dude’s March 1957 ... More

In 1957, two men’s magazines, The Dude: The Magazine Devoted to Pleasure (1956) and The Gent: An Approach to Relaxation (1957), reprinted short stories by William Faulkner: The Dude’s March 1957 issue presented “Carcassonne” and The Gent’s June 1957 issue included “Divorce in Naples”—two stories that are not just any old Faulkner stories when considering issues of masculine identity. Magazine editors made the curious decision to reprint these stories, ripe with overtones of sexual ambivalence, alongside more explicitly heterosexual erotic spreads. This essay contends that the motives behind these choices are twofold. First, these decisions can be viewed as responses to a male postwar desire for homosocial bonding, as men sought to contest the domestication of masculinity even while operating within it. Second, they indicate the possibility that the heterosexual male was not the sole target audience.Less

Homosexuality in the action film

Lisa Purse

in Contemporary Action Cinema

Using Bad Boys II, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Alexander, Spider-Man 3 and 300 as illustrative case studies, this chapter maps out homosexuality's status as both structuring presence and structuring ... More

Using Bad Boys II, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Alexander, Spider-Man 3 and 300 as illustrative case studies, this chapter maps out homosexuality's status as both structuring presence and structuring absence in contemporary action cinema, as well as documenting how action movies speak to this presence/absence. After a brief history of homosexual screen representations, the chapter argues that the imposition or regulation of a straight-gay binary remains readable in contemporary action cinema, and that as a violent, risk-filled homosocial space the action ?lm provides a fertile ground for the anxieties about losing one's proper gender that Judith Butler has described. Representation of and performance of homosexuality, current practices of presenting and policing homosocial space, and patterns of knowing avaowal and disavowal, are historicized and analysed. The chapter explores how homosexuality operates as metaphor in the superhero action cycle, and as an indicator of villainy in films like Gamer, 300 and Watchmen, and also points up the persistent invisibility of female homosexuality in contemporary action cinema.Less

Hermes in Love: The Erotic Career of a Mercurial Character

Joseph Farrell

in Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury

As a lover, Hermes is generally regarded as comparable to other male divinities. His perceived connection to ithyphallic herms only strengthens this impression. In literature, however, the character ... More

As a lover, Hermes is generally regarded as comparable to other male divinities. His perceived connection to ithyphallic herms only strengthens this impression. In literature, however, the character of Hermes’ erotic activity is different from that of other gods. In general, as might be expected, he relies on stealth rather than force, and he is often content to play a secondary role by facilitating the amorous adventures of other figures. In fact, Hermes can be said in most cases to sublimate his own sexuality in favor of someone else’s, often in a way that bespeaks his own greater interest in homosocial bonding than in sexual conquest. These tendencies are clearly visible in archaic, classical, and Hellenistic representations of Hermes, and they develop in generally consistent and almost predictable ways through classical Roman treatments of Mercury down to quite late texts that become foundational for the medieval reception of classical antiquity.Less

Polygamy and Masculinity in China: Past and Present

Harriet Zurndorfer

in Changing Chinese Masculinities: From Imperial Pillars of State to Global Real Men

This chapter traces the relationship of polygamy to masculinity from the Ming-Qing era to the present. It demonstrates how ideals of masculinity shifted from passing the civil service examinations ... More

This chapter traces the relationship of polygamy to masculinity from the Ming-Qing era to the present. It demonstrates how ideals of masculinity shifted from passing the civil service examinations and enacting political/moral leadership to demonstrating business acumen and gaining wealth. With the demise of Maoist goals of gender equality in the post-Deng reformist years, masculinity became coupled with materialism and affluence which enable men nowadays to acquire mistresses and ‘second wives’. This chapter argues that both in the past and in the present, a homosocial culture that separates men from women encourages polygamy, boosts men’s sense of entitlement, and their pursuit of self-distinction and self-aggrandizement. While men nowadays may profess their filial obligations to their parents and wives, they also consider their power to indulge in extramarital affairs a crucial mark of status in relation to other men.Less

Conclusion: Suspect Desires: The End of a Religious Illusion in Doubt (2008)?

Maureen Sabine

in Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film

The book closes with a study of Doubt and views this film as a somber retelling of The Bells of St. Mary's in its representation of a gender power struggle between a nun and priest, played out in a ... More

The book closes with a study of Doubt and views this film as a somber retelling of The Bells of St. Mary's in its representation of a gender power struggle between a nun and priest, played out in a Bronx parish church and parochial school setting that is no longer a safe space for children. It proposes that the film dramatizes the patriarchal bargain compensating women superiors for their female subordination to the clerical hierarchy by giving them power over the young and the weak. It discusses how Doubt subtly broaches the topical subjects of homosexuality and pedophilia in the priesthood; outlines the homosocial organization of the institutional Church; and warns that both nuns and priests in positions of trust can abuse their religious authority. In final remarks, it notes the ways in which the Oscar dominated documentary God Is the Bigger Elvis, profiling the life of starlet Dolores Hart who left Hollywood to join a Benedictine cloister, has entertaining and arresting points of comparison with the nun films in this study.Less

Our Dionysian Experiment: Three Theses on the Poetry of Thom Gunn

Brian Teare

in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn

By examining the creative and critical oeuvre of Thom Gunn, with particular emphasis on his notebooks and his work's critical reception, which, when read side by side, allow us to witness a kind of ... More

By examining the creative and critical oeuvre of Thom Gunn, with particular emphasis on his notebooks and his work's critical reception, which, when read side by side, allow us to witness a kind of interior/exterior dialectic concerning the terms “gay” and “poetry.” Ultimately, it is the author's contention that, when taken together—Gunn's publication record and its critical reception, his development in his notebooks of a distinctly gay poetics, and his relationships with mentors Yvor Winters and Robert Duncan—all tell an exemplary story about the tension created, sustained, and sometimes resolved by the close proximity of “gay” to “poetry.” And though this chapter is foremost a story about Gunn's own poetry and his development as a gay poet, this story might also be read as representative of aspects of both poetic and gay histories in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature. In light of this dialectic between the evolution of Gunn's work and its interpretation by his critics, the chapter suggests that Gunn's career so expertly elicits from twentieth-century critical discourse the shifting historical definitions of “gay” and “poetry” for the following three reasons: To put the argument about Gunn's style another way, the distinction between homosocial and homosexual is “a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical difference in, the structure of men's relations with other men.”Less