Queering Moby Dick

Abstract

As same sex marriage emerged at centre of the social and political debate in Portugal, the film Hero, Captain, and Stranger (2009), by João Pedro Vale (JPV) and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira (NAF), intersected art, identity politics and pornography in a manner hitherto unseen in Portugal. A homoerotic adaptation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, the film confronts a series of aesthetical and political taboos (and prejudices) which have never been analysed in depth despite their topicality. Initially conceived to survey the references to Portuguese seaman from Massachusetts in Herman Melville’s novel, the project by JPV and NAF is an irreverent provocation to a ‘semi-peripheral’ milieu, which still denied juridical recognition of homosexual marriage thirty-five years after the demise of the dictatorial regime (1926-1974).Basing itself on the overcoming of the incompatibility between art and pornography, and the specific nexus between the concept of democratic eros and the model of a more egalitarian gay pornography, this article will address the following questions: what are the political implications of de-metaphorizing homoerotic sexuality in the Great American Novel? And how does gay pornography serve this affirmative purpose?