Male-male Desire Research Articles

Ferdinand Grimms Geschichte Der Burgherr im Kontext der Homosozialität

The present analysis focuses on the relationship between two knights described in the text Der Burgherr, which could be an extrapolation of Ferdinand Grimm's alleged homoerotic desire. However, the article proves that the thesis of his homoerotic desire formulated in 2020 by Heiner Boehnke and Hans Sarkowicz is unlikely and that the relationship of male heroes/knights in the text Der Burgherr corresponds to a patriarchal culture already characteristic of the Middle Ages. The concept of homosociality, as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, provides the interpretive framework here in the context of her thesis that in men's alliances there are highly emotional relationships between the same sexes that go far beyond the sexual sphere. In the paternalistic culture of the Middle Ages, this does not necessarily mean hiding one's homoeroticism and expressing the ‘male homosexual panic’ defined by her, as the potential sexual component, which is by no means obvious, is effectively concealed or repressed in favour of an idealised patriarchal order. Related to this is the author's polemical stance against the thesis of male-male desire in both Grimm's life and his text. Instead, the author focuses on the internalised symbolism of inter-male alliances in Grimm's text in a homosocial context and critically points out textual consequences of such possible analogy to Ferdinand Grimm's life situation.

The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Iran by Kathryn Babayan

Babayan begins her book with a moment of transition in Iranian history. A couple of years before the dawn of the seventeenth century, Shah Abbas I, the Safavi king, moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan and with the help of Shaykh Baha’i, the Shi’i high-ranking cleric, and attempted to change Isfahan’s culture by converting its Sunni population to Shi’ism. In an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, Babayan guides us through the city in the seventeenth century with a series of verbal and visual texts, including murals, paintings on paper and walls, and what she calls family anthologies.The first chapter, “Imperial Vision of Sovereignty,” describes how Shah Abbas I began his imperial building project, known as the “Image of the World Square,” intended to transform Isfahan into an urban paradise—an ideal city of beauty and desire. Large crowds of people watched the spectacle during its inauguration or read oral accounts of the celebration as recorded in “household anthologies” (36). In this chapter, Babayan provides detailed interpretive readings of verses from the Quran and epigraphic poetry inscribed on minarets and the walls of the king’s new Friday Prayer Mosque, which, in her words, “can be read as a book” (43). She writes that “the city of God” envisioned by Shah Abbas was founded “on the promise of material delight and homoerotic pleasure that awaited pious Muslims in paradise” according to the Quran (61, 113).In the second chapter, “Collecting, Self-Fashioning, and Community,” Babayan engages in a close reading of anthologies by a religious scholar and a painter, arguing that “both men mark[ed] their urbanity” through the idioms of love and etiquettes of sociability, “[writing] themselves into their idealized city” (106). The title of the third chapter, “Disturbing the City,” based on the Persian poetic genre of sharashub or “city disturber,” explores how a cleric and poet’s popular literary guidebook to Isfahan challenged the imperial vision of the city as paradise. According to Babayan, that book represents Isfahan “as a masculine space where friends are educated in the adab [etiquette] of erotic love” (27); it “sees Isfahan as a copy of beauty and draws its image in the figure of a beautiful male youth” (136).The fourth chapter, “Cultivating and Disciplining Friendship Letters,” examines letters in household anthologies that provided models of friendship to be emulated, using the “mystic tropes and conventions” that characterized the “modes of reading and debating homoerotic love” at the time (163). Babayan argues, however, that “the dynamic of erotic love and its denial, so central to the conventions of Sufi love, was mobilized by the Safavi court to discipline male-male desire, which was perceived as a threat to rule and maintenance of stability in Isfahan” (163). The fifth chapter, “Family Archives and Female Space of Intimacy,” analyzes the anthology of a prominent family of bureaucrats and literati, especially a female member’s autobiographical verses about a pilgrimage to Mecca, as well as paintings depicting women. Babayan’s skillful commentary vividly demonstrates the psychological and spiritual inner conflict of women at the time regarding the stigmas and other consequences that attended intimate friendships between females.As Babayan closely examines the verbal and visual texts that she chose to portray the culture of Isfahan during the seventeenth century, Babayan weaves throughout her chapters the theme of “gazing,” a term borrowed from the Sufi tradition, as in the etiquette of gazing at beautiful male youth “in playfulness, bantering, and coquetry, one lovelier than the other, well-built and tall, each one ready to be desired” (125–126). The City as Anthology is a well-researched, theoretically informed, and elegantly presented work. Babayan’s close readings of paintings and her literary analyses of texts are always creative and often brilliant.

Bodily Citationality and Hermeneutical Sex: Text, Image, and Ritual as Tools for Queer Intimacies

Bodily Citationality and Hermeneutical Sex: Text, Image, and Ritual as Tools for Queer Intimacies1 Shlomo Gleibman This article discusses queer images of traditional Jewish clothes and objects-the prayer shawl, the ritual undergarment, and the phylacteries-in contemporary photography and novels, in relation to the biblical and rabbinic texts (the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, and Midrash). The selected cultural productions of the turn of the millennium that represent the intersections of Judaism and male-male desire include works of fiction and visual art from Canada, the United States, Israel, and Germany. Michael Lowenthal’s The Same Embrace (1998), set in the early 1990s, follows Jacob, a secular and openly gay Jewish man, who, while visiting his religious twin brother Jonathan, becomes infatuated with Ari, an Orthodox yeshiva student who is his brother’s study partner. Evan Fallenberg’s novel Light Fell (2008) depicts a passionate romance between two Jewish male scholars in the 1970s: Yoel Rosenzweig, an Orthodox rabbi, and Joseph Licht, a university professor. André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name (2007) delineates a love relationship between two Jewish men in the 1980s: Elio, a professor’s son, and Oliver, a doctoral student and Elio’s father’s research assistant.2 In all of these works, Jewish religious references serve to establish the immediacy and totality of the intimate connection between male lovers. The photography of Benyamin Reich, produced between 2005 and 2020, and of Oscar Wolfman, produced in 2010–11, employs biblical and rabbinic tropes to represent contemporary Jewish queer experience. Sarah Rosen’s and Tom Stokes’s blog Porn4Jews3 and Duncan Pflaster’s Naughty Jewish Boys Calendar (2015) introduce eroticized Jewish religious references and ritual objects into the contemporary popular culture.4 Drawing upon the works of queer theorists such as Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz, I propose to look at these literary and artistic productions as examples of subversive citationality and (dis)identification that construct queer subjectivity by rethinking traditional religious images and cultural practices across texts and [End Page 41] genres, through particular modes of intertextuality and cultural translation. Like a number of works in Jewish critical scholarship (see e.g. Lefkovitz; Pellegrini), I approach Jewish identity, along with gender and sexual identities, as a performative category enacted in cultural productions through interpretation and reworkings of earlier texts. Judith Butler’s description of identity as performative ritual includes the notion of bodily inscriptions, which, through compulsory citationality, establish textual authority as a form of conventionality and normativity. In Bodies that Matter, Butler defines sex as “citational practice” (71–72). She understands citation as a way of accumulating “the force of authority” through “a prior, authoritative set of practices” (171–72) in which the law is produced through citation (xxiii). Citation produces the norm (xxii), yet it also produces “a viable subject” (177). Butler makes a distinction between “forced citations” and “subversive citations” (232). The very mechanism of sex being “produced as reiteration of hegemonic norms” (70) allows a possibility of “a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of resignification” (70). Citation can invite reappropriation and recontextualization (169). The texts and works of art that cite the tradition differently could be seen as examples of such subversive citations, as instances of bodily citationality through queering biblical and rabbinic texts and religious rituals associated with these texts. The classical religious texts are cited in liturgy, performed in ritual, and enacted by, with, and upon the queer male bodies through subversive erotic performance. When discussing his art, Benyamin Reich draws a parallel between religious ritual objects and sexual fetishes: “Fetish […] is connected to holiness. In religion, fetish is when a person makes kiddush, if he puts tefillin […]. You take an object, and you make of this object much more than what it is. This is the whole idea of art” (Schmoozing 3:54–4:24). The similar roles of imagination in erotic fantasies and in religious concepts bring together sexual practices and religious rituals. This strategy of queer reclamation of traditional images could be understood in light of José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentifications. In his discussion of the relation of queers of colour to their mainstream, traditional cultures, Mu...

Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex by Robert Deam Tobin

Reviewed by: Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex by Robert Deam Tobin Liesl Allingham Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex. By Robert Deam Tobin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xix + 306. Cloth $69.95. ISBN 978-0812247428. In the impressive Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin significantly extends the scope of his previous two monographs; the first, an argument for an emergent "queer proto-identity" in the Goethezeit (Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe, 2000) and the second, an investigation of the relationship between medicine and literature in the texts from the nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, ending before the onset of National Socialism. In the detailed preface, Tobin makes clear that this volume is neither a history of sexual practices, nor does it engage in queer readings; it is instead a textual-based "history of sexual ideas" (xv). Accordingly, he is careful to maintain the nomenclature of the authors he discusses, such as Urning, invert, and homosexual. Tobin also is upfront about the limitations of the study; his sources necessarily come almost exclusively from the bourgeoisie or the upper class with little representation from the working class. Similarly, female subjects are largely absent, with the exception of in the sixth chapter, which he devotes to a discussion [End Page 646] of the third sex and the women's movement in Switzerland. Nonetheless, gender is fundamental to Tobin's analysis and Tobin draws attention both to the presence and, perhaps more importantly, the absence of theoretical discussions of lesbianism and female-female desire throughout the volume. Any history of sexuality must reckon with Foucault. Tobin acknowledges his debt to Foucault, including the use of "peripheral sexualities" in the title, but also seeks to provide a corrective to what he believes to be Foucault's overemphasis on power and on the larger institutional and discursive constructions of sexuality, particularly the importance of medical institutions. Tobin turns instead to the geographic periphery of Western Europe, looking beyond the German-speaking cultural centers of Berlin and Vienna to Hungary (chapter 4), German colonial Samoa (chapter 5), Switzerland (chapter 6), as well as to novelized discussions of Italy (chapter 7) and Palestine (chapter 8). Reading literary, medical, and political texts with and against each other, he highlights the individual voices and emancipatory movements that he believes Foucault neglects, situating them within the two competing paradigms of same-sex desire that he argues still frame contemporary thinking on sexualities, the liberal-minded emancipationist minoritizing tradition and the antiliberal masculinist tradition. Equally peripheral are some of the literary writers he discusses. In addition to the canonical authors Albert Stifter, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and the popular Karl May, Tobin discusses texts by lesser-known novelists such as the Swiss authors Heinrich Zschokke, Ernst von Wolzogen, and Aimée Duc, and the Silesian-born Arnold Zweig. Tobin lays out the foundations of the emancipationist minoritizing position in his introduction with close readings of seminal publications on the construction of sexuality from 1869 by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Karl-Maria Kertbeny, and Carl Westphal. These authors shared a belief that same-sex desire is inborn, occurs only in a discrete minority, and displays identifiable biological characteristics such as gender inversion. The competing masculinist tradition is the subject of the second chapter. While physicians' and activists' use of ancient Greece as a source of evidence for the biological fixity of homosexuality decreased, the masculinists continued to claim it as proof of the inherent bisexuality of most men and as evidence that male-male desire was the epitome of masculinity. Thus they vehemently rejected the idea of gender inversion with its assumption of effeminacy. Unlike the liberal, emancipatory tradition of the minoritizing position, the masculinists were antibourgeois, antiliberal, antimodernist, and antifeminist. In subsequent chapters, Tobin broadens his investigation both geographically and topically and looks at how these approaches to same-sex desire intersect with, and are duplicated in discussions of race, gender and the women's movement, German colonialism, and nationalism and national identities. One of the more intriguing sections is Tobin's third chapter—an exploration of the increasingly ubiquitous analogy [End Page 647] of Jewishness and homosexuality in the nineteenth century. Originally...

Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (review)

Reviewed by: Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton Emily Johnson Roberts Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, ed. James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2013) vii + 329 pp. Building on important scholarship that theorizes and historicizes sex and sexuality, this collection of essays, which began with a series of conversations [End Page 326] among scholars and the prompt “What is sex?” challenges modern assumptions about sex (the act) in the early modern period prior to the development of the modern definition of the term as penile-vaginal intercourse. Several of the essays in this volume explore and historicize sexual acts that today are little known or have been obscured by dominant cultural narratives, while others offer queer readings of early modern texts. According to the editors, Sex before Sex is a compilation of queer, historicist, and queer-historicist essays, which is just one of the reasons that it is an exciting and significant contribution to existing scholarship. The introduction, co-authored by Will Stockton and James Bromley, opens with a brief discussion of Act 2 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Hermia and Lysander are discussing their sleeping arrangements for the night. Stockton and Bromley recognize the sexual tension of this scene, but they also aptly note that scenes such as these should raise questions about what preciselyis sexual (or what sex could be) in these contexts. Reminding readers that there is no transhistorical definition of sex, the authors explain that Sex before Sex is an attempt to destabilize scenes like this one by “pressuring the definition of sex” and challenging modern presumptions about sex (2). In the first chapter, “‘Invisible Sex!’: What Looks like the Act in Early Modern Drama?,” Christine Varnado connects the “LOLCats” Internet phenomenon (in which photos of cats in anthropomorphic positions are posted with captions identifying their imagined activities) with the implied offstage action that suggests sex in early modern drama. In doing so she demonstrates the imaginative and interpretive activity that must take place for one to “see” sex in early modern drama. In making this connection, Varnado hopes to recover the similarities between modern and early modern subjects which critical emphasis on historical alterity has deemphasized (25). In addition to asserting that erotic reading requires subjective identification with an objective phenomenon, Varnado offers analyses of sexually-charged scenes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, arguing that scenes from the latter two texts demonstrate the ambiguity of offstage sexual acts in the former, particularly in the morning after scene in Romeo and Juliet, which scholars typically read as a scene of “straight” offstage sex. Chapter 2, “Death and Theory: Or, the Problem of Counterfactual Sex,” by Kathryn Schwarz, is the most theoretically demanding essay in the collection. Schwarz explores the connection between sex and death by focusing on corporeal virginity, the social reputation for virtue, and the dead bodies on which virtuous reputations are built. Using the myth of Lucretia as a starting point, Schwarz explores with insight the complex paradox that privileges a dead body over a living subject. Among the essays that reexamine erotic desire in early modern texts are Melissa Jones’s “Spectacular Impotence: Or, Things that Hardly Ever Happen in the Critical History of Pornography,” in chapter 3, and Nicholas F. Radel’s “‘Unmanly Passions’: Sodomitical Self-Fashioning in John Ford’s The Lover’s [End Page 327] Melancholy and Perkin Warbeck,” in chapter 4. Jones explores the erotics of impotency in Thomas Nashe’s “Choise of Valentines” (1592) and John Mars-ton’s Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598), arguing that narrowly categorizing pornographic narratives as “subversive” or “hegemonic” limits the affective and erotic possibilities of the texts (89). Jones emphasizes the overlooked desires of early modern female readers, for whom the failed erections of pornographic narratives might serve as objects of desire. In a similar reading of male-male desire in the two plays of his essay’s title, Radel argues that the ability of men...

Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature Steven C. Ridgely (bio) Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature. By Jeffrey Angles. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011. vii, 302 pages. $75.00, cloth; $25.00, paper. The contemporary formation of “boy’s love” (BL) is a manga genre authored primarily by women and marketed to girls (who like boys who like boys). Jeffrey Angles’s book is about this genre’s Taisho and early Showa literary predecessor, which was authored by men but marketed to both male and female audiences. Angles makes a strong claim about these writers of what might be called Gay Taisho—that the writers Murayama Kaita, Edogawa Ranpo, and Inagaki Taruho collectively invented a language for the emergent form of egalitarian love between young men in single-sex schools that begins to displace the hierarchical and machismo-driven formation that preceded it. “Love of boys,” then, refers not to men’s love of boys but to the love between adolescent boys or young men that is aestheticized and codified into a bishōnen (beautiful young men) genre of literary production. Writing the Love of Boys is a seven-chapter book consisting of an introduction that positions the study amid work on the literary and cultural history of male-male desire in Japan, two chapters on the poet and artist Murayama Kaita (1896–1919), two chapters on the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965), one chapter on the modernist writer Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977), and a conclusion tracking the legacies of these writers in post-war culture. The main chapters are characterized by a great deal of translation, a primary interest of the author. Angles has devoted much of his energy to translation recently, producing volumes of translated poetry by Arai Takako, Itō Hiromi, Takahashi Mutsuo, and Tada Chimako. His translations of short stories by Kaita, Ranpo, Taruho, Yumeno Kyūsaku, and Hagiwara Sakutarō are collected in the anthology Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), edited by the late William Tyler. Angles has rapidly emerged as the most active advocate of contemporary poetry working in Japan studies today. [End Page 193] For this study, Angles acknowledges and builds on Jim Reichert’s work on male-male sexuality in Meiji literature and Greg Pflugfelder’s history of male-male sexuality from the Tokugawa period to the early postwar period. But this book can be positioned among other recent research as well. In tracing the roots of a 1970s manga genre back to earlier literary formations, Angles’s book will pair nicely with Deborah Shamoon’s recent study of shōjo culture from Meiji literature through contemporary manga (Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan [University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012]). Shamoon’s central insight might also be applicable to bishōnen—that the passionate female-female “esu” (S) relationships, like “smashes” elsewhere, were not simply tolerated by school authorities but were seen as fully in line with heterosexual development as practice relationships in preparation for marriage and as a deflection of sexual desire away from premarital sex with boys. Writing the Love of Boys could also be considered against John Treat’s Great Mirrors Shattered (Oxford University Press, 1999). Treat’s book, when understood for what it is—a piece of experimental literary writing that combines the “rhetoric of confession” from Taisho-style “shishōsetsu” (I-novels) with 1970s gay life-writing in the style of Larry Kramer—is very much akin to the memoir-of-the-present mode of writing Angles explores in the Kaita chapters. And yet, these books in other ways could not be further apart. I expected to find something scandalous in Angles’s book, too, but what makes us blush is just how desperately sweet, gentle, and (frankly) clichéd the love odes of Kaita, for example, are to the object of his affections: “my yearning / Cannot withstand your scintillating form / And I weep” (p. 57). The personal is very much part of Angles’s book, however, as with Treat’s. Writing the Love of Boys is done...

“Give Me the Stump Which Gives You the Right to Hold Your Head High” — A Homoerotics of Disability in Asian Americanist Critique

This essay performs a reading of John Okada's novel No-No Boy that examines the latent homoeroticism between the two main characters, one a disabled veteran and the other a draft resister. It shows how male-male desire may heal ruptures among Japanese American men in the wake of World War II. In doing so, this essay urges a rethinking of the terms on which Okada's novel was embraced by Asian American literary cultural nationalism in the 1970s.

Same-Sex Desire, Cross-Gender Identification and Asexuality in D.H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction

The appearance of The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories in 2009, edited by N.H. Reeve, concluded the publication of Lawrence’s short fiction in the Cambridge edition with a volume of early and draft versions of a number of stories. Drawing on this new text, I will argue that the depiction of sexuality and desire in early Lawrence was much more heterogeneous than has usually been acknowledged. The texts address male-male desire, cross-gender identification and asexuality. Sexual relationships b...

The Double Life in the Cage: The Queering of the Social in Henry James's Late Short Fiction

It is now widely accepted that a thematic of male-male desire operates within the matrices of a Jamesian freeplay of the signifier. Yet the fate of a proper homosexual subject is confined to the closet, as James's rhetoric doubles back on itself. This article proposes that while the frustrated, and at times contradictory, narrative economies of exposure and retreat in James's late short fiction clearly problematize subjectivity and same-sex sexual identity, they also work to reveal a rich and dynamic interrelation of selves and others that is always already in operation.

Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder by Carol Braun Pasternack, Lisa M. C. Weston, Daniel Gillmore Calder

476 Reviews might constitute Europeanness, are at theheart of the book. Almost inevitably, there is some variation in thequality of the contributions, and one notes a tendency togive excessive detail about the filmic text (in the essay of Stan Jones, for example), and more generally at times a failure to appraise more fully the cinematic qualities of the selected material, such as choice of shot or detail ofmise en scene. The editors are clearly aware of the need to strive foroverall coherence, and thus the essays are divided into categories such as 'Gendering theOther' and 'Engaging with thePast'. Other editorial strategies are less satisfactory,however. Some authors are allowed over-lengthy quotations. All essays list references at the conclusion but, astonishingly, the references do not include a filmography.There is a proliferation of footnotes that include additional and developmental material more appropriate to the main text. In Frank Leinen's contribution some pages contain almost more footnote than text, and without doubt this overwhelms themain thrust of the piece. This is themost extreme, though by no means the only example. The book contains essays thatwill be of considerable value to an advanced course on European cinema, but it is a pity that itsoverall high quality ismarred by theseweaknesses in the editing. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PAULINE SMALL Sex and Sexuality inAnglo-Saxon England: Essays inMemory ofDaniel Gillmore Calder. Ed. by CAROL BRAUN PASTERNACKand LISAM. C. WESTON. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 277) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 2004. xlix+284pp. $40; ?36. ISBN 978-o-86698 320-4. As well as gender and sexuality, the essays in thisvolume show a recurrent interest in issues such as lexicalmeaning and the relation between thediscourses of thepast and present. The editors' introduction (pp. xix-xlix) reviews earlier work on medieval attitudes towards sexuality, noting the absence of any previous collection concerned exclusively with Anglo-Saxon England (p. xlii), and summarizes the papers that fol low.The essays themselves are divided into three sections, beginning with those that address 'Same-Sex Acts and Desires: Systems ofMeaning'. R. D. Fulk's 'Male Homoeroticism in theOld English Canons of Theodore' (pp. i 34) questions the assumption thathomosexuality, as an identity rather than a forbid den act, emerges in the nineteenth century. Fulk suggests thatOld English ba?dling (usually translated 'effeminateperson') 'designated anOther' (p. 29), therebydefining a homoerotic identity in away not found inother languages before the modern era. In 'Sanctimoniales cumSanctimoniale: Particular Friendships and Female Community in Anglo-Saxon England' (pp. 35-62), Lisa M. C. Weston discusses the representation ofmonastic women bymale writers, such as Bede. She finds that theyexhibit anxiety about female relationships, and seek to regulate them by emphasizing the importance of community over exclusive, secretive friendships that may give rise to sinful desires. Kathy Lavezzo ends this section with 'Gregory's Boys: The Homoerotic Production of English Whiteness' (pp. 63-90), arguing that IElfric's account of Pope Gregory's encounter with the slave boys, like a laterVictorian version, engages with images of male-male desire in the construction and celebration of aChristian English identity. The second section, 'Sexualities of theVirgin and the (Virgin) Mother', begins with Carol Braun Pasternack's 'The Sexual Practices ofVirginity and Chastity in Aldhelm's De Virginitate' (pp. 93-120). Pasternack believes Aldhelm's aim is topro mote virginity as a passionate yet virtuous sexual identity, inwhich desire is con strained by being directed towards Christ and theChurch. In 'Maternal Sexuality on the Ruthwell Cross' (pp. I21-46) Mary Dockray-Miller also presents a rather MLR, I02.2, 2007 477 different image of sexuality: the emotional, physical, and therefore erotic maternal desires which are, she argues, the focus of theRuthwell depictions ofMary. The final section deals with 'Sex, Violence, and theNation'. Shari Horner ana lyses 'The Language of Rape inOld English Literature and Law: Views from the Anglo-Saxon(ist)s' (pp. I49-8 I). She challenges the standard dictionary definitions, and concludes that the regulation of sexual violence inAnglo-Saxon texts informs a broader definition of physical, social, and spiritual identity. In 'Embodying Christ, Embodying Nation: 'Elfric's Accounts of Saints Agatha and Lucy' (pp. I83-202) Andrea Rossi-Reder uses...

Alexander Smith and the Bisexual Poetics of A Life-Drama

In a sense, the binary restriction on culture postures as the precultural bisexuality that sunders into heterosexual familiarity through its advent into culture. From the start, however, the binary restriction on sexuality shows clearly that culture in no way postdates the bisexuality that it purports to repress: It constitutes the matrix of intelligibility through which primary bisexuality itself becomes thinkable. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Our pulses beat together, and our beings Mixed like two voices in one perfect tune, And his the richest voice. Alexander Smith, A Life-Drama (1) MOST COMMENTATORS ON ALEXANDER SMITH'S A LIFE-DRAMA, FIRST PUBLISHED in biweekly installments in the Critic from March 1, 1852-January 15, 1853 before becoming the lead poem in Smith's debut volume of Poems (1853), (2) make two points: the poem seems to exist more for the sake of the images that constantly disrupt its narrative than for the story itself, and the narrative shifts from transgression to redemption when, abruptly, the poet Walter pledges himself at the end to union with the woman he formerly wronged and to go[ing] forth 'mong men .../... in the armour of a pure intent. / Great duties are before me and songs (Smith, p. 211). In other words, the poem culminates in chivalric masculinity and heterosexual union--compensatory assurance after earlier solecisms against form, taste, and moral decorum. Rarely do nineteenth-century reviewers or recent scholars direct attention to another feature of the text, the origin of Walter's love of image-making, and of his poetic vocation, in an intimate friendship with an unnamed male poet. His achievement of a poem, in contrast--publicly acknowledged work--is tied to a narrative of heterosexual transgression recuperated by heterosexual union. I want to suggest that the two most notable features of Smith's Life-Drama--its preoccupations with image-making and with erotic transgression--are founded on bisexual poetics, the embedding of male-male desire within an unconventional courtship narrative. I here use in the broadest sense to indicate a poet's implied principles. Bisexuality, I argue, is the medium through which Smith imagines the action or plot of his verse drama and also an authorizing principle that allows poet and poem (including its proliferating imagery) to emerge. Bisexuality, defined by its instability and unpredictable sequence of erotic objects, (3) is also associated with a distinctive world view. As Maria Pramaggiore observes, Bisexual epistemologies--ways of apprehending, organizing, and intervening in the world that refuse one-to-one correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities, between identification and desire--acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject. (4) However conventionally the poem ends, the epistemology of A Life-Drama is bisexual in the terms Pramaggiore identifies. Indeed, the culmination of the closet drama's bisexual narrative in marriage and armored masculinity exemplifies Judith Butler's arguments about Freud's distinction between infantile bisexuality and subsequent ego development, a distinction that in Freud's work underwrites the interdependence of culture and gender binaries. In A Life-Drama, as in the scenario Butler identifies in her critique of Freud, (5) the very swerve into compulsory heterosexuality at the poem's end is the medium through which the poem's prior investment in bisexuality and bisexual poetics becomes legible. In this essay, accordingly, I trace the bisexual plot of the verse drama, its interweaving of same-sex desire with heterosexual romance, of effeminate men with assertively desiring women. Ultimately the poem's bisexual poetics do more than trouble gender norms, however: they enable Smith to perform Byronism and thereby to mediate a more threatening scandal, the suggestion that a great poet is not born but made by a sponsoring editor and literary critic. …

Cumming to an End

Cumming to an End

A Companion to German realism, 1848-1900

This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Muhlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von Francois, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Muhlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's Die Ahnen; gender and nation in Louise von Francois's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum, Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.

Love stories: sex between men before homosexuality

In Love Stories Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the 19th century - including those of Abraham Lincoln - drawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, define and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before gay and straight referred to sexuality, men like Walt Whitman and John Addlington Symonds created new ways to name and conceive of their erotic relationships with other men. Katz, diving into history through diaries, letters, newspapers and poems, offers us a clearer picture than ever before of how men navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.

Gay Men and the Rural South: No Contradiction in Terms

Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. By John Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 395 pages. $27.50 (cloth). GAY MISSISSIPPI. FOR MANY RURAL SOUTHERNERS WHO ARE ACCUSTOMED TO maintaining a pretense of ignorance toward what they do not want to see or hear about, those two words together have represented something of a contradiction for much of the twentieth century. Male-male desire and gender insubordination might exist in the seemingly less normative and more anonymous environment of major, mostly Northern cities but largely not in their homes and communities. Ironically, such a mindset also informs the beliefs of many non-Southern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and historians who assume that individuals who are attracted to others of the same gender will come out--and if they live in a rural part of the country, move out--and settle in a large metropolitan area where they can supposedly express their sexual identities more openly. These activists and historians cannot fathom the possibility that individuals interested in pursuing same-gender relationships could live satisfying lives in Jackson or Biloxi, much less in Brandon, Mississippi, the town in which John Howard grew up. Howard's work demonstrates that "men like that," as well as men "who liked that" (men who had sex with other men but who did not identify themselves as gay or bisexual), not only survived but flourished, [End Page 178] whether living in the Mississippi countryside, in a small town, or in a relatively more populated city neighborhood. Neither completely isolated nor invisible, they acted on their desires within the main institutions of local society--home, church, school, and workplace. In a sense, sexual and gender nonconformity were homegrown experiences in Mississippi. Men Like That examines male-male sexualities and male-to-female transgender sexualities--what Howard refers to as expressions of "queerness"--from the end of World War II to 1985, the year that seems to have marked the onset of the AIDS crisis in Mississippi and the culmination of a rural to urban shift in the state. The first part of the text describes how queer Mississippians both shaped and were shaped by their particular social and physical landscape. While readers familiar with LGBT histories of cities such as Buffalo, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Flint, Michigan will recognize some commonalities, Howard provides a history that is specific, if not entirely unique, to Mississippi. For example, given the predominantly rural nature of the state, men who were attracted to others of the same gender did not necessarily seek out or look to belong to a community of people like themselves. Instead, they developed distinct ways of enacting their sexualities. For this reason, Howard argues that gay community "is not simply a phenomenon lacking at this place and time. Rather, it is a concept lacking in explanatory power, a notion that incompletely and inadequately gets at the shape and scope of queer life" (15). However, the fact that many Mississippians did not structure their lives around membership in a gay community did not mean that they refrained from creating and occupying spaces specifically marked as gay. In chapters entitled "Sites" and "Movements," Howard vividly describes how men who desired other men met and circulated, moving back and forth between rural and urban, local and more distant places. While bars with a predominantly gay clientele played an important role for some men, as they did in other locales, most Mississippi residents, according to Howard, had limited access to them. For much of the period he considers, few cities in the state other than Jackson could sustain an exclusively gay bar, especially for African Americans, and the bars that did exist were divided along lines of race and gender presentation. As a result, men-desiring men more often went to local African American or white establishments, where they socialized with individuals of different sexual persuasions, or they met each other for [End...

Warm brothers: queer theory and the age of Goethe

In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and admirers and detractors alike of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, felt constrained to comment upon the ruler's obvious preference for men over women. In German cities of the period, men identified as warm brothers wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and developed particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion. There is much evidence, Robert D. Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were coalescing around a queer proto-identity. Today, we might consider canonical author of the period such as Jean Paul homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller. But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others. Warm Brothers analyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon and the history of sexuality.

Slander, Renaissance Discourses of Sodomy, and Othello

Slander, Renaissance Discourses of Sodomy, and Othello Robert Matz* “I think you think I love you,” Iago tells Cassio, who because of his fight with Roderigo and Montano has just lost the love of his general Othello. 1 How do we understand the exchanges of love in Othello that encompass not just male-female bonds but male-male bonds as well? And how do we understand these bonds of love, too, as they are involved in the ambiguity, uncertainty, betrayal, and accusation that Iago’s comment implies: “I think you think I love you”? In this essay I want to consider the ways in which Othello puts at stake not only the regulation of desire between men and women, but also between men. I want to argue that the regulation of male same-sex desire reflects on male political relationships, since this desire cements these relationships but may also be invoked—accusatorily—to disrupt them. I also want to consider how the accusation of illegitimate male-male desire intersects with other forms of desire in the play that are subject to similarly ambivalent construction as the products of conflicted and transitional social forms. For what Foucault calls the “utterly confused category” of sodomy indeed confuses, or rather fuses, a number of relationships in Othello that cross boundaries of gender, race, and status, and that the play at once represents, gives play to, and regulates. 2 While much fine work has explored the construction and regulation of female sexuality in Othello, less has focused on male-male desire in the play. 3 Sexuality has primarily been read in terms of male-female relationships, thereby sustaining the assumption that only heterosexual desires exist. 4 However, the object of a consideration of male-male desire in Othello, and in Renaissance studies more generally, should not be to identify the “homosexual” in the text. Rather, this desire needs to be understood together with the institutions that support, solicit, and regulate it, and in terms of the particular social contexts that determine the way it is represented. In these aims, I follow historian Alan Bray and the developing work of queer theory in Renaissance studies, in two important assumptions: first, that the realms of the sexual and the social are not cordoned off from one another, and, second, that the early [End Page 261] modern period recognized no distinct homosexual, or therefore heterosexual, identity. While “sodomitical” relations were condemned, sodomy was a category that could proscribe more acts than sex between men (such as adultery, bestiality, and witchcraft), and it was a sin to which all—not a distinct minority—might succumb. Moreover, the condemnation of male-male “sodomitical” sex existed in an uneasy overlay with high praise for male-male friendships. 5 The anxiety about sexuality in Othello may be understood within this framework. Just as marriage is a public, social institution that within the early modern period increasingly depended on the idea of the private affection of husband and wife, so, as Bray has argued, did the primarily male public institutions of Renaissance England function through personal alliances of affection. As Bray argues, “friend” (or “lover”) was a term that in the Renaissance included and frequently overlayed political and affective alliance: to be a powerful man’s “bedfellow” was to have a most valuable political access—and honor. 6 The highly praised alliance of friendship was frequently eroticized, yet what kept (or did not keep) the celebrated closeness of friendship from appearing to be the sin of sodomy was not the degree of physical contact, but the appropriateness of the relationship. Just as in marriage desire should follow proper alliance and social status, so too in male friendship. One’s political enemies or men seen as social climbers (Bray’s example is Francis Bacon) could be called sodomites. Sodomy was not a category; it was an accusation. But, as Bray also argues, by the more socially mobile late sixteenth century, almost any political relationship might be vulnerable to this accusation. 7 As the structures of feudal vassalage gave way to bourgeois marriage, so too did the social institutions that most completely legitimated male-male desire. Thus reading Othello within the history provided by...

Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass

Within 12 years of the first appearance of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman produced three other editions. Michael Moon, interpreting more profoundly than earlier Whitman critics have done, while treating the poet's homosexuality as a cultural and political as well as a biographical fact, shows how Whitman's continual modifications of his work intersect with the representations of male-male desire throughout his writing. What is subjected to endless revision throughout the first four edition of Leaves of Grass is a historically specific set of principles governing how the human body was conceptualized and controlled in mid-19th century America.

Epistemology of the Closet (review)

332Philosophy and Literature be a narrator" (p. 81). In his concluding chapter, Bruner shows how the oral, "spontaneous autobiographical narratives" of ordinary people construct selves that are "not isolated nuclei of consciousness locked in the head, but are 'distributed ' interpersonally" (p. 138). Bruner's stress on agency reflects the current resistance, visible in philosophy and literary theory as well, to biological and cultural determinisms that reduce human conduct to the result of forces over which we have no control and for which we have no responsibility. The cultural psychology he proposes would seek to understand acts of meaning as transactions between self and other within a socially defined context. As Bruner acknowledges, such a psychology would be fundamentally interpretive, and thus rejoin the hermeneutic enterprise of the human sciences in general. University of OregonSteven Kendall Epistemology ofthe Chset, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; 258 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, $24.95. Gay men have long presented a problem for feminism, a certain strain of which has followed Luce Irigaray in denouncing that "hom(m)o-sexual monopoly ," "reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, . . . played out through the bodies of women." Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Between Men (1985), provided a theoretical grounding for the intuitive feeling that the male desire for men found in a gay male couple in Manhattan was significandy different from the masculinist trade in women displayed by Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms. She distinguished between male homosociality, which worked very much as Irigaray says, and male homosexuality, which violated the rules of homosociality by allowing the objectification of men. Not only was Between Men vitally important in forging an alliance between feminists and gay men, it quickly became a central document in the 1980s explosion of a gay studies informed by feminism. Now, in Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick continues her investigation: "Is men's desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent of the threats against them?" She compares a "minoritizing" view of"real" homosexuals and a "universalizing" assumption ofa homosocial society. Her analysis, which is deconstructive without theoretical discussions of deconstruction, shows that each of these categories both contains and conflates with its opposite. A whole range of deconstructible binarisms follow: as might be expected of dichotomies about such important Reviews333 topics as sex and power relations between the genders, these binarisms prove to ground much modern thinking. Her analysis debunks a number of myths about homosexuality and provides the prospect of escaping a number of impasses in gay theory, such as the debate between essentialists and constructivists. Sedgwick begins her literary analysis with two works written in 1891, at the time when medical and legal notions of "homosexuality" were crystallizing: Melville's Billy Budd and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Billy Budd, she neatly oudines the differences between the "real" homosexual in the text, John Claggart, and the homosociality best incorporated by Claggart's double, Captain Vere. Her reading of Wilde, almost outshone by the many fascinating aperçues of male-male desire in Nietzsche which fill out the chapter, brilliantly breaks down a number of clichéd dichotomies. Sedgwick then moves on to James's tale, "Beast in the Jungle," which shows, among other things, the destructive effects which the closeting of homosexuality can have on women. And finally, Sedgwick's inquiries into Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu apdy conclude her book by demonstrating once again the importance of the "open secret" of the closet, that much discussed, analyzed, condemned, and medicinalized space for the "love that dare not speak its name," to modern politics, philosophy, religion, and society. The observation that one-sentence summaries cannot do justice to chapterlength readings of literary works is particularly true of the chapters in Epistemology oftL· Closet, because Sedgwick writes much more personally and expansively in this study than in Between Men. This subjective style with its personal opinions and anecdotes is presumably part of her project, an attempt to break out of an academic discourse which has long refused to discuss the oppressive systems grounding it. Readers who still hanker for expository prose without digressions...

Masculine desire: the sexual politics of Victorian aestheticism

Beginning with Tennyson's In Memoriam and continuing by way of Hopkins and Swinburne to the novels of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, Richard Dellamora draws on journals, letters, censored texts, and pornography to examine the cultural construction of masculinity in Victorian literature. Central to the struggle over the meaning of masculine desire was the institutional politics of Oxford University, where Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were principal players. As a young man in the 1860s, Pater, the art historian, essayist, and novelist, theorized a place for desire between men in cultural formation and critique. Later, in a climate of growing intolerance, he continued to affirm male-male desire but with increasing attention to the social functions of homophobia. Dellamora shows that discontent with conventional gender roles animated efforts to reimagine the possibilities of masculine existence. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.