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felis_ultharusSo, I've set myself an impossible task for the essay I'm writing. I have to prove that Renaissance isn't as queer as people like to think.
Ever since Foucault's History of Sexuality, people in literary studies (and even some people in the real world) have been turning the Renaissance into some kind ambisexual utopia where everyone was bi and limited only by their imaginations.
That may have been life onstage, in Shakespeare's theatre among others, and for a few nobles and their favourites who were protected from prosecution. But the reality is that the Renaissance was the probably the most brutal period in Western history for the homosexually-inclined.
The Middle Ages only started killing men for having sex with men very late (about the 13th century), and this massively increased with the Early Modern Era. It was only the Enlightenment that gradually put an end the executions. In between -- the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Reason -- is one of the bleakest eras of queer history. The statistics historians have begun to gather about what he'd now call homophobic violence in the period are frightening.
Ganymede triumphed onstage, and in the court. He lost at the gallows and in the streets.
And I have about two pages to convince my professor that everything he's read on the subject by Ivory-Tower academics is wrong, so I can go on with my analysis of the texts themselves. A limit of ten pages is an unnecessary straitjacket.
Ever since Foucault's History of Sexuality, people in literary studies (and even some people in the real world) have been turning the Renaissance into some kind ambisexual utopia where everyone was bi and limited only by their imaginations.
That may have been life onstage, in Shakespeare's theatre among others, and for a few nobles and their favourites who were protected from prosecution. But the reality is that the Renaissance was the probably the most brutal period in Western history for the homosexually-inclined.
The Middle Ages only started killing men for having sex with men very late (about the 13th century), and this massively increased with the Early Modern Era. It was only the Enlightenment that gradually put an end the executions. In between -- the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Reason -- is one of the bleakest eras of queer history. The statistics historians have begun to gather about what he'd now call homophobic violence in the period are frightening.
Ganymede triumphed onstage, and in the court. He lost at the gallows and in the streets.
And I have about two pages to convince my professor that everything he's read on the subject by Ivory-Tower academics is wrong, so I can go on with my analysis of the texts themselves. A limit of ten pages is an unnecessary straitjacket.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 12:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-18 11:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-11 05:30 am (UTC)Good luck! Especially if your teachers are as open as mine about new and different opinions.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-18 11:40 am (UTC)It would be like deciding Japan was a happy, perfect place for gay men because of all the shounen ai.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-18 11:40 am (UTC)