Burns' "Courtly Love: Who Needs It?"

In E. Jane Burns' article "Courtly Love: Who Needs It?," (Signs: Autumn 2001) she traces the development of feminist scholarship as it engages with the institution of "courtly love" as it appears in medieval literature, especially the romance narratives. She begins by pointing out the surprising but striking parallels between the expectations of women within the framework of courtly love and the contemporary book The Rules. The Rules sets out to provide a guide for women to land a husband by instructing them on how to appear more attractive and desirable through their behavior. They are supposed to be subservient, submissive, passive, avoid conflict, and should always let the man have his way, basically. The book points out that although this may seem disempowering or even offensive to women, this strategy will actually prove quite effective, especially when paired with the simultaneous strategy of appearing aloof and disinterested. The result, then, will be that the man will find himself entranced and full of desire and ultimately, will promise to serve and protect the girl.

This appears to be the very same dynamic in courtly love as it functions in medieval fiction. Feudal Europe being an intensely patriarchal society, women were allowed little power or agency and were generally expected to submit to the men in their lives. However, in the workings of courtly love, this gendered expectation appears to be inverted. The knight pledges his loyalty to the lady and in return she provides him with an object to desire, a source of inspiration, and of course, affection. Burns points out that while the lady appears to have nominal power over her lover, it was merely meant to be read as symbolic or metaphorical.

Burns' point is that there are roughly two different kinds of courtly love that emerge when one looks at the romance texts: a traditional one in which the man is enhanced through inspiration or social standing through a love affair with a lady, and a second in which basic roles, identities, expectations, traditions, and conventions are challenged, stretched, satirized, or outright subverted.

She ultimately argues that courtly love is not an inherently oppressive institution, but rather has a long history, stemming from the Middle Ages, of actually offering the chance to sidestep heteronormativity and offer room for ambiguity and suspension of the norms. She criticizes the feminist scholarship of the 80's and 90's, and Lacanian psychoanalytic work as well in how it treats romance, for taking the emphasis off of the women in the texts. For example, many feminists were quick to point out that Eve Sedgwick's "Between Men" theory of male homosocial bonding easily applies to the love affairs of the medieval romances, in which men egage in heterosexual marriages and love affairs merely to negotiate connections with other men and improve their own social standing. Thus, what this amounts to for Burns is a look at what is going on between men, ignoring any possible agency or power that women could find within that triangulation. Similarly, psychoanalysis "removes" the woman from the equation as well by rendering her an absent, "lacking other," who simply provides the excuse and the superficial inspiration to compose love poetry and songs.

What I found most interesting about this article is how I can now read medieval romances looking at the behavior of women within their sociopolitical circumstances to see how they both conform to the expectations feudal society places on them AND how simultaneously, they find the space to resist and trouble those same conventions.

I also want to take a look at David Lorenzo Boyd's "Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacements: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," which was cited by Burns.

Divertissement in Ballet and Medieval Romance

The Shades from the Australian Ballet's production of La Bayadere

When I was watching "Dancer's Dream: La Bayadere," a documentary on the restaging of the ballet choreographed by Rudolph Nureyev, yesterday I tried to find more similarities between medieval romance literature and classical ballet. I'm going to start by talking about what I noticed about ballet itself and then come back to the connections to romance.

First of all, I noticed, listening to the dancers tak about their jobs portraying certain roles and emotions onstage, that the plot, or narrative itself, is really of secondary--if that!--importance to the audience. Much like opera, or even classic movies, audiences do not go to ballets to "find out what happens" or to watch some suspenseful action-packed story. Almost always, the audience is very familiar with the narrative and, in case they're not, a synopsis is printed in the program. Why do people attend these, then? What is offered by these performances? The answer, of course, is the very reason that the arts are referred to as the "humanities." That is, the audience wants some glimpse into the reality of human existence, to be brought to feeling by the artform itself. Even if the narrative is shoddily constructed or has elments of utter fantasy, or the narrative takes place in radically foreign settings, the expectation is that the emotions portrayed, explored, and interpreted by the performance is something that will be deeply enjoyed by the audience.

Love, anger, jealousy, betrayal, ambition, greed, confusion, and distress are some of these emotions recurring throughout high artistic performances and audiences eat them right up. Thus, in the case of La Bayadere, no one attends the ballet to learn about what life was like for temple dancers and rajahs in "legendary India," or to attain a better grasp on some true story. They go because the fantastic plot elements merely provide an excuse for the artists to meditate on human emotion. I would argue, as well, that such meditations happen outside of the movement of the narrative. Turning back to La Bayadere, even though it can be characterized as a "pantomime ballet," relying heavily on physical acting to illustrate the plot, it is the moments when the action is interrupted, when the narrative is suspended, so that a particular feeling or mood can be adequately and artistically developed. These are the moments that are the most famous in the ballet--the images everyone remembers, like when the corps de ballet, representing the "Shades," or ghosts of the dead temple dancers, descends from the Himalayan mountain tops in a slow progression where one dancer at a time adds on to the line and dozens of arabesque penchees are performed one at a time, but completely in unison. The sadness and beauty create a haunting effect, leaving the audience in awe. I remember when I saw the ballet performed live, this was the moment when the elderly woman behind whispered, "It's SO beautiful!" The scene itself contributes nothing to the plot; it is a break in the action. However, the surreal feeling of the effect is indispensible to the ballet's impact on those watching it.

Operas work very much the same way. For example, the famed "Va Pensiero" chorus performed by the Hebrew slaves in Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco is a moment when nothing is furthered, no action occurs, but the dramatic effect is essential in deveoping the theme of sadness and abject hope. The chorus is, without a doubt, the most memorable and haunting scene from the opera, and during Verdi's funeral procession, the crowd on the street broke out into singing it.

Arias in operas function the exact same way--there is a pause in the unfolding of the action to allow for a moment of artistic accomplishment for a variety of purposes: to develop a certain emotional effect, to further characterize an individual character, to get inside a character's mind and emotions, to show off the technical skill of the performer, and so the composer can spread their creative wings. Solos in ballets accomplish these very same things, all without strengthening the plot. Therefore, what I'd like to conclude is that plot narratives in these high artforms are mere excuses to create these moments which are the truly important and remarkable artistic creations. They are reason that the operas and ballets exist in the first place. A plot must simply exist so as to excuse these by placing them into a necessary but somewhat arbitrary context.

The second act of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker is the perfect example. Clara, having been received at the Court in the Clouds and celebrated as the temporary queen, is treated to a series of entertaining dances. None of the dances further the plot in any way and most of the act shows Clara meerly sitting there, enjoying the pieces. The Spanish, Chinese, and Arabian dances, and even the well-known Waltz of the Flowers (all very beautiful and rife for critical interpretation) are so disparate and disconnected from the overall themes and narrative of this children's Christmas ballet that they can only be excused by virtue of the context provided by a very weak plot justification: that she is simply sitting there watching these dances. These dances, called "divertissements," the French word for "entertainments," are actually much more critically telling than the plot narrative itself. No one could assume that this children's story about a young girl being given a Nutcracker for Christmas could actually carry the incredibly overt Orientalist and imperialist themes that are developed in these barely contextualized divertissements.

What I mean to say here is that for the project of a critical theorist, the plot itself provides no fertile ground for analysis, however, by looking at these moments when the narrative ceases--which I argue are the much much more important spaces within the arts--the true artistic and sociopolitical purposes of the piece are made manifest. It is because these are the spaces deeply important to an valued by the artists involved, that they become the more essential points of departure for critical engagement. Critics and theorists should begin here.

I also mean to suggest that medieval romances are filled with moments of divertissement. Where the plot ceases, the composer is given the space to flex their artistic muscle, to create moods, effects, character developments, and other important literary achievements. Assuming this, it is what we read in those moments of plot suspension that--by virtue of the fact that it was the composer's more prized work--that we can find the most interesting values embedded in the text. It is here, in these divertissement/entertainments that we can find most important work a piece of literature does.

For example, descriptions of physical beauty, fetishized commodities, exotic locations, and of course, the feelings of lovers, all take up huge numbers of lines in romances where the plot is not furthered. However, these are the spots where the composer is forced to rely upon his or her most sophisticated poetic artistry and where he or she invests most of their creative energies. Also, since composers were very conscious of their audience's expectations, we can assume that the audiences adored these sections of entertaining plot suspension. Thus, because of both the composer's and audience's investments in these moments, they are going to be the most telling about the contexts from which the romances emerged. I'm challenging romance critics to emphasize these moments in their engagements and to rely less on mere plot elements to draw out their analyses.

While I'm not trying to make any radical claims about the connections between romance divertissement and operatic and balletic divertissement, I am pointing out that by beginning with later works of art--operas and ballets--we can use some of the artistic conventions apparent in these to inform and educate our readings of earlier, literary artforms. Rather than looking at timeless and recycled narratives as important indices of cultural conditions, we should direct our inquiries at the more vital and interludes and detours within the narratives, as they are going to be from where we can draw our most interesting conclusions.

Comrade-love in Medieval Romance

Some papers I've written recently in my courses have dealt with the category of comrade-love in the medieval context, specifically within romance literature. I'd like to deal with this category a little more and try to understand it both within its context of origination and original reception, but also what it might mean for and how it might influence other contexts, especially our own.

First, the twelfth century French romance (though probably composed in England, which was a very Francophone and Francophile culture at the time, especially among the powerful elites) called the Roman d'Enéas is a medieval adaptation of the narrative of Virgil's Aeneid for a new context and suited for the emerging genre of romance. It follows the Latin Aeneid closely, but also deviates significantly from Virgil's text, especially where it needs to do so in order to conform to the new standards of romance. The love story, for instance, is expanded drastically. Its important to say as well that Enéas epitomizes the genre of romance, exemplifying most of the genre's expected characteristics. Thus, even though it is an adaptation of classical material, the Enéas is, by intention, distinctly medieval.

One of the conventions that, although present in the Latin Aeneid, is very obviously included in the medieval French adaptation with no apparent anxiety, commentary, or explanation is the depictons of same-sex desire. My assumption is that if the medieval courtly audience would have experienced anxiety or tension or could possibly have misinterpreted these depictions, the composer of Enéas would have either redacted these portions of the narrative, or somehow used the narration to address these possible issues. Rather, the depictions are shamelessly included and vividly articulated in the poem.

One such instance is the episode of Nisus and Euryalus. Let me quote here from the Yunck prose translation (John A Yunck, transl., Enéas: A Twelfth Century French Romance, New York: Columbia University Press, 1974):

At the gate Eneas had placed as guard a knight named Nisus; he valued no man more. Nisus was very brave and had complete charge of the castle. This knight had a companion named Euryalus; they loved one another with such a love that they could have none greater. There was never a truer love than that between them, as long as they lived. Neither of them knew anything, or had any joy or desire, without the other. (152-3)

This passage needs little in the way of interpretation. "They loved one another with such a love that they could have none greater," implies that not even heteronormative love could compare with the love that existed between the two young knights. Also, we read that since, "never a truer love," could have existed for either one of them, then the narrator of the poem indicates that this brand of comrade-love is one of the truest possible. Even more interestingly, in the last sentence of the passage I quoted, we see that neither had any joy or desire without the other. Even in the Middle Ages (and even in the Old French original), this could very easily have been interpreted the same way that we interpret it now: they experienced EVERY joy and desire together.

The rhetoric of comrade-love is downright identical to that of heteronormative desire in other romance narratives, including narratives within the same poem, when we examine the language the two knights use to speak to each other:

When Euryalus listened and heard that Nisus wished to do such brave deeds, he was most happy and joyful over it, but he was desirous of going with him, and said, "I will not remain here, and you will not go about this business alone. How will I remain without you, or how will you go without me? For are you not I, and am I not you? I think you have lost your senses: we are one soul and one body, and one-half will go outside; how can the one remain without the other? From now on I can complain about you that you deceive me, and do not hold any love or true companionship with me. You will not go against the army without me, nor will I remain behind without you." (153)

In addition to the standard--and heteronormative--trope of one lover being unable to be separated from the other, we also see the possibly Platonic rhetoric of destined soul-mates, sharing one body and one soul. We also see a gesture, quite very queer to modern readers, of one male combatant questioning the love of his comrade for not taking him with him on his daring and risky plot to slay enemy knights. Very clearly, then, it is love for his comrade that propels Nisus to brave acts, not the quest for glory or to impress and observing beloved maiden.

During their plight, the enemy knights capture Euryalus, but Nisus is able to escape. The ensuing lover's grief that he experiences is yet another trope borrowed unapologetically and comfortably from the heternormative rhetoric of desire characteristic of romance narratives:

Nisus was so far from them that he would never have been captured. Then he remembered his companion, stopped, and looked around: he did not hear him or see him. His sorrow was not small but very great. He sighed bitterly, beat himself with his fists, and tore his hair.
"Alas, wretch, what will I do now about my friend, whom I have lost? I have kept very bad faith with him, since he is caputred or dead without me; like a coward I abandoned him. I feared death too much, and fled; but I thought he would follow me, and did not see what he was doing. Most certainly I should hae remained. I would not have felt too much cause to lament if I had died and he had lived. Euryalus, sweet friend, for love of you I will lose my life: I will never live longer than you. Ill-fated was your youth! I have given you my affection, and have lost you very quickly. Now I think I am delaying too long, for my soul is not joined with yours, which is suffering; it will be there quickly. But I think in good truth that my friend is not yet dead. I feel my heart and it is wholly alive. If he had felt the mortal pangs, my heart would likewise have felt them. It may well be that they have captured him, but they have surely not killed him. They woud never do such cruelty as to lay hand on him with evil intent. Who would touch such a creature? Ah, wretch, what an evil turn that I have escaped their hands, as if he has suffered while I am well! I will return to where I was when I parted from him. If I do not find him I will value my life little. If there is no one else who will kill me, I know well that I will kill myself. I will outlive him only a little." (157)

Once again, we see the references to being of one sould of one body, for Nisus expects that he would feel the same "pangs" of death, should Euryalus' heart cease to beat. Additionally, though, we see the rhetoric of the suicidal impulse at the prospect of having lost one's lover. This is an especially powerful sentiment since it occurs in this poem, the same one that depicts the suicide of Queen Dido, who "died for love," killing herself when Enéas departs Carthage for Italy earlier in the romance. The fact that such similar language is used suggests that the emotions between Nisus and Euryalus are meant to be interpreted as parallel, if not identical, to the heteronormative romantic love between Dido and Enéas.

When Nisus comes upon Euryalus and discovers that he is about to be killed by his captors, he pleads for his friends life:

"Whoever would touch him has a very hard heart; whoever wishes to kill him has never loved; whoever would touch such a creature has no care for true love. I will offer my head for his: if I die for him it will be most agreeable to me." (158)

Nisus' plea does little good, for the captors decapitate Euryalus in front of him, and in his pained grief, Nisus is prompted to seek vegeance for his lost friend, but is killed in the attempt.

In general, this episode from the romance shows the rather typical way in which composers of romance use the same language they use to depict heteronormative love and desire to depict same-sex comrade love, but with some basic rules: the men are always of equal status, both are privileged and elite (knights), and their love works to inspire them to acts of bravery and militaristic excellence.

My questions at this point are: Why is this kind of "queer" love tolerated or even encouraged within this genre? Why does there seem to be no anxiety or tension surronding it? What changed from the feudal context to establish codes of masculinity in which this kind of male-male affection would seem bizarre? And last, in a historical context that demonizes sodomitical behavior, how do these elite and popular poems skirt around that possible accusation? My answer to the last is that perhaps the reason has something to do with estate identity and class-based expectations of masculinity.

Medieval Romance and Classical Ballet

Today I'm thinking about the ways in which medieval romance, as a literary genre, is so strikingly similar to the idiom of classical ballet. Additionally, I'm wondering as to how ballet can provide a means, method, and context that could be useful in understanding romance and how it would have been perceived by its intended audience in the Middle Ages. Despite the separation of the advents of these two artforms by several centuries, I believe that one can inform the reading of the other and I'd like to begin my marking their similarities.

First, romance and ballet both emerged from and were patronized by extremely elite audiences and both emerged from and were developed in French or, at the very least, Franco-phone/phile cultures. Perhaps as a result, both bear very strong and overt imperialist impulses by virtue of the fact that they fetishize and romanticize--and Said would say "orientalize" the cultural Other. They also portray very determined and conventional gender roles, specific to courtly contexts. In other words, the privileged and dashin man woos a beautiful, important, and to varying extents, unreachable woman. Perhaps related to the last two points I just mentioned, both provide what could be characterized as escapist fantasy for their elite audiences. As one ballet critic noted, "Even the serfs have jewels in their hair."

My next task is to consider how each artform could possibly inform an interpretation or analysis of the other and then conclude what is revealed about society at large with regard to the specific contexts of each, or even, what they reveal about Western values, gender and class dynamics, and the relationship between art and audience.

Thoughts?

My favorite ballerina, Darci Kistler, performing a révérance.

Performance and Performativity

Today I'm thinking about performance and performance studies: what the performing arts can both reveal about society at large and also how the performing arts not only reflect but shape cultural values and practices. I'm also deeply preoccupied by the question of how the performing arts offer us potentialities of political--that is to say, liberatory, empowering, enfranchising--transformation.

Starting at the most basic level, there is something really powerful about performing--about being on stage, being gazed upon by an anonymous (but only to an extent) audience, and the performer being in a situation that screams "I have something to offer you all en masse, and you all must agree!"

Then, of course, there's the question of the performer as mere entertainer. This particular perspective strips the performer of the power I just described and assigns a very different power, perhaps an economic one, to the audience. In this sense, the performer is seen as a subordinate, an employee, a service professional, who must tend to the needs and desires of the audience--and usually a paying audience. This is the circumstance under which the audience feels entitled to be entertained while they kick back.

Dance, and the other high arts (although I should acknowledge that this is a possibly arbitrary distinction) seem to comfortably belong to the first category. People buy tickets to the symphony, opera, or ballet to temporarily enter a different world--a fantastic world that transcends reality and employs illusions of transcendence from worldly concerns. As they say, "opera is bigger than life," meaning that the exquisite sets and costumes, superhuman singing, and inflated sense of drama go well beyond senses of realism. The audience members themselves don their finest and drench themselves in jewels, both to acknowledge the fantastic sublimity of the performance they expect to see and also to perform themselves--to play a role in the beauty the elite artforms offer.

"Lower" forms of entertainment, ranging from rock concerts to comedy clubs to TV sitcoms, are not inherently meant to challenge or move the audience, or to push them to something beyond their immediate lives (except for Madonna's performances, whose theatricality and intellectual sophistication warrant her a position in the category of the high arts), In fact, most lower artforms tend to be more about the real and real-life experiences, even drawing humor from the mundane.

I believe it is this sense of reality, of the performer as a "real" person, that invites the audience to attempt to engage them directly. Laughter, yelling, and excessive howling and whistling mark the performances of the "lower" arts, not the high ones where reserved applause and the occasional "Bravo" register the audience's appreciation. I would suggest that this particular reservation on the part of the audience stems from, of course social protocol and concerns with decorum, but also out of a marvelous awe of the performers onstage and their temporary inhabitance of the world of fantasy. In other words, the conditions of performance place the performer on a pedestal of admiration and outright worship (don't forget the etymology of the word "diva"!) and place him or her outside of the audience's reach. In the lower arts, the performer must remain withIN the audience's reach to be effective and must relate to them on a fundamental level, appearing
proximate and safe rather than distant, threatening, and intimidating. Lucille Ball, for instance, is responsible for beginning the now longstanding tradition of inviting an audience into the studio for the filming of television sitcoms because she felt she needed the audience's engagement and reactions to draw out her best and funniest performance.

What, then, are the connections between class and fantasy, between reverence and engagement, between appreciation and protocol, artistic achievement and entertainment, sublimity and relation?

Reply to eighteenthcfreak

Thanks for your questions and challenges!

First of all, let me begin by saying that queer medievalists have wrestled with the question of what it actually means to "queer" the Middle Ages, an era that is so fundamentally dissimilar from our own? Or is it? I'm an advocate of the fact that the Middle Ages are radically similar to our historical moment and that so many of the cultural ideas and practices formulated or solidified during the Middle Ages have stayed with us, influencing and informing our own cultural practices. However, I need to also acknowledge that significant--even monumental--cultural artifacts have morphed or mutated between the medieval and contemporary contexts, taking on new meanings, shedding old ones, or being reappropriated by a different context. I see the shift in economic systems of production as one of the most powerful factors affecting how institutions and practices change to accommodate new contexts. However, human inclinations toward tradition and nostalgia
concurrently work against fundamental or radical transformations of such practices. In other words, behaviors and actions tolerated in the medieval feudal economy (especially sexual behaviors and actions) may shift in meaning and interpretatibility to become intolerable or threatening. Therefore, we can look to the Middle Ages and seek to name acts that we find "queer" from our contemporary post-postmodern worldviews, or we as medievalists can alternatively seek to discern and understand acts seen as "queer" within the medieval context. These are the two principal avenues of inquiry.

Implicit homoerotic desire, for instance, tends to be glossed over in medieval romance texts, suggesting that such moments were not the cause of anxiety to medieval audiences. Men expressing love and devotion to each other, sharing a bed, or partaking in other symbolic acts of profound affective emotion seem to be part of normative medieval noble masculinity. In fact, such deep bonds of affection seem to work to enhance militaristic cohesion and inspire impressive acts of military prowess. In sum, they are merely manifestions of homosocial bonding. In the contemporary moment, however, where masculinity has changed in considerable ways, we experiene anxiety or confusion when we, as readers, happen upon these instances of homosocial desire, feeling somehow that such acts must represent more than mere homosocial bonding and wonder as to the possibility of such instances being evidence of homoerotic intimacy. In simplest terms, did these knights just
love each other, or did they LOVE each other?

One could probably make the argument that, although the knights demonstrate affection for each other in ways that would be seen as bizarre or "queer" in the current moment, behaviors have changed such that it is anachronistic to read anything more into it.

The question becomes more complicated if we consider what I referred to as moments of "explicit desire." Wherever same-sex sexual relations are addressed within romance, they are done so with implications of abnormality and sodomy. For instance, I'm thinking of the trope of the "homosexual accusation" in Marie de France's Lanval. The queen, rebuffed by Sir Lanval when she tries to seduce him, resorts to accusing him of "enjoying himself with the stable boys," thus initiating the medieval equivalent of gay panic. There are many other such examples from the genre of romance. We can assume, then, that sodomitical behavior was intolerable, undesirable, and potentially disastrous for one's positionality in terms of sexuality, gender, and class status.

This discussion pushes me to a slightly more sophisticated point, then. That is, that if knights experienced homoerotic affection or desire for each other, it had to be veiled in acceptable terms and any actual acts between them would have to be covert if they happened at all. Certainly, as I have previously said, affection and emotional intimacy could be safely experienced and articulated between knights, as long as it didn't progress to overt acts. This is especially interesting considering that such overt EXPRESSIONS of affection are no longer comfortably tolerated in the current era. Something shifted in the meantime, and I suggest that it was the shfit from feudalism to industrial capitalism, when individuals had to marry for romantic love rather than out of economic necessity. Therefore, homoerotic affection, even if homoerotic acts are out of the picture, is still a dangerous enough threat to heteronormative marriage and must be pushed beyond
the boundaries of normative behavior...and into the realm of the queer.

Now, what to make of this?

The central question that prompted the inquiry that guides this exam is regarding the role of male homoerotic desire in medieval romance. More narrowly, I am seeking to interrogate how, a feudal patriarchal society such as that of medieval France and to a more limited extent in England, that relies so heavily on fixed notions of heteronormative desire and gender roles, allows space in its literary texts to deal with these homoerotic desires.

At this point in my research, I'm finding that medieval romance, while it certainly promotes gender roles and categories of desire that support feudal patriarchal economic values, were probably read "with a grain a salt" by medieval noble readers. In other words, the courts at which the romances circulated understood that the romantic desires and courtships in these poems were hyperbolized and idealized. Real human beings only sought to imitate those courtships in limited ways.

While my initial question was how medieval readers/listeners resolved the seemingly inherent tensions between the heavily heteronormative relationships portrayed in the romances and the virtually ubiquitous moments of homoerotic attraction between men also contained in them, I have come to believe there was, in fact, no such tension for medieval readers. These two apparently contradictory vectors of desire are actually NOT at the expense of each other, but rather reveal a complex and highly specific brand of masculinity unique to men of the privileged estates.

How are these vectors not contradictory? The reason can be discovered by understanding the economic system underlying the cultural values embraced by the feudal aristocrats. In my neglectfully basic summation of the feudal system, wealth consolidation was enforced by an obsession with kinship networks and bloodlines. Heteronormative marriages were required in order for families to not only hold onto their coveted lands and assets, but was also the best means for acquiring more (until this system was eroded and the desire for "more" inspired the colonial gaze---but that's a whole other dissertation!) So, basically, if nobles wanted to remain in their privileged lifestyles, they abided by the rules of arranged and appropriated marriages. Thus, there was no need for romantic desire (or even erotic desire) to bring together spouses and force them to live in heternormative marriages. Finances took care of that. Actually....maybe not much has changed
since then...:)

Therefore, I'm arguing that thinly veiled (but not explicit) homoerotic desire was NOT seen as a threat to marriage or heteronormativity as a system, as it is in the contemporary moment--although with gay marriage increasingly being sanctioned, marriage has managed to only recently neutralize that threat through assimilation by including same-sex couples--and therefore was tolerated. This is not to say, however, that knights could don pink armor or attach fairy wings. Medieval codes of masculinity were strict and rigid. However, what I hope to illustrate is that the degree to which homoerotic desire between men was tolerated is parallel to the extent to which it served the function of enforcing the values and expectations of men's militant and feudal behaviors.

More to come soon...

PLEASE feel free to comment and offer feedback! Anyone who is interested!