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Chapter 12 - Homosocial Desire in the War of Troy

Between (Wo)men

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2018

By
Stavroula Constantinou
Edited by
Adam J. Goldwyn  and
Ingela Nilsson
Adam J. Goldwyn
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
Ingela Nilsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

In this chapter, the concept of homosociality, as developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her pioneering work Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), is employed in order to provide a reading of the anonymous War of Troy (fourteenth century), which celebrates male ethics and ideologies. The War of Troy is the masculine romance par excellence of the Palaiologan period; thus, it can fully understood only if its male worlds are taken into consideration. Sedgwick’s concept proves particularly useful here, since it refers to “social bonds between persons of the same sex”, and is applied to such activities as “male bonding”, which may be characterized, by “intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality”. In addition, male bonding in the War of Troy reveals an ideology about men’s superiority to women, though it remains an open question whether these ideologies are imported from the Old French source or are somehow authentically Byzantine in their origin. In examining the homosocial communities of the War of Troy and their characteristics, this paper will show the key character of homosocial politics and desire both in shaping the text’s plot and comprehending its poetics.
Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the Late Byzantine Romance
A Handbook
 , pp. 254 - 271
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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