The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama by Mario DiGangi

CITATION: DiGangi, Mario. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What does queer theory tell us about the subversive effects of early modern dramatic homoeroticism?
• Answer: When understood without the moralizing term "sodomy," homoeroticism can be understood "within other economies of difference... [such as] masculinity, militarism, reproductive sexuality, colonialism, and race" (160).
• Method: DiGangi reads for clues of homoerotic subversion among masculine authority figures in (mostly) non-Shakespearean Ovidian comedies, satires, tragedies, and tragicomedies (those figures being the father, the master, the king, and the general, respectively).
• Assumptions: First, DiGangi responds to the tradition of addressing homoeroticism in terms of "sodomy," a term with implicit claims to moral order. Second, DiGangi reacts to Shakespearean over-represention in this scholarly field. Third, DiGangi ultimately relates representations of homoeroticism to overarching statements about symbolic economies.
• Sententiae: "Before the emergence of male-male sexuality as an identifiable practice or condition of deviation from 'normal' gender identities, object choices, or sexual roles--and the concomitant naming of those deviant people and practices--homoerotic practices were 'normal' aspects of even the most socially conventional relationships." (1-2)
  "... I find it necessary more fully to demonstrate several points: the pervasiveness of nonsodomitical or nonsubversive homoerotic relations in early modern England; the diversity of homoerotic relations as they are represented in a range of literary and nonliterary texts; the implication of homoerotic relations within social, economic, and ideological power structures. To my mind, the studies I have summarized exhibit three tendencies - in different degrees and combinations - which have prevented the above goals from being more fully realized: (1) an emphasis on sodomy, as opposed to a detailed textual analysis of homoeroticism [;] (2) a reliance on psychoanalytic and deconstructive, as opposed to more rigorously materialist, methods [;] (3) a focus on largely familiar texts, especially by Shakespeare, as opposed to less author-centered and more generically diverse consideration of cultural patterns." (9)
  "Similarly, the Renaissance category of sodomy derived its stigmatizing power from threateningly exotic significations: the sodomite was devil, heretic, New World savage, cannibal, Turk, African, papist, Italian--these categories overlap--or a beastly defiler of boys, whores, and goats." (13)
  "No more intrinsically orderly or disorderly than heteroerotic relations, homoerotic relations could sustain one ideology (the master-servant hierarchy) while challenging another (companionate marriage). The point, then, is to identify as precisely as possible the social and ideological contexts in which different kinds of erotic practice accrued meaning." (19)
  "The display of male bodies on the Renaissance stage, if sometimes sensationalistic, is often undeniably sensual. We ignore the homoerotic sensuality of the drama at the cost of misjudging  the centrality of homoeroticism to the ideological and social practices of early modern England." (28)

Overstanding

• Assessment: DiGangi has written a subtle, acute description of early modern homoerotics, indulging neither in revisionism nor psychologism. The method by which DiGangi ultimately hopes to relate homoeroticism with other symbolic economies may unnecessarily reduce his readings.
• Synthesis: The obvious connection is to The Idolatrous Eye: the means by which drama negotiate image and text implicate the audience. For O'Connell, incarnation subjects power to the audience; for DiGangi, performance presents eroticism to the audience.
• Application: DiGangi's interest in symbolic economies may be turned, in an autocritical move, back to the material history of early modern England. Specifically, book history can provide information about  how material systems of difference implicated homoerotics. How did books printed in economies of "masculinity, militarism, reproductive sexuality, colonialism, and race" represent homoeroticism?

(NB: Written with reviews)
Hammond, Paul. "The Homoerotics Of Early Modern Drama (Book Review)." Seventeenth Century 14.2 (1999): 172. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Jan. 2013
Ian MacInnes. "Book Reviews - the Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama." Shakespeare Quarterly. 50.3 (1999): 399. Print.