I am so friggin’ confused about the reading right now. I’m not sure what is due tomorrow but I read “The Sodomitic Moor” and “Chaste Subjects.” Hopefully they were the right choices. If not, meh. I’m going to read Eneas tomorrow morning since my eyes are starting to cross again.
To begin with, “TSM” made Spain sound like one of those angry kids in highschool who beat up all of the gay kids because he himself was gay. The two cultures seemed to get along for a while until Spain freaked out about its cultural instability. I love that it is the homosexual’s fault for all of Spain’s problems. But the real ringer was the idea that homosexuality was a “Virus Oriental” and therefore curable. Now where have we heard that before?
What strikes me as odd is the fact that some Arabs were just as disgusted with the idea of same-sex intimacy as the Spanish Christians. However it seems that the Sodomitic Moore became too strong of a bad guy. It was the potent signifer of cultural, sexual, and racial diference that the two cultures recognized.
There is also the idea of the Moors being too indulgent (Moor+heaven=tons of food) so they become homosexual pagans. I’m still a little muddled as to how the image of the gay Moor came to be but from the reading I have gathered that it was mainly the evils of propaganda that forever soiled their image. There was a deliberate confustion of cultural and sexual differences in Sodomy. My favorite line from this work is that the image of the Sodmitic Moors was a “by-product of the forgoing sexual, cultural, and gender difference into a servicable discourse by which the Christians might expose the “enemy within.” I thnk that pretty much means point and gasp at the homosexuals and they’re bound to give in.
Now onto “Chaste Subjects” which I think was a stretch and a half on the author’s part. It was like she was looking at a poem about flowers and analyzing its affect on the price of oil. I mean, come on. Yes, a chaste knight is odd. And yes, the devil did dress up as beautiful woment to try and seduce the pious young knights. But to insinuate a homosexual undertone and quesitoning of sexuality was a bit much.
I am totally on board with the oddness of having Chaste knights. It defeats the whole purpose. A knight goes for adventure to get sex from the greatful dame later on. To not accept the sex disrupts the cycle in which chivalrich prowess is rewarded. Sex is a reward for the exploits and battles are a way to prove chivalric prowess. to overcome the temptations of flesh demonstrates the defining relationhip of gender and desire. These ideas make sense. I can see them in my head and they connect quite well.
But then suddenly, the author pulls this ide out of her hat that the shifting, uncertain gender of the devil is an object of deire for the poor knight. At one point she states that the knights establish that fighting is with men, sex is with women. But then she does this whole analysis about the devil chanign sexes and how that maesses with gender roles and yadda yadda yadda, something about using the figure of women to verbalize the concerns of the church and I’m scratching my head. She may not come out and say it but I felt that she was hinting to the confusions of sexuality with this devil and the relationship the knight feels toward it. I think that was just a bit much. These men deire to not deisre. That’s that.