Masculinities, History and Cultural Space: Queer Emancipative Thought in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys
Journal Title: Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture - Year 2018, Vol 8, Issue 8
Abstract
At Swim, Two Boys, a 2001 novel by Jamie O’Neill, tells a story of gay teen romance in the wake of the Easter Rising. This paper considers the ways in which the characters engage in patterns of masculine behaviour in a context that excludes queer men, and the rhetorical effect of transgressive strategies to form a coherent identity. These patterns include involvement with the masculine and heteronormative nationalist movement, as well as a regime of physical exercise, and a religious upbringing in 20th-century Ireland. The strategies of broadening the practices of masculinity include their renegotiation and redefinition, as well as attempts to (re)construct the Irish and the gay canons of history and literature. These strategies, as exemplified by character development, become a rhetorical basis for the novel’s main argument for inclusiveness. This analysis deals with the central metaphors of space and continuity in the novel in the light of a struggle between identities. It also observes the tradition of parallels drawn between the emasculated position of the gay man and the Irish man at the beginning of the 20th century, and O’Neill’s rhetorical deployment of the shared telos in construction of a coherent gay Irish revolutionary identity.
Authors and Affiliations
Jarosław Milewski
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP417462
- DOI 10.1515/texmat-2018-0004
- Views 76
- Downloads 0
Timothy Findley, His Biographers, and The Piano Man’s Daughter
In this paper, Sherrill Grace, Findley’s biographer, will examine her biographical practices in the context of Findley’s own memoir, Inside Memory, and his interest in creating fictional auto/biographers and auto/biograp...
Blindness in the Beckettland of Malfunctioning
Many of Beckett characters suffer from different kinds of disabilities and impairments, this being one of the ways of punishing them for “the eternal sin of having been born.” The article discusses blindness in Waiting f...
The Conflicting Traditions of Portraying the Jewish People in the Chester Mystery Cycle
The article seeks to analyze the portrayal of the Jews in two plays from the Chester mystery cycle: “Trial and Flagellation” and “The Passion.” The analysis acknowledges that the cycle is a mixture of, and a dialogue bet...
The Catch of the Hyperreal: Yossarian and the Ideological Vicissitudes of Hyperreality
Hyperreality is a key term in Jean Baudrillard’s cultural theory, designating a phase in the development of image where it “masks the absence of a profound reality.” The ambiance of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) closel...
Negotiating Reality: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock, or “A Vaudeville Nightmare”
In the course of a career that spans half a century, from the Vietnam era to the America of Barack Obama, Sam Shepard has often been labelled as a “quintessentially American” playwright. According to Leslie Wade, “[d]raw...