Queering Early Modern Ireland
This essay reconsiders sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland by queering not only ostensibly heteronormative texts and practices, but social structures writ large. I first outline the intensely homosocial and even homoerotic nature of the bardic institution (including typical poet-patron exchanges and representations as well as the dánta grá or courtly love poetry), employing Sedgwick's concept of ‘male homosocial desire’ so as to situate the bardic response to the challenge of early modern colonial authority. I argue that colonialism queers pre-existing male homosocial bonds, prompting a set of powerful, foundational responses that live on in the Irish imaginary, including, on the one hand, powerful ideological consolidations of domestic homosocial bonds and, on the other, obsessively recording of the perversity of colonial power and acculturation, as well as of an Irish manhood troubled and reconfigured in its wake.