queer masculinities

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Searching in the Dark: Towards a
Historiography of Queer Early
Modern and Enlightenment
(Anglo) Ireland
Chris Mounsey
Searching for what?
I believe and hope that I was asked to write this essay reviewing the
study of male–male relationships in the Early Modern and
Enlightenment (Anglo) Ireland because of my delight in finding
rapprochements and syntheses between apparently opposing views. The
syntheses of which I speak, that have in the past been between philosophy
and literature, between literary theory and textual scholarship, do
not follow any predetermined (say, Marxian) pattern. They are sometimes
rather ragged and ungainly, but always, I hope, challenging and
stimulating. Such syntheses are best characterized by William Blake’s
ideas from Milton and Jerusalem: that it is self-defeating to try to progress
by excluding or negating past beliefs. Blake argues that should you move
forward by stating ‘that old idea was wrong’ but ‘this new idea is right’,
you miss out on the dynamic forces that fire progress. Moving forward
by negation, Blake argues, is the progress of normatizing discourse. 1 To
the present case, it is anathema to queer discourse, which seeks to
accommodate all variant forms, modes, approaches and techniques.
Herein lies, of course, a foundational opposition, a point at which
my argument may be deconstructed before it begins. Queer does not
want normatizing discourse. Queer rejects normatizing discourses.
Queer progresses by opposing normatizing discourse. But I draw your
attention to the paradox (rather than try to pretend it does not exist)
since it is queer par excellence to found queerness on a paradox rather
than upon a solidly logical structure. For within the paradox lies the
kernel of truth (or its foundational myth, or whatever you want to call
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