Homosociality, Homoeros, and Homosexual Panic in Irish Literature

Abstract Book of the 4th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in the 21st Century

Year: 2025

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Homosociality, Homoeros, and Homosexual Panic in Irish Literature

Michael Lapointe

ABSTRACT:

My paper examines the homosocial and homoerotic desires configuring the Easter Rising of 1916 in Jamie O’Neill’s novel At Swim, Two Boys. The novel charts the overlapping psychosexual and political development of its young heroes, Jim and Doyler. The crucial importance of fellowship as articulated by the character Scrotes–“[f]riendship tending to love may tend to desire” (265)–insinuates a productive confusion of sexual and national categories of identity. Drawing upon the work of queer theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, I argue that the Irish representation of homoeros is not only a submerged counter-tradition within Irish writing of which O’Neill is a part, but also an integral part in the constitution of modern nationalist identity. Specifically, homosociality and homoeroticism have affected the nature of Irish literary and cultural nationalisms insofar as homosocial desire resides in the heart of nationalisms’ ideology and symbolism, and in its sacrificial interpellation of the homosexual figure.
O’Neill’s novel queers Irish nationalist mythology and excoriates the hypocrisy surrounding homoeros within Irish social conventions and silences. Breaking with earlier texts that explore masculinist national identity such as those by Edward Martyn, James Joyce, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, and Frank McGuinness, At Swim, Two Boys does not veil nor distort the male object of homosocial desire, but rather, it specifies that the object is not only presumably coded as male but, in this instance, marked by homosexual desire as well. O’Neill demonstrates that one of the foundational sources for configurations of Irish nationalism is a conflicted homosociality with its purchase on sacrificial violence, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, but through the novel’s trio of sympathetic gay men, a counter-narrative of the possibility of freedom and of male-male love resonates. O’Neill injects his mournful revision of Easter 1916 into Irish cultural discourse, presenting his country a glimpse of his alternative Utopia’s “patterns of the possible” (607) within the representation of varieties of Irishness and exposing the stunning contradictions and evasions inherent within Ireland’s “constitutional” identity.
O’Neill, Jamie. At Swim, Two Boys. London: Scribner, 2001.

Keywords: Irish, Literature, Queer, Homosociality, Homophobia, Nationalism, Identity