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  • Dante Spinning Forward
  • Gary Cestaro

medieval queer

"The world only spins forward." This is a line from a great modern classic, a new member of the canon and a play dear to my heart, Tony Kushner's Angels in America. It comes as close as anything to a thematic statement of the whole and moral of the story. Though seriously and even obsessively engaged with the past, Kushner's 1991 play—the expression of a queer, post-modern medievalism—insists on the future. I'm tempted to adopt Kushner's adage as my own here to characterize my contribution to this conversation about Dante, pedagogy, and ideology. I have for years been steadily engaged as teacher and scholar in two fields, Dante Studies and LGBTQ Studies, sometimes as distinct entities but often, too, as they intersect—or collide. An enterprise that no doubt strikes some as inherently contradictory.

I'm currently at work on a book, long in the making, called Dante's Queer Genealogies, which claims that the poet's interactions with non-normative modes of gender and sexuality shape the Comedy in fundamental ways. I do this work not out of some personal need to identify with a distant past or any self-inflating quest to bend history to my will. Reading and contemplating Dante's texts sparks my imagination and speaks to my soul much in the same way it does for many of you, I imagine. Of course in Dante we are confronted with a society and psychology significantly different from our own. But I prefer not to see the poem as an artefact so alien that it demands of the modern reader, just for basic appreciation, a wholesale suspension of disbelief [End Page 127] and distorting leap out of current reality. Peter Hawkins's comments in this forum on Charles Singleton are fascinating in this regard. The poem may be in some senses incompatible with modernity, but it seems like a stretch to declare the modern heart, as Singleton does, no longer unquiet. I feel Dante can speak directly to us, while agreeing with Peter that the excitement and pleasure of reading and teaching the poem lie in how we respond to him—in "talking back to the Commedia."

Perhaps I'm just saying that between us and Dante there is disjuncture and continuity. Gender and sexuality are part of Dante's vast universe and provide for me a focus of study, a foothold in that intimidating expanse. We are also living in a moment when long-held assumptions about the stability of gender and desire are under siege in ways that can feel unprecedented. Surely teaching and writing about literature is meant to create a dialogue between past and present, allowing ancient texts we value to speak in the here and now. Partly I'm interested in showing that our current polemics around gender identity and sexuality have a long history, and may not always be as radically novel as most assume. I also want to frame Dante as an important chapter in the history of sexual subjectivity while affirming his relevance for what is surely a queer future.

down with Dante!

In 2012 the Italian human rights NGO Gherush92 called for the elimination of Dante from school curricula with a blast of a headline on their website: "VIA LA DIVINA COMMEDIA DALLE SCUOLE, OVVERO RAZZISMO ISTITUZIONALE MASCHERATO DA ARTE."1 Needless to say, this garnered some reaction and press coverage, including an article in the Guardian by Alison Flood, "Divine Comedy is 'offensive and discriminatory,' says Italian NGO."2 The charges will come as no surprise to students of Dante: racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia. Gherush92 focuses on the poem's propagation of anti-Semitic stereotypes—Jews as killers of Christ, justly revenged in the destruction of the Second Temple—and points to portraits of Judas in Satan's mouth (Inf. 34), Caiaphas crucified (Inf. 23), and the picture of Christians being scorned by Jews in Par. 5 (though, interestingly, no mention of Par. 7), for them part of the same tradition that will give [End Page 128] us the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Russian pogroms, and Italy's 1938 racial laws...

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