"What's Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms"

During my quiet weekend I read What's Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms. This is an interesting collection of essays. The word queer is used in several ways in these essays. The main theme is queer theory, but here queer does not always refer to sexual orientation. The first essay is "(Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited." Most of this essay deals with male couples in the 16th century, but reference is made to a woman who lived "as a man" with a feminine wife. One of the sources for the information is an essay by Michel de Montaigne. Several men from the Iberian Peninsula men wanted to get married in the church. They were executed for this. People at the time said that they were violating the sanctity of marriage. The writer of the essay, Gary Ferguson, also wrote about relationships between mature men and younger effeminate men being accepted in that time period. The younger men acted like wives for the older men.

The second essay, "A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland," uses the word queer in the sense of the outsider. Many Russian women went to Switzerland to study medicine mostly. They often got involved in Russian anarchist political groups. Most of the Russian women were considered overly masculine in their appearance and behavior. They were also considered immoral because many of them believed in "free love." In 1906, in Interlaken, Switzerland, Tatiana Leontieva, at a resort hotel, shoots someone she believes to be an ex Russian government official. She does not fit the stereotype of the Russian women is Switzerland. She is very feminine. She had been able to pass as an aristocrat in Russia because of the same femininity. The mad she kills is a European businessman. The Swiss government wants to limit the number of Russian women entering Switzerland because of their masculine appearance, the questions of moraility and their possible involvement in terrorist activities. The Russian government wants to limit the number of women studying in Switzerland because they could be influenced too much by the Europeans. There are things about this that remind me of what has been happening recently in the USA.

I will write more about this book in a later post.