{"id":84182,"date":"2023-08-11T04:00:24","date_gmt":"2023-08-11T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=84182"},"modified":"2023-08-10T15:30:12","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T19:30:12","slug":"queer-eye-for-the-tudor-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/08\/11\/queer-eye-for-the-tudor-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Eye for the Tudor ?guy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

At First Things<\/em>, Carl R. Trueman<\/a> looks into a recent post from the Mary Rose Museum (where the remains of King Henry VIII’s favourite warship now resides), considering Tudor artifacts recovered from the wreck from a Queer perspective:<\/p>\n

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“Mary Rose Museum & HMS Victory<\/em>” by Silly Little Man<\/a> is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 <\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The anti-Western left has been exposed for its sexual imperialism over the last few months. Evidence is all around. American Muslims have led protests against the imposition of LGBTQ policies and curricula in schools, leaving American progressives uncomfortably caught between two pillars of their favored rhetoric of political thought-crime: transphobia and Islamophobia. The Washington Post<\/em> opined that anti-LGBTQ moves in the Middle East were “echoing<\/a>” those of the American culture wars\u2014as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.<\/p>\n

It is, of course, the nature of imperialism that everything, everywhere, is always to be measured by the imperialists’ standards. And that is also what makes them so impervious to spotting their own imperialism. “Queering the Mary Rose<\/em>‘s Collection”, an article<\/a> on the website of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, is a recent example of this. The Mary Rose<\/em> was a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 and was raised from the seabed in 1982 in a groundbreaking act of marine archaeology. The museum is dedicated to displaying artifacts retrieved from the wreck, some of which are now been analyzed “through a Queer lens”.<\/p>\n

The specific examples are an octagonal mirror, nit combs, a gold ring, and Paternosters. Apparently, looking into a mirror can stir strong emotions for both straight and queer people, and for the latter it can generate, for example, feelings of gender dysphoria or euphoria, depending on whether the reflection matches their gender identity. Combs would have been used by the sailors to remove the eggs of hair lice. Today they are reminders of how hairstyles can be the result of imposed gender stereotypes, but also make possible the subverting of these through hairdos that break with social expectations. Rings are a reminder of marriage and, of course, that the Church of England founded by Henry VIII, king during the Mary Rose<\/em>‘s working life, still does not allow gay marriage. Finally, the Paternosters remind us that the crew were “practicing” Christians and that, once again, Henry VIII, via his initiation of the English Reformation, facilitated the civil criminalization of homosexual acts.<\/p>\n

Two things are striking about the article, in addition to its lack of any intellectual merit. First, the absence of any historical awareness is striking. For example, the category of “practicing Christian” is essentially meaningless when applied to the early sixteenth century. Everybody, bar a few underground Jews, Anabaptists, and radicals, was part of the Catholic Church by baptism. The question of how the crew might have understood themselves, whether in terms of mirrors, rings, combs, or Paternosters, is never asked. To be fair, a short blog post cannot ask all the relevant questions, but this does not even nod in the direction of suggesting that the differences between yesterday and today might be remotely interesting or instructive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

David Thompson<\/a> also has some thoughts on the Mary Rose<\/em> artifact interpretations:<\/p>\n

It’s quality stuff. Just like being there, in the mists of history. And not at all inept, or jarring, or comically incongruous.<\/p>\n