Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2008
Abstract
This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's fear of the erosion of male power and the coherence of distinct gender categories that I call a “queer fear of the feminine.” However, this is neither a sign of incipient homosexuality nor a feminist move; rather, it is good old-fashioned patriarchy dressed up in drag. I conclude by offering a symptomatic reading of the popularity of the thesis that Nietzsche was gay, arguing that this reflects our own twenty-first-century tendency to read gender deviance as only ever a sign of sexual “orientation,” which is always already presumed to be homosexuality.
Recommended Citation
C. Heike Schotten. "Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine" differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Theory 19.3 (2008): 90-205.
Publisher
differences, Duke University Press
Included in
Continental Philosophy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, German Literature Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Other Classics Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other German Language and Literature Commons, Political Theory Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
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