Byzantine Queer History and Norwegian Homonationalism

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate how queer readings of premodern historiography can make meaningful contributions to contemporary political struggle and to make one such contribution. It uses fifteenth-century Byzantine depictions of Ottoman sultans as heretical, barbaric, and sexually non-normative to denaturalise the very different (and yet uncannily similar) combination of religious, ethnic, and sexual alterity in contemporary Norwegian homonationalist discourse. It seeks to unpick the anti-Muslim and anti-migrant implications of the neoliberal story of LGBT+ rights accumulation told in the framing of skeivt kulturår 2022, the commemoration/celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between men in Norway. Specifically, it seeks to draw out the positioning of the Norwegian state in that framing, by leveraging the temporal and cultural alterity of Byzantine historiographical invective. The objective is to disturb the complacent production of a story of Norwegian queer history as a dimension of benign Norwegian liberalism and exceptionalism. The specific role of the premodern past in Norwegian homonationalist narratives is illustrated through the example of an exhibition within the framework of skeivt kulturår 2022, which was ultimately cancelled because of a text naming Norwegian state violence and use of the term homonationalism. In the process, this article seeks to identify a way for Byzantine queer history to do useful work in the present.