Final thoughts on the Odyssey: I’m very confused by the backlash to Emily Wilson’s essay on the grounds that she’s not a film critic. Her critique largely focused on the themes of the story, and how they were poorly executed, painfully dumbed down, and often completely antithetical to the themes of Homer’s work. She’s right, and you don’t need to be a film critic to understand what the themes of the Odyssey are supposed to be — even Odysseus’s defining character trait, his cleverness, is told rather than shown, and the story hurts for it. Honestly, I felt that Nolan only understood the individual plot points and had no grasp on the overarching story, or its characters.
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i
The Sexualization of Aaron Burr & Alexander Hamilton’s Relationship.
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr might be one of the most sexualized rivalries in all of American memory, and this idea (shockingly) didn’t originate on Tumblr. It actually started with partisan smear campaigns, got reinforced by satirical verse, got blown out of proportion by Freud-happy biographers, and crystallized in Vidal’s incest fanfic (sorry, “historical novel”).
Just...why.
Why does the story of two ambitious men arguing about policy metastasize into metaphors about submission, penetration, incest, or unacknowledged desire?
At the root is a simple political utility. In the volatile party culture of the early Republic, sex and gender were weapons. Aaron Burr’s enemies repeatedly deployed sexual innuendo to wound his reputation. Journalists and pamphleteers accused him of “seducing a youthful band of followers” and otherwise painted him as morally loose in order to delegitimize his claim to public virtue. Nancy Isenberg’s work on Burr makes this instrumental use of sex plain: the sexualization of Burr began as partisan slander and stuck in the public imagination for generations, a smear that functioned to emasculate and discredit a dangerous political rival.
The effect is important: once a public figure has been sexualized in print, any later account of his conflicts—including the duel—is likely to be read through a sexual lens.
Sexual metaphors are especially seductive when applied to rituals of masculine honor like dueling, because duels are already charged theatrical performances of power, shame, and humiliation. Duel protocol presented male reputation as something that could be punctured, bought back, or defended with a pistol at dawn; in other words, the duel materializes a kind of bodily threat that lends itself easily to sexualized readings. Psychoanalytic and Freudian framings find this readily available symbolic content irresistible: pistols become phallic objects, wounds become penetrative acts, surrender becomes sexual submission. Arnold Rogow’s psychobiographical account exemplifies this move, suggesting that Hamilton’s obsession with Burr could be read through repression and projective identification and that the duel’s ritualized violence can be interpreted as erotically coded drama.
The event’s obvious physicality—two bodies at close range, two weapons pointed, the act of taking aim and yielding space—is irresistibly legible as a scene of domination and surrender, even a grotesque, fatal parody of sexual intercourse.
Rogow’s hypothesis was framed as psychologically compelling in contemporary reviews, but critics have (rightfully) pointed out that it leans heavily on conjecture. It reads sexual meaning into ambiguous acts and rumors rather than into clear, documented sexual behavior between the two men. Still, once psychoanalytic vocabulary is introduced, the duel’s imagery (guns, aim, who fires first, who “takes” and who “receives”) becomes narratively available as sexual metaphor, and subsequent retellers often deploy it without the caveats Rogow’s critics demanded.
The persistence of fringe sources like J. Michael Mahoney’s Schizophrenia: The Bearded Lady Disease points to an appetite for the sensational and symbolic over the documentary. Mahoney’s grotesque psychoanalytic reading—wherein Hamilton’s posture at Weehawken is interpreted as a “passive, feminine homosexual undertone” and the pistol as a stand-in for penile penetration—reveals the power of metaphor to override method. There is no possible way for me to explain what is being said without sounding ridiculous, so here are excerpts:
“ Alexander Hamilton's obsessive hatred of Aaron Burr was based on a powerful, unconscious homosexual attraction to him, as is always the case in such examples of paranoid and obsessive behaviour. The fact that Hamilton was known by his peers to be suffering from “recurring illnesses” i.e. manic-depression, which name is interchangeable with the term schizophrenia, adds further proof to this diagnosis. ”
“ Furthermore, there was clearly a passive, feminine homosexual undertone in Hamilton’s actions at the duel, as he presented himself in a totally helpless physical posture to Burr and waited for the latter to shoot him with a gun, symbolically representing being penetrated by the issue of Burr’s penis i.e. gun. Basically what Hamilton’s actions were telling Burr was “Here, take me, and do what you will with my body.” ”
I was not lying, by the way.
Popular satire also played its own role. Burr laughing at the waxwork duel tableau in a New York museum, quoting the doggerel—“O Burr, O Burr, what hast thou done? / Thou hast shooted dead great Hamilton. / You hid behind a bunch of thistle, / And shooted him dead with a great hoss-pistol”—turns the supposedly solemn ritual into burlesque. Audiences snickered because they already understood the duel as theater, and theater is easily sexualized. The image of Burr “hiding behind a thistle” and then shooting Hamilton “with a great hoss-pistol” is not subtle. Caricature works by exaggerating bodies, by making them grotesque, by turning violence into a kind of slapstick innuendo. The duel as dirty joke is as old as the duel itself.
Queer theorists later returned to this material with different aims. The problem, they suggested, was not whether Hamilton and Burr “were” or “weren’t,” but that the intensity of masculine rivalry often reads as homoerotic because it uses the same language of obsession, fascination, and betrayal. Eve Sedgwick’s model of homosocial desire, for example, explains how bonds between men in eighteenth-century political culture were always triangulated through rivalry, and political rivalry itself becomes the site of desire. Hamilton and Burr as mirror images—short, debonair, ambitious, dazzling to women, gallant in public—are easy to cast as doubles whose confrontation must finally tip into something intimate (as explained in “The Erotic Charisma of Alexander Hamilton,” Journal of American Studies). The duel is then read not as the breaking point of political careers but as the climax of a relationship.
Even Burr’s late-life comments feed the myth. When he encountered a bust of Hamilton in Boston decades after the duel and reportedly murmured, “A remarkable man—a very remarkable man,” later retellers frame it as wistful, reverent, almost lover-like. Touching the contours of Hamilton’s sculpted face becomes, in their hands, a caress, especially as he once remarks how “There was poetry!” as he caresses Hamilton. Whatever Burr meant by this action (most likely it was a mockery), the interpretive frame was already set: every gesture could be read as proof that underneath the rivalry there had always been something else.
Hamilton and Burr do not escape sexualization because the duel itself—ritualized, spectacular, performed at dawn with pistols raised—is too much like theater, too much like a staged intimacy between two men who cannot exist without reference to each other.
And once theater is in play, sex is never far behind.
SO WHAT YOURE SAYING IS THAT HAMBURR, HAMBURR ELUSIONS, HAMBURR SMUT HAVE ALL BEEN PART OF AMERICAN CULTURE FOR OVER 200 YEARS god that country cannot be real
you learn history so you can pass your exams. i learn history so i can read more historical yaoi in the time i should be studying for exam. we are not the same.
people getting mad at ao3 for rightfully being firmly against censorship and allowing dark fics that depict taboo subjects in explicit details to be on their platform is so funny to me because ao3 was created specifically to be a fuck you to capitalism and censorship. the point of ao3 is that it’s a place to host and archive any fanwork, which includes fanwork about taboo topics that are not allowed on other platforms like wattpad or fanfiction.net
the whole point of ao3 is that it’s a safe space for all fics, and that includes fics about taboo subjects
ao3 has always been firmly against censorship since the day it was created, that’s why it’s run by fans, for fans, on fans’ donations, why it’s a nonprofit organization, that’s also why it has no ads or algorithms or any of those capitalism bullshit
if you have a problem with that, go to fanfiction.net or wattpad. no one forces you to stay in the house made specifically for the (affectionate) freaks
very interesting to see "ao3 ship: landoscar" in shambles hating each others guts after a championship battle when i know these two racing freaks r my dream championship battle [see: jeddah 2022)
titsay
ellievsbear
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
gamechangershow
