“My Heart Is All Blood”: Queer Unhappiness in the Ulster Cycle
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33353/scf.157587Abstract
This article applies Sara Ahmed’s theory of affect alienation to the portrayal of Deirdriu in the Longes mac n-Uislenn and Cú Chulainn in the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Both suffer as a result of their desire for a socially undesirable object and come to associate that experience with their desire for the object itself. This sense of unhappiness as a pre-condition for ‘queer’ desire eventually alienates them from the society which a) deems the object undesirable and b) imposes suffering as a punishment for desiring said object. Deirdriu’s lament for Noisiu emphasizes her continued desire for her dead beloved, creating a queer dynamic that subverts the expectation of female desire as that defined by its reproductive potential. This reproductive potential is further subverted by Deirdriu’s refusal to desire a normative, living object (Conchobar) in favor of rejoining her queer beloved in death. Cú Chulainn’s lament for Fer Diad highlights the homosocial intimacy of their relationship which transgresses the emotional and behavioral restrictions of the warrior culture portrayed in the Táin. The characters’ inability to conform to a normative model in the face of their grief queers their presentation and allows the text to challenge normative expectations for grief and desire, namely that grief must fall within an accepted range of emotion and should not surpass reintegration with society and sexual or social productivity.
