Subverting Canonical Masculinity: Nationalist 19th Century Romanticism and Radical Gender Politics in 21st Century Romania

• In Event: Liberation or Immiseration?: Narratives of Epistemic Crisis in Literature Across the 19th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

My paper will address the political legacy of romanticism with respect to the body in a semi-peripheric country, Romania, with a focus on the country’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), and on 21st century efforts of feminist writers and activists to subvert his largely masculinist legacy.
The paper will proceed in three steps. First, I will define the 19th century romantic poet’s concern with intimacy, sexuality, and pornography, as a form of national and cultural emancipation. Second, I will briefly address the large corpus of literary biographies, criticism and anecdotal lore regarding Eminescu, identifying in it a dual image, that of an ethereal, abstract and impersonal lover, and that of a sexual maverick who subverts authority through vulgar innuendo, the figure of a “cultural saint” (Dovic, Helgason 2019) who is prone to popular deconstruction. Finally, I will analyze recent events, public scandals which emerged around the prestigious „Mihai Eminescu” poetry prize (2022), when the award went to feminist poets who decried the masculinist structure, judgement and language of local cultural institution as modelled after the public image of the national poet. As a result, Eminescu’s legacy came to be instrumental for the constitution of an articulate and outspoken Romanian feminism, a dynamic that characterizes many other (semi-)peripheric cultures. Here, cultural nationalism presided over the constitution of the literary canon and invested literature with social authority, but it also made possible the current trend of feminist liberation, allowing art to be politicized and literature to play a role in societal change.

Author

• Doris Dumitru Mironescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U of Iași (Romania)