Pretty tangential, but I wanna point out that I do see people try to use things from Norse myths like Loki shapeshifting, Odin using “women magic” or Thor crossdressing to get his hammer back as examples of Norse mythology being “queer” in some way, sometimes to try and make weird nazi “pagans” mad. But its not really accurate, all of these are almost explicitly portrayed as shameful and either humorous or as a kind of flaw or contradiction in the gods conduct. Loki bearing children is something he gets mocked for and has his masculinity questioned as a result of, plus it literally directly leads to the death of the two “biggest” gods so thats hardly a good thing.
Also one of the more commonly used insults in the stories is basically a word calling a man cowardly and “womanlike”, which also has specific connotations of accusing them of being gay and that being shameful. I do understand why people would wanna “reclaim” it but it kinda falls into the larger trend of pretending that we’re some kinda bastion of progress and good over here in scandinavia and it really is pretty much never the case no matter how much we love to pretend it is and portray ourselves as such. I wish it were true that there was explicit acceptance of queer people at some point before modern times over here but that isnt much of the case.
TL;DR: Sometimes Europeans just are like that and its not necessarily Christianity that made us be homophobic.
Edit: Also at least one collection of laws straight up state that its permissible by law to kill someone in retaliation if they accuse you of being “Unmanly/Womanly/Gay”(Argr), and in fact one of these laws explicitly brings up the severity of comparing a man to “a mare”, so comparing someone to Loki in the form of a mare is on the same level of severity and demands atonement. There is to some extent evidence of there being a similar idea of male homosexuality to the greeks, in which you are not shamed for being the “top”, but as far as I’ve seen most cases where this is invoked its in the act of explicitly shaming another man by sexually assaulting him.
On a side note, some scholars have theorised that the story of Thor crossdressing to get his hammer back was actually made by early Scandinavian Christians to mock the native gods.
I think that’s a really important point. All our knowledge of Norse myths is from after Christianization, so how we can tell how they were understood in their own time?
Yes, but its basically impossible to tell unless we find an earlier collection of texts, since there are essentially two significant large sources that means that at least 50% or more of Nordic mythology that we know of is already theories and speculation, it could be a later christianization but it could also just be an existing story that we dont fully understand the context for.
Odin using “women magic”
Ain’t no woman like the one-eyed god
We are not a fad. We are not an invention of the West. We are not bourgeoisie decadence.
The first pride was a riot led by Black Trans Women to combat State violence.
:brick-police:
Queerness is inherently revolutionary in nations affected by, or built with, puritanical dominance and slavery.
Worth noting that the roles most reactionaries think are “traditional western gender norms” are, for the most part, a product of modernity and have only been applied to all of society fairly recently. The idea, for instance, that women shouldn’t work outside of the house, has only ever applied to wealthy women in “the West”. The fashions and presentational modes of modern “femininity” are a product of mass-production, a change in the nature of labor, and mass-marketing.
We don’t need to prove to the reactionaries that we have always existed, because the very structure that they claim is concrete and exists in the material world is nothing more than an ahistorical misunderstanding of the history of gender in the first place. It’s ideology. Other societies had far more than just “third genders”. they addressed the social role of physical sex and any concept of performed gender in a completely different framework. What we have is a product of an invented “tradition” based on choosing some of the most openly misogynistic cultures in history to create a historiography of sex.
