Anton Juul

I'm particularly interested in the intersection between literary writing, desire and sexuality. I'm a PhD-fellow at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Difference, where I do research on literary representations of homosexuality. 

PhD-project: Sex after AIDS: Homosexuality and queer masculinities in contemporary Danish literature.

(09/01/22 - 08/31/25)

Supervisor: Michael Nebeling Petersen

My research revolves around literary represenations of the gay man as a figure and sex between men as a motif in Danish literature from the 90's to today, with a focus on depictions of anal sex, bottoming and sexual promiscuity. I read works by authors such as Tomas Lagermand Lundme, Nikolaj Tange Lange, Bjørn Rasmussen, Niels Henning Falk Jensby and Mads Ananda Lodahl.

My PhD project has two main lines of inquiry: Firstly, the projects makes a historical inquiry into the on-going legacy of HIV/AIDS pandemic in representations of male gay sexuality. If the epidemic literalized the connection between sex and self-destruction that psychoanalysis has famously conceptualized as the death drive “beyond the pleasure principle”, and thus made public an image of the gay man as someone willing “to risk death for a good fuck” (Dean Beyond Sexuality, 139), how does this image “haunt” the literary configurations of male homosexuality, even in a time when HIV/AIDS has gone from outright death sentence to a manageable chronic condition? Secondly, the projects makes a more theoretical inquiry into the ways in which the literary representations of male homosexuality and anal sex, in particular, destabilizes basic dichotomies such as active/passive, masculinity/femininity, top/bottom, domination/submission, subject/object, desire/disgust, positivity/negativity, etc. I want to think about the affective and theoretical ambiguities that arise in the intersection of masculinity and homosexuality and about what it means for our contemporary cultural understanding of gay identity to foreground an intimate connection between sexuality and negativity – understood broadly as practices of self-destruction, self-abandonment, submission, bottomhood, etc.

How do these representations intervene in a historical context where the homosexual increasingly has been incorporated into the Danish welfare state, secured and protected by law, as a viable social category and a positive image of sexual liberation and democratic freedom, as something worth of protecting? What do the more passive, negative, and/or hopeless descriptions of homosexuality, that I locate in the novels, say about that narrative of legal and moral inclusion into the nation state?

Promiscuity, the history of the HIV/AIDS-epidemic, queer masculinities, queer temporalities and negative affect. Queer theory, affect theory, feminist theory, gender studies, sexuality studies, comparative literature.