Camões's Queerness

Abstract

This article reads Camões’s sonnets in dialogue with queer theory, but informed by philology. It suggests that there are still problems of interpretation in sonnets that are regularly anthologized and around which there is a seeming critical consensus. By pointing to the limits of what we know when reading these poems, this article brings out in Camões’s work its openness to diverse desires and its attunement to varied sexual practices and dispositions, which have been overlooked amid the conventional language of sixteenth-century poetry and critics’ focus on its deep intertextuality.