King's College London

Dr Sebastian Matzner's project unfolds the remarkable story of how two late antique figures became global queer icons. A planned monograph, inspired in form and approach by Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, will scrutinize them as contrapuntal models for dissident masculinities and crystallization points for reflections on male bodies and desire, aestheticism and power, self-determination and abjection, offering timely new insights into histories and strategies of countercultural male self-fashioning.