Feasting at the Threshold: Eucharistic Eroticism and Homonationalism in Diane Duane's The Tale of the Five

Authors

Taylor Driggers, Independent ScholarFollow

Abstract

Diane Duane’s ongoing fantasy series The Tale of the Five (1979–present) is set in a world marked by constant bodily transgressions and surprises, where a human and dragon can occupy the same body and become lovers and a one-night stand can bring one face-to-face with God. This essay will argue that Duane’s series articulates eroticism in a manner comparable to Linn Marie Tonstad’s (2016) queer re-visioning of transubstantiation and bodily and spiritual transformation through the Eucharist. Acts of eating and drinking serve to highlight how characters’ pansexual, polyamorous relations with each other and the love of the Goddess spill over into and amplify one another, constructing a theology premised on transformative pleasure. These aspects of Duane’s worldbuilding, however, exist in uneasy tension with the series’ increasing narrative concern with the maintenance of noble bloodlines and divinely sanctioned hereditary monarchies, which transforms a potentially radical queer eucharistic theology into something uncomfortably close to what Jasbir K. Puar (2007) has described as ‘homonationalism’. These tendencies in Duane’s writing highlight the need for fantasy’s queer theological imaginaries to be attentive to the ways religious identity, desire, and nationhood serve as mutually constitutive and socially regulating forces, lest queerness become recuperated as an extension of Western theological triumphalism rather than its dissolution.

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