Sex and Politics in "Cyclops" and "Circe": Bloom's Bid for a Non-binary World

This paper considers two episodes of James Joyce's Ulysses, "Cyclops" and "Circe" as the author's call and response critique of nationalist ideology, a masculinist discourse that, I suggest, Joyce counters with his presentation of the "womanly man" Leopold Bloom. Reading the text through a gender/post-colonial lens, I examine the linkage Joyce makes between the ideology of state and gender, and his subsequent exposure of their collusive, two-sides-of-the-same-coin alliance. Bloom's rejection of essentialist notions of nation, as portrayed by the nationalists in the Barney Kiernan pub, and his rejection hyper-masculinity, as embodied by the womanly Bloom, exposes binary thinking as not only false and but no longer viable in modernity's complex and vastly changing world. Joyce destabilizes masculinity's binary position of power and dominance and advances, I suggest, a transformative internationalist and inter-gender world view.