This article has just been published in Open Access by postmedieval 👇
doi.org/10.1057/s412...
Monks in the ninth–eleventh centuries identified with bees to make sense of their place in medieval society. In bees, they found an ideal of communal life, selfless virtue, and chastity. By living with bees and writing about them, these monks forged a distinct, nonbeenary gender.
Read it here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
And make sure to look through the whole issue. This centennial publication offers a remarkable, open-ended, prismatic panorama of new directions from across medieval studies. It is a heartening picture of a field that continues to flourish.
The Middle Ages are not essential -- and that is what makes them so helpful to us. Prior to the hegemony of racial capitalism, medieval cultures offer us a glimpse into other ways of thinking and being, revealing our own capacity to be otherwise.
This is the topic of my essay in Speculum.
Read it here 👇
doi.org/10.1353/sac....
& please let me know if you have any trouble accessing this paper.
This culminates in a trans/medieval critique of Lacan's transcendental sexual difference.
This colloquium is generously edited by Ruth Evans and Jessica Rosenfeld, with brilliant contributions from A. E. Whitacre, Masha Raskolnikov, Zachary Engledow, and Grace Lavery.
It's an honour to contribute to the colloquium on "Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Studies" in Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
I argue that Lacan's critique of metaphor allows us to join up a distinctly medieval concept of "gender" with present-day anxieties about toilets.
This has everything to do with horses' bones, and with the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Read about it in The Chaucer Review.
muse.jhu.edu/article/961888
Out today! Sodomy is "the sin against nature." But what is "nature"? "Heterosexuality" seems like the obvious answer, but such a term is anachronistic... Sodomy might be better understood as the disruption of the division between male and female.
Very pleased that my article on sodomy and the Pardoner will appear in what promises to be a rich and lively issue of The Chaucer Review.
Yes! This is a great way of putting it.
Also enjoyed how some of what you were saying, especially in the context of historic ideas of gender, overlapped with this Tumblr post, but like, with an actual academic basis. an-ruraiocht.tumblr.com/post/7790442...
No worries, I'm so glad you could make it, and will welcome your thoughts whenever you are able to formulate them
Friday 2 May, 5pm, in Cambridge: I will be speaking at the ASNC Research Seminar, about The Contingent Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are generative, are worth engaging with, because they are inessential. I'm very excited to share this work.
GR04 in the Faculty of English.
🥳 It’s publication day! 🥳
IMPOSSIBLE RECOVERY is now available to buy and online via institutional access.
Read more about the book and buy a copy at 20% off with code CUP20: cup.columbia.edu/book/impossi...
Or access online: www.degruyter.com/document/doi...
Writers over the course of the Middle Ages interpreted the classical myth of Tiresias's sex change as an allegory for the cycle of the seasons. This led to the emergence of a strange notion: that the seasons have genders, that the climate is trans.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
Were there medieval medical theories of intersex? Was there a distinction between sex and gender? How were humors related to sex/gender? What does it do to a woman if she has too much greenness in her body?
I wrote about it in Exemplaria, and it's Open Access.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Since I've recently joined I may as well share some of my previous work.
What kind of political work do we perform by claiming people in the premodern past were "gay"? How can an encounter with the past transform us? I wrote about it in Diacritics. muse.jhu.edu/article/845151
Very happy to see The Languages of Queer History, now online!
notchesblog.com/category/phi...
