tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post4212360545058361468..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Loving the New Middle AgesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21225461340978680552007-02-28T19:02:00.000-05:002007-02-28T19:02:00.000-05:00Very true JJC. It can, of course, be just as antip...Very true JJC. It can, of course, be just as antipathetic, even hostile, to heterosexual academics who do queer theory too. So, I agree that the capaciousness of the term can be misleading since it like all universals draws a cordon sanitaire around itself. There are exceptions, such as Butler and Warner, who, interestingly, have been most vocally opposed to gay marriage.Michael O'Rourkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03110210128389911666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21235466458954501212007-02-28T08:30:00.000-05:002007-02-28T08:30:00.000-05:00It answers my question. I do think that queer theo...It answers my question. I do think that queer theory can sometimes be a little tough on "mere" gays and lesbians, and treat such lives as if they were a simple reinscription of heterosexual norms in another form: thus, for example, a widespread antipathy of queer theorists towards the insitutionalization of gay and lesbian marriage. It seems to me that the issue is far more complicated than that ... and although there is certainly some reinscription, there remains a good deal of challenge as well. I also think that, although queer is obviously a much more capacious category than "gay and lesbian," it can be just as susceptible to boundary drawing and disdain towards that which is placed outside its ambit.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-49454184830722080852007-02-27T20:38:00.000-05:002007-02-27T20:38:00.000-05:00Yes, of course Jeffey. What troubles me about quee...Yes, of course Jeffey. What troubles me about queer theory in its institutionalized form (and perhaps also in its activist incarnations, although these are less visible now) is that it becomes nothing more than another name for lesbian and gay studies and identities, or more narrowly, and more troublingly, gay male studies and identities. What Pugh's book does, at least on my reading, is to "gay male" texts rather than queer them by suggesting that we can find something like what we would call gay maleness in a number of different texts and generic locations in and from the Middle Ages (he seems, as my review suggests, much less interested in women). Pugh is at pains several times in the main text and notes to say he is not interested in reclaiming gay men in the past but it seems to me that this is precisely what he is doing. If queering is to remain (and therein lies its efficacy) an anti-identitarian mode of enquiry for medievalists--who are best positioned to accept this slipperiness-then it is rather disappointing if we are looking for gay men (or lesbians, or indeed heterosexuals) in the middle ages. This is the work of lesbian and gay studies not queer theory and for me, although not everyone who works in queer studies, these are separate enterprises. Does this answer your question?Michael O'Rourkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03110210128389911666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79025603634476352242007-02-27T07:38:00.000-05:002007-02-27T07:38:00.000-05:00Michael, could you say something more about this l...Michael, could you say something more about this line from your review?<BR/><EM>My worry is that queering medieval texts for Pugh, means gaying them, and that creating a space for homosexual desires, however laudable, really doesn’t do anything to shake the heteronormative edifices of the societal and generic regimes under consideration.</EM>Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-87741984555836503852007-02-25T15:41:00.000-05:002007-02-25T15:41:00.000-05:00Wow, thank you Michael, that's very interesting. M...Wow, thank you Michael, that's very interesting. <BR/><BR/>My - sadly neglected since I spend too much time writing novels these days - PhD thesis is about <I>The Karlamagnús saga - Analysis of the Text and its Discourse with the French and Scandinavian Literature of the 12th and 13th Centuries</I> (or, in the original German: Die <I>Karlamagnús saga I</I>, einschließlich der Teile <I>KMS IX</I> und <I>X </I>sowie den post-Roncesvals-Episoden der <I>Karl Magnus Krønike</I> - Analyse des Textes und seines Diskurses mit der französischen und skandinavischen Literatur des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts), thus not directly dealing with homoerotic and homosexuality. But as often with academic research, my interest goes odd ways and queer subjects come creeping up. It may even prove useful to indeed have a look at the different discourses of queer motives in the two literatures. On another note I had to do a lot of research on Feudalism since the French system is so different from the Icelandic and Norvegian concepts, and that is mirrored in the adaptations.Gabriele Campbellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17205770868139083575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79133038991229301282007-02-25T14:21:00.000-05:002007-02-25T14:21:00.000-05:00Here we are. This was for a panel on Queer Affect ...Here we are. This was for a panel on Queer Affect in the Icelandic Saga at Leeds in July 2005. The other speaker was David Ashurst on William Morris' translation of Laxdoela. The chair was Armann Jakobsson who has wonderful work coming out in masculinity in Njala.<BR/><BR/>• Icelandic Studies has for the most part remained oblivious to the incursions of feminist, lesbian and gay and queer studies in the last ten or fifteen years. Notable exceptions are David Ashurst’s detailed examination of “homosexual” liebestod in Breta Sogur and Alexanders Saga among other texts translated from Latin in Saga Book; Jenny Jochen’s article on triangulation and homosocial desire in Bjarnar Saga Hitdoelakappa; and Carl Phelpstead’s Scandinavian Studies piece on the sexual ideology of Hrólfs Saga Kraka. <BR/>• Studies of masculinity have been influential especially since Carol Clover’s 1993 article in Speculum “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women and Power in Early Northern Europe” which interrogated and destabilized the categories of “man” and “woman” “male” and “female”. Clover discusses the exceptionality of the women in Laxdoela and their performances of masculinity (she gives the example of Unn The Deep Minded). One wonders if Laxdoela is also a place to begin to extend the array of masculinities to what Judith Halberstam calls “female masculinity” or masculinities without men? Audr dressed and armed like a man avenges her brothers and performs masculinity as well as, if not better, than any man in the saga. These “bold, valiant” women, as well as Vigdis and Gudrun, suggest to us that disarticulating masculinity and males is an important project; as Eve Sedgwick has claimed “sometimes masculinity has got nothing to do with it”, nothing to do with masculinity that is. <BR/>• When male same/sex desires have been discussed it has largely been in considerations of the saga tradition of insult (nid) and sexual defamation, which often turn on charges of male penetrability or sodomizability. There is rich evidence for this in the sagas and pættir-men being accused of taking the feminine, passive role in sodomitical sex, being a mare, beardless, unmanly. But should we try to move our focus away from the genitalic to intimate or affective relations between men and between women?<BR/>• If male/male desire has been undertheorized in Icelandic Studies then so too has female/female desire since female/female desires and intimacies are rarely, if ever, acknowledged, let alone discussed, by saga scholars. One could argue with Jacqueline Murray that “lesbians” in the Icelandic saga are twice invisible, both marginalized and erased. Can we make a space for lesbian affectivity in Laxdoela Saga?<BR/>• How might we compare the relationship between Bolli and Kjartan and Bjorn Arngeirsson and _or_r Kolbeinsson in Bjarnar Saga?<BR/>• Critics have long asked if there is a Sedgwick school for girls. Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian offers praise of Sedgwick but also a strong critique. She asks “within such a totalising scheme, with its insistent focus on relations ‘between men’, what place might there be for relations between women?’ The answer to this rhetorical question is “none” and “an entire category of women-lesbians-is lost to view”. Castle constructed another triangle; in effect she flips over or unfolds the Girard-Sedgwick triangle, rotating it on one of its sides to form an adjacent triangle the third point of which is female, not male. Next to the ‘normative’ male-female-male triangle she has placed its mirror opposite: female-male-female. Can we construct such a reconfigured triangle in Laxdoela or elsewhere? The triangulated relationships between Jorunn-Melkorka-Hoskuld and Hrefna-Gudrun-Kjartan seem to be motivated more by hostility than desire but I am mindful of Carolyn Dinshaw’s reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where she finds a lesbian plot motivating Morgan’s desire to “get at” Guinevere.<BR/>• Carl Phelpstead finds evidence of “symbolic” sexual domination or intercourse between men in Hrólfs Saga. When does the relationship between Bolli and Kjartan come into the orbit of the potential erotic? When they are swimming together? Kjartan’s swimming contest with King Olaf Tryggvason is no less erotic. They “go under” three times and Kjartan has never found himself in such a “tight corner”. Their bodily intimacy is followed by Olaf’s giving Kjartan a gift of a cloak. We might detected another erotic triangle between Olaf-Kjartan-Ingibjorg. But, do our queer readings really need to ratchet the homosocial up to the power of one to the potentially homoerotic?<BR/>• What is the relationship between violence and homosocial rivalry in Laxdoela? And what sort of connections can we make between misogyny, homophobia and the homosocial in the saga?<BR/>• How much of the homosociality in the saga is down to the influence of European chivalric romances in which male-male intimacy was almost homonormative?<BR/>• Cross/dressing in the saga and condemnation in Iceland. Breeches-Aud symbolically penetrates her husband who has divorced her on the grounds that she dresses like a masculine woman, in breeches: he is lying on his back, takes her for a man, she pulls out a small, impotent short-bladed sword and slashes him across the arm and nipples (a symbolic castration?).Gudrun also uses cross/dressing to her advantage by making her first husband a shirt which exposes his nipples, knowing that effeminacy is a grounds for divorce. How stigmatised or non-normative was cross/dressing in the sagas? Is it so capacious a category as to be rendered meaningless?<BR/>• Touching William Morris touching Laxdoela would seem to be a perfect example or double example of what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a “queer vibration”. Texts do not randomly bump up against each other-they need a queer intervention; they need the queer historian. How does the touch of the queer function in the affective encounter between Ashurst and Morris? What kind of “partial connections” are being made in this queer relation? What kind of post-identitarian community with the past? Michael Camille calls this “striking a pose”, submitting oneself to a temporal suspension. What does Ashurst’s contiguity with Morris and adjacentness to Laxdoela tell us about queer subjects and queer objects of desire?<BR/>• In 1982 Foucault changed his mind about “leaving Love to the Christians” and said, “I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships…that history is very, very important”. A number of recent gay and lesbian historians have argued, similarly, that we have focused our attention too narrowly on sex and sexuality: we need to turn back to friendship and love. How productive a turn might this be for Icelandic studies? How does the category of “love” function in the saga which is unusual for its description of emotions? Is it what David Halperin calls a ”homoromance without gay identity”? Is “love” in Laxdoela a species of ethical practice or a relation of power in the Foucauldian sense?<BR/>• At the end of his life, the late Alan Bray, a pioneering historian of early modern England proposed that the theoretical charter for the new queer social history ought to be no longer Foucault’s History of Sexuality but Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. In The Friend, published posthumously, he predicted that future queer histories will be preoccupied less with analysing the links between sexuality and power than with documenting the various forms of “voluntary kinship” and other relations of ethical commitment among persons of the same sex that premodern societies once recognized, even formalized, and that postmodern queer cultures may wish to reinvent. Where would we begin such a study? Sworn brotherhood, blood-brothers (in Gisla Saga for example), and fostering seem important places to start thinking about non-heteronormative kinship arrangements.<BR/>• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen suggests in Medieval Identity Machines that queer theory needs to de-privilege its focus on the human and interrogate other circuits of affective desire-between men and their horses for example. Again, how might such a project be imagined? Hrafnkel and his beloved stallion Freyfaxi might be a good place to begin. <BR/>• A sustained critical focus on expressions of queer love, friendship, desire, intimacy and affect between men and between women is still very much needed so how might our readings of Laxdoela prove to be stepping stones for future queer readings of Icelandic sagas, poetry, _ættir? What other texts are or might potentially be amenable to queering, thereby potentially reconfiguring the entire field?Michael O'Rourkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03110210128389911666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-76445697655400323642007-02-25T13:49:00.000-05:002007-02-25T13:49:00.000-05:00Hello Gabriele C.There is virtually nothing on mal...Hello Gabriele C.<BR/><BR/>There is virtually nothing on male (even less on female) friendship and affect in the sagas or paettir, with the exception of Carl Phelpstead on Hrolf's Saga and David Ashurst on homosexual liebestod. I organized a panel on affect and friendship in the Icelandic sagas a few years ago and can send my introductory notes if you are interested. This is wide open.Michael O'Rourkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03110210128389911666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79711058325872014742007-02-25T13:44:00.000-05:002007-02-25T13:44:00.000-05:00That is pretty uncanny Karl. I was reading The Wor...That is pretty uncanny Karl. I was reading The Work of Mourning on the bus just the other day and was rather taken with Derrida's description of his relationship with the Americanist Joseph Riddel, his memories of whom he associates with speed, race cars, driving, danger and death. There's much more to be said about travel in Derrida and his "quasi-transcendentals" (Catherine Malabou's book Counterpaths is all about this).Michael O'Rourkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03110210128389911666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-12742696970616329102007-02-25T13:42:00.000-05:002007-02-25T13:42:00.000-05:00I always had suspicions about Roland and Olivier, ...I always had suspicions about Roland and Olivier, lol.<BR/><BR/>Seriously, thanks for the book tips, I'll definitely check them out. The motive of male friendship in the <I>chanson de geste</I> is a very interesting one, and the way it is rendered in the Old Norse adaptations makes me want to re-examine male friendship in the Icelandic sagas as well.Gabriele Campbellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17205770868139083575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54764320572576199432007-02-25T08:52:00.000-05:002007-02-25T08:52:00.000-05:00it is in Klosowska’s conclusion when she describes...<I>it is in Klosowska’s conclusion when she describes Roland Barthes as “a fellow passenger on a train” (145) that I get an overwhelming feeling of her loving Barthes.</I><BR/><BR/>More on the rest of it perhaps later (?), but as the train reference jarred a memory loose, one that I think intersects (or gives another voice to), your discussion of silences, I wanted to put it out here right now. From the collection of eulogies and letters by Derrida, <I>The Work of Mourning,</I> where he remembers Barthes:<BR/><BR/>"I shall not make of this an allegory, even less a metaphor, but I recall that it was <I>while traveling</I> that I spent the most time alone with Barthes. Sometimes head to head, I mean face to face (for example on a train from Paris to Lille or Paris to Bourdeaux), and sometimes side by side, separated by an aisle....Even if I wanted or was able to give an account, to speak of him as he was for me...even if I tried to reproduce what took place, what place would be reserved for the reserve? What place for the long periods of silence, for what was left unsaid out of discretion, for what was of no use bringing up, either because it was too well known by both of us or else infinitely unknown on either side?" (55).Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com