2 - Inherited Futures and Queer Privilege: Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine

Summary

Abstract

This chapter considers John Capgrave's Life of St Katherine within a queer genealogical framework in order to contribute to a queer historical archive. Procreative and generative language and detail early in the narrative explicitly open the vita to a reading that considers the text itself as offspring in a genealogical line of reproduced texts. Thus the chapter also understands this textual procreation as representative of a particularly genderqueer temporality. Finally, this chapter offers an intersectional consideration of Katherine's characterization in order to assess how different social privileges and subjugations effect and enable her veneration, complicating essentialist notions of gendered social position and female sanctity.

Keywords: queer, genderqueer, temporalities, futurity, hagiography, privilege, St Katherine, John Capgrave

Queer historicism transgresses temporal boundaries through affective connections based on identification and recognition between individuals and communities. A twenty-first century reading of John Capgrave's verse Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria (c. 1445) shows how certain authorial modes of textual production foreground a future for queer readers by developing alternative pathways to inheritance, although these rely on Katherine's privileged subjectivity. Homonormativity, first theorized by Lisa Duggan in 2002, refers to ‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’. Capgrave's endorsement of marriage and biological reproduction likewise prefigures modern homonormative uses of established familial institutions as pathways to legitimacy. This method of political validation is recognizable in various modern campaigns for the legalization of same sex marriage, which often emphasize(d) monogamous commitment and conservative values as characteristics of ‘good’ and loving couples, regardless of partners’ genders. Challenging the normative function of familial inheritance, this chapter re-evaluates ideals that shaped the social circumstances of gendered subjects in fifteenth-century England. In the Life of Saint Katherine, Capgrave (d. 1464) – an Augustinian friar and scholastic theologian – presents a paradoxical Katherine, whose resistance to normative social institutions is complicated by the reinforcement of ‘proper’ adherence to expected social positions and gendered proclivities. For modern readers seeking a queer medieval genealogy, Katherine's holy celibacy and formulation of gendered social positions can be claimed as queer subjectivity.