Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:47:57.421Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Feminism, Gender studies, and Medieval Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Madeline H. Caviness
Madeline H. Caviness*
Affiliation:
Tufts University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article traces the multiple and rapid changes that have occurred during the past fifteen years, in theorizing “sex/gender arrangements”. A secondary aspect is the reception, application and above all modification of these theories by some scholars of European medieval cultural production, in which varieties of difference are found that do not apply in modern societies. Deconstruction of the binary m/f (whether thought of as sexual or gender difference) erupted among feminist thinkers in the 1990s and eventually “queered” academic discourses by destabilizing labels that had been naturalized, including a consistent gender identity for the individual in medieval or modern society. The author claims that queer and post-colonial theory, far from being antithetical to feminist theory, are out-growths of it, and exist in parallel; the proponents of each are concerned with the societal forces, including our own discourses, that maintain difference, and create communities of oppression Yet it is also necessary to raise the question, when will the next radical departure occur, and how will new theories be generated?

Type
Articles
Information
Diogenes , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 30 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2010

References

Anderson, Bonnie S. and Zinsser, Judith P. (1988) A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Baisch, Martin, Haufe, Hendrike and Mecklenburg, Michael (eds) (2003) Aventiuren des Geschlechts: Modelle von Männlichkeit in der Literatur des 13. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.Google Scholar
Banner, Lois (2003) “Mannish Women, Passive Men, and Constitutional Types: Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies as a Response to Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture,” Signs, 28(3): 833–858.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean (1970) “Fétichisme et Idéologie: La réduction sémiologique,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 2: 213–224; English version published as chapter 3 in Baudrillard (1981) For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, translated by Charles Levin, pp. 88–101. St. Louis: Telos Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Judith M. (1993) “Medievalism and Feminism,” in Partner (1993): 7–29.Google Scholar
Bennett, Judith M. (2006) History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Blamires, Alcuin (ed.) (1992) Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blamires, Alcuin (1997) The Case for Women in Medieval Culture. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Bullough, Vern L. and Brundage, James A. (eds) (1996) Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Bromberg, Sarah (2008) “Gendered and Ungendered Readings of the Rothschild Canticles,” Different Visions, 1 [online]: www.differentvisi-ons.org/issue1PDFs/Bromberg.pdf.Google Scholar
Burger, Glenn and Kruger, Steven F. (2001) Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Burgwinkle, William L. (2004) Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England 1050- 1230. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bynum, Caroline Walker (1982) Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bynum, Caroline Walker (1995) “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry, 22: 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camille, Michael (1992) Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.Google Scholar
Caviness, Madeline H. (2001a) Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Caviness, Madeline H. (2001b) Reframing Medieval Art: Difference, Margins, Boundaries, http://dca.lib.tufts.edu/caviness. Medford: Tufts University.Google Scholar
Caviness, Madeline H. (2008a) “The End of Theory?” Different Visions 1 [online]: www.differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Comments.pdf.Google Scholar
Caviness, Madeline H. (2008b) “From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” Different Visions, 1 [online]: www.differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Caviness.pdf.Google Scholar
Clover, Carol (1993) “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” in Partner (1993): 61–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey J. (ed.) (2000) The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey J. and Wheeler, Bonnie (eds) (2000) Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan (1997). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP.Google Scholar
Dressler, Rachel Ann (2004) Of Armor and Men in Medieval England: the Chivalric Rhetoric of Three English Knights’ Effigies. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Dressler, Rachel (2008) “Gender as Spectacle and Construct: The Gyvernay Effigies at St. Mary’s Church, Limington,” Different Visions, 1 [online]: http://www.differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Dressler.pdf.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry (2008) Literary Theory: An Introduction [1983]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Erler, Mary and Kowaleski, Maryanne (eds) (1988) Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Erler, Mary C. and Kowaleski, Maryanne (eds) (2003) Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferrante, Joan M. (1997) To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana UP.Google Scholar
Freedman, Paul and Spiegel, Grabielle M. (1998) “Medievalisms Old and New: the Rediscovery of Alterity,” Am. Hist. Rev., 103: 675–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frese, Dolores Warwick and O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine (eds) (1997) The Book and the Body. Notre Dame/ London: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Grantley, Darryl and Taunton, Nina (eds) (2000) The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Green, Monica Helen (2000) Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Green, Monica H. (2001) The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groden, Michael and Kreiswirth, Martin (eds) (1994) The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP.Google Scholar
Herdt, Gilbert (ed.) (1993) Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Hotchkiss, Valerie R. (1996) Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe. New York/ London: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce (1977) Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Minuit.Google Scholar
Jacquart, Danielle and Thomasset, Claude (1985) Sexualité et savoir médical au Moyen Âge. Paris: PUF.Google Scholar
Jordan, Mark D. (1997) The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kay, Sarah and Rubin, Miri (1994) Framing Medieval Bodies. Manchester: Manchester UP.Google Scholar
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane (ed.) (1992) Silences of the Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA Belknap Press of Harvard UP.Google Scholar
Klein, Dorothea (2002) “Geschlecht und Gewalt: Zur Konstitution von Männlichkeit im ‘Erec’ Hartmanns von Aue,” in Meyer, Matthias and Schiewer, Hans-Jochen (eds) Literarische Leben: Rollenentwürfe in der Literatur des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters. Festschrift für Volker Mertens zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth (ed.) (1997) Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Kruger, Barbara (1993) Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kuefler, Mathew (2006) The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.Google Scholar
Lees, Clare A. (ed.) (1994) Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
LeMay, Helen Rodnite (1992) Women’s Secrets. A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s “De Secretis Mulierum” with Commentaries. Saratoga Springs, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Lochrie, Karma (2005) Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Lomperis, Linda and Sarah, Stanbury (eds) (1993) Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
McDonald, Nicola (ed.) (2006) Medieval Obscenities. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press.Google Scholar
McNamara, Jo Ann (1999) “An Unresolved Syllogism: The Search for a Christian Gender System,” in Murray (1999): 1–24.Google Scholar
Mirrer, Louise (1994) “Representing ‘Other’ Men: Muslims, Jews, and Masculine Ideals in Medieval Castillian Epic and Ballad,” in Lees (1994): 169–186.Google Scholar
Moi, Toril (2006) “‘I am not a Feminist, but.’ How Feminism became the F-Word,“ PMLA, 121(5): 1735- 1741.Google Scholar
Murray, Jacqueline (1995) “Thinking About Gender: The Diversity of Medieval Perspectives,” in Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (dir.), Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, pp. 1–26. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Murray, Jacqueline (ed.) (1999) Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Murray Jones, Peter (1998) Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts. London/Milan: The British Library /Centro Tibaldi.Google Scholar
Nederman, Cary J. and True, Jacqui (1996) “The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6(4): 497–517.Google ScholarPubMed
Nelson, Charles (2008) “Are We Being Theoretical Yet? Innocents Abroad and Sachsenspiegel Scholarship,” Different Visions, 1. http://www.differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Nelson.pdfGoogle Scholar
Newman, Barbara (2003) God and the Goddesses. Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, Katherine and Nye, Robert A. (1991) “Destiny is Anatomy. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur,” The New Republic 53 (Feb. 1): 56.Google Scholar
Partner, Nancy F. (ed.) (1993) Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism. Cambridge: The Medieval Academy of America [originally published as a special issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, 1993].Google Scholar
Poor, Sara S. and Schulman, Jana K. (eds) (2007) Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhode, Deborah L. (1990) “Definitions of Difference,” in Rhode, Deborah L. (ed.) Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale UP.Google Scholar
Rhode, Deborah L. (ed.) (2003) The Difference “Difference” Makes: Women and Leadership. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.Google Scholar
Roscoe, Will (1998) Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle (1975) “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Reiter, Rayna R. (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women, pp. 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Schleif, Corine (2008) “Introduction or Conclusion: Are We Still Being Historical? Exposing the Ehenheim Epitaph Using History and Theory,” Different Visions, 1 [online]: www.differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Schleif.pdf.Google Scholar
Sekules, Veronica (2001) Medieval Art. New York: Oxford UP.Google Scholar
Selden, Raman and Widdowson, Peter (1993) A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd edn, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Sheingorn, Pamela (2009) “Subjection and Reception in Claude of France’s Book of First Prayers,” in Pastan, Elizabeth Carson, Lane, Evelyn Staudinger and Shortell, Ellen M. (eds) The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, pp. 235–248. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Smith, Bruce R. (2000) “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA, 115(3): 318–329.Google Scholar
Stoller, Robert J. (1968) Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity. New York: Science House.Google Scholar
Thomasset, Claude (1993) “Le corps féminin ou le regard empêché,” Micrologus, 1: 99–114.Google Scholar
van Houts, Elisabeth (1999) Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waithe, Mary Ellen (1989) A History of Women Philosophers, t. 2: AD 500-1600. Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warhol, Robyn R. and Price Herndl, Diane (eds) (1997) Feminisms. An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.Google Scholar
Whittington, Karl (2008) “The Cruciform Womb: Process, Symbol and Salvation in Bodleian Library ms. Ashmole 399,” Different Visions, 1 [online]: http://www.differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Whittington.pdf.Google Scholar
Zeikowitz, Richard E. (2003) Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ziolkowski, Jan (ed.) (1998) Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar