Courses

What kind of flexibility and play does gender signify in medieval literature? How was gender enacted and how did it impact identity, sexuality, shape-shifting, intimacy and empowerment? How does it echo in our ideas of queerness, closeness, and sexual identity as understood today? This class will look at how a kind of power associated with gender and sexuality figures in medieval literature and is echoed in contemporary poetics and theory. This course takes the idea of _play_ seriously (despite the paradoxical nature of this statement), discerning how gender embodies a form of discursive and non discursive play in premodern works. In doing so, we will examine how the definition of gender is implicated in theological, cultural, and scientific discourses on the nature of the body and sexuality, how it links to the role of the liminality in discourses of power, and how poetic play and gender figure in contemporary contexts, both literary and theoretical. We begin by looking at representations and attitudes towards gender in the Middle Ages via literary and non-literary texts, examining the role of gender in relation to rhetoric, philosophy, representations of Christ, Old Norse mythology, and more. We will then look at how medieval texts play with gender and speak to modern times.

Often, medieval texts and modern theoretical work will be paired together to “dialogue” with one another. And, since dialogue is a trans-historical pedagogical form of play, we will see where our discussions take us, possibly mofifying the syllabus, letting our course transform along the way.