Reply to eighteenthcfreak

Thanks for your questions and challenges!

First of all, let me begin by saying that queer medievalists have wrestled with the question of what it actually means to "queer" the Middle Ages, an era that is so fundamentally dissimilar from our own? Or is it? I'm an advocate of the fact that the Middle Ages are radically similar to our historical moment and that so many of the cultural ideas and practices formulated or solidified during the Middle Ages have stayed with us, influencing and informing our own cultural practices. However, I need to also acknowledge that significant--even monumental--cultural artifacts have morphed or mutated between the medieval and contemporary contexts, taking on new meanings, shedding old ones, or being reappropriated by a different context. I see the shift in economic systems of production as one of the most powerful factors affecting how institutions and practices change to accommodate new contexts. However, human inclinations toward tradition and nostalgia
concurrently work against fundamental or radical transformations of such practices. In other words, behaviors and actions tolerated in the medieval feudal economy (especially sexual behaviors and actions) may shift in meaning and interpretatibility to become intolerable or threatening. Therefore, we can look to the Middle Ages and seek to name acts that we find "queer" from our contemporary post-postmodern worldviews, or we as medievalists can alternatively seek to discern and understand acts seen as "queer" within the medieval context. These are the two principal avenues of inquiry.

Implicit homoerotic desire, for instance, tends to be glossed over in medieval romance texts, suggesting that such moments were not the cause of anxiety to medieval audiences. Men expressing love and devotion to each other, sharing a bed, or partaking in other symbolic acts of profound affective emotion seem to be part of normative medieval noble masculinity. In fact, such deep bonds of affection seem to work to enhance militaristic cohesion and inspire impressive acts of military prowess. In sum, they are merely manifestions of homosocial bonding. In the contemporary moment, however, where masculinity has changed in considerable ways, we experiene anxiety or confusion when we, as readers, happen upon these instances of homosocial desire, feeling somehow that such acts must represent more than mere homosocial bonding and wonder as to the possibility of such instances being evidence of homoerotic intimacy. In simplest terms, did these knights just
love each other, or did they LOVE each other?

One could probably make the argument that, although the knights demonstrate affection for each other in ways that would be seen as bizarre or "queer" in the current moment, behaviors have changed such that it is anachronistic to read anything more into it.

The question becomes more complicated if we consider what I referred to as moments of "explicit desire." Wherever same-sex sexual relations are addressed within romance, they are done so with implications of abnormality and sodomy. For instance, I'm thinking of the trope of the "homosexual accusation" in Marie de France's Lanval. The queen, rebuffed by Sir Lanval when she tries to seduce him, resorts to accusing him of "enjoying himself with the stable boys," thus initiating the medieval equivalent of gay panic. There are many other such examples from the genre of romance. We can assume, then, that sodomitical behavior was intolerable, undesirable, and potentially disastrous for one's positionality in terms of sexuality, gender, and class status.

This discussion pushes me to a slightly more sophisticated point, then. That is, that if knights experienced homoerotic affection or desire for each other, it had to be veiled in acceptable terms and any actual acts between them would have to be covert if they happened at all. Certainly, as I have previously said, affection and emotional intimacy could be safely experienced and articulated between knights, as long as it didn't progress to overt acts. This is especially interesting considering that such overt EXPRESSIONS of affection are no longer comfortably tolerated in the current era. Something shifted in the meantime, and I suggest that it was the shfit from feudalism to industrial capitalism, when individuals had to marry for romantic love rather than out of economic necessity. Therefore, homoerotic affection, even if homoerotic acts are out of the picture, is still a dangerous enough threat to heteronormative marriage and must be pushed beyond
the boundaries of normative behavior...and into the realm of the queer.

Now, what to make of this?