Abstract
That gender matters in romance is self-evident. The construction of complementary and antithetical gender roles upholds the heteronormative framework on which the romance genre is predicated: it is the opposition of normative gender identities of masculinity and femininity that facilitates the romantic relationship. However, these gender identities become less certain, less clearly defined when they are collocated with Eastern ethnic or religious identity. The gender blurring, or queering, that can occur in an Orientalized space disrupts the linear logic of gender, suggesting the possibility of gender identification that is more subversive and more troubling to the romantic structures of heteronormativity.
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Notes
Rachel Dressler, “Steel Corpse: Imagining the Knight in Death,” Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (London: Garland, 1999), 154–155.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the members of Interscripta, Medieval Masculinities: Heroism, Sanctity, and Gender, April 30, 2012, http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/e-center/interscripta/mm.html (page no longer available).
For a thorough examination of the relationship between the Old French romance and its European adaptations, see Patricia Grieve, Floire and Blancheflor and the European Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Donald B. Sands ed., Middle English Verse Romances (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 280.
See Jane Gilbert, “Boys Will Be… What? Gender, Sexuality, and Childhood in Floire et Blancheflor and Floris and Lyriope,” Exemplaria 9.1 (1997), 39–61
P. McCaffery, “Sexual Identity in Floire et Blancheflor and Ami et Amile,” Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland, 1998), 129–151
Lynn Shutters, “Christian Love or Pagan Transgression? Marriage and Conversion in Floire et Blancheflor,” Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 85–108.
Vern L. Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Thelma S. Fenster, and Jo Ann McNamara (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 41.
For an outline, see Kathryn M. Ringrose, “Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium,” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert H. Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 85–109.
Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Brower and Guilfoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. On Abelard and eunchism, see Martin Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinisation,” Cohen and Wheeler, 87–106.
Peggy McCracken, “Chaste Subjects: Gender, Heroism, and Desire in the Grail Quest,” Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 137–138.
A. J. Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 152
Murray, “Sexual Mutilation and Castration Anxiety: A Medieval Perspective,” The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 264; Irvine, “Abelard,” 90, 93–94.
Matthew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 34.
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182.
John A. Geck, “‘For Goddes Loue, Sir, Mercy!’ Recontextualising the Modern Critical Tex t of Floris and Blancheflor,” Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 88–89.
Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994), 206.
Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance : Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1982), 31; Jayne Ann Krentz, “Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness,” Krentz, 107; Doreen Owens Malek, “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: The Hero as Challenge,” Krentz, 74–75; Robyn Donald, “Mean, Moody, and Magnificent: The Hero in Romance Literature,” Krentz, 82; Suzanne Simmons Guntrum, “Happily Ever After: The Ending as Beginning,” Krentz, 152.
Sarah S. G. Frantz, “‘Expressing’ Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power,” Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America, ed. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 18.
Heather Schell, “The Big Bad Wolf: Masculinity and Genetics in Popular Culture,” Literature and Medicine 26.1 (2007), 109.
Turner, “E. M. Hull,” 173. For an examination of the “cultural cross-dressing” of Lawrence of Arabia and Rudolph Valentino, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin, 1992), 304–311.
Annie West, For the Sheikh’s Pleasure (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007), 109.
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970 (London: Flamingo, 1999), 204, 199; Moody, “Temptation,” 143.
Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 206.
I have discounted one sheikh title that does not state whether the heroine is a virgin or not: Michelle Reid, The Sheikh’s Chosen Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2002).
Derek Hopwood, Sexual Encounters in the Middle East (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1999), 277.
Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih, “Introduction: Virginities and Virginity Studies,” Medieval Virginities, ed. Bernau, Evans, and Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 1.
The valuing of women within a system of heterosexual patriarchy has been theorized by Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
Kim M. Philips, “Four Virgins’ Tales: Sex and Power in Medieval Law,” Medieval Virginities, ed. Bernau, Evans, and Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 86.
Casting women as goods and men as merchants is a trope that has been analyzed by Kathleen Coyne Kelly in “The Bartering of Blauncheflur in the Middle English Floris and Blauncheflur,” Studies in Philology 91 (1994), 101–110.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000), 8.
For a critique of the representation of the hymen in romance see Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels (New York: Fireside, 2009), 27, 37–40.
Sarah Salih, “Performing Virginity: Sex and Violence in the Katherine Group,” Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 95–112; Kelly, Performing Virginity, 17–39.
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© 2016 Amy Burge
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Burge, A. (2016). “For You are a Man and She is a Maid”: Gender and the East. In: Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-59356-6_4
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