Abstract
This chapter examines two widely divergent instances of sexualized violence against women whose bodies have been figured as foreign and barbaric threats within collective national bodies: the real case of a massacre in the modern state of Gujarat in southwestern India in 2002 and the imaginative case of Alexander the Great’s massacre of a race of giant women in the fantasized Babilonia of the Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East.
For all colonization involves the taming of the beast by bestial methods and hence both the conversion and projection of the animal and human, difference and identity. On display, the freak represents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the outside, is now territory.
—Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
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Notes
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 ), 203.
Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 ), 93.
Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing,400–1600 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988 ), 82.
Asa Simon Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England ( New York and London: Routledge, 2006 ), 80.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 151 and 152.
Janet M. Bately, ed., The Old English Orosius, EETS s.s. 6 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), 66. 7.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 ), 15.
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© 2008 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
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Joy, E.A. (2008). The Signs and Location of a Flight (or Return?) of Time: The Old English Wonders of the East and the Gujarat Massacre. In: Cohen, J.J. (eds) Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614123_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614123_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37158-7
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