Abstract
In 1990, Teresa de Lauretis coined “queer theory”, which subsequently sparked discussion of non-normative gender and sexuality in literature. Despite the theory’s codification nearly 30 years ago, there are few queer approaches to the foundational Old English poem Beowulf. The two primary handbooks on Beowulf, A Beowulf Handbook (1997) and A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003) make no mention of queer theory. In 2009, David Clark’s article “Old English Literature and Same-Sex Desire: An Overview” gave a historiography for studies of early medieval English same-sex relationships and concluded future work should integrate queer theory in their approach. This essay aims to update all three reference-works by enumerating queer theoretical approaches to Beowulf since 1990 through two thematic strands: transgressive human behavior and queer monsters. By examining queer readings of Beowulf, I submit this theory’s usefulness in problematizing long-held assumptions and presenting new possibilities for understanding the Old English heroic world as diverse and plural.
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Notes
This is a summary of Rosemary Hennessy’s outlook on the methodology from her article “Queer Theory: A Review of the “Differences”(1993: 964).
Although more recent than A Beowulf Handbook (Bjork and Niles 1997), Andy Orchard’s A Critical Companion to Beowulf (2003), does not consider gender and sexuality, whether queer or not. In roughly 300 pages, Orchard mentions women or gender only three times (2003: 8,148,198). He considers sexuality only in a passing reference to the “supposed psycho-sexual imagery” when Grendel’s mother sits on Beowulf (2003: 84). Given Orchard’s limited engagement with gender and sexuality, this essay focuses on A Beowulf Handbook’s contributions.
This includes Clark’s own book, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (2009). Clark devotes some analysis to Beowulf but it is not his primary focus. In a similar vein is the earlier volume Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder (Pasternack and Weston 2004). The first section, ‘Same-Sex Acts and Desire: Systems of Meaning,” focuses on queer desire in Old English literature, yet Beowulf goes unmentioned.
According to Clover, “women’s […] words are the equivalent of men’s deeds: it is incumbent upon the woman to urge vengeance and it is incumbent on the man to take it” (1986, 145).
Clark condemns scholars of Old English for failing to answer the theoretical challenges posed by Michele Foucault’s opus History of Sexuality (1976–2018), or the medievalist John Boswell’s controversial book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980). Boswell’s book, although influential for the diffusion of queer theory into medieval studies, leaves Old English literature largely uninvestigated. For a discussion of Boswell and Foucault’s influence, see Clark (2009a, b).
Old English quotations of Beowulf are from Klaeber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg (Fulk et al. 2008). Translations are my own.
An overview of scholarship on Grendel’s mother’s transgressive role is outlined in Trilling (2007).
Mittman and Kim’s work was chosen as a recent exemplar, but they are not the only scholars to apply queer and gender theory to The Wonders of the East. Rosalyn Saunders also approaches the ambiguously gendered monsters in her article: “Becoming Undone: Monstrosity, Leaslicum Wordum, and the Strange Case of the Donestre (2010).” Saunders analyzes the donestre monster through Butler’s theories of gender performance and concludes that the donestre denies gender and sexual categories (Saunders 2010: 1, 16–17). However, she stops short of asserting the monster’s queer potential. This essay could list recent queer scholarship on the Wonders of the East or the Nowell Codex’s other contents, but my primary purpose is to investigate Beowulf’s queer scholarship.
Vaccaro has two forthcoming publications that have a queer approach to Beowulf. One is Vaccaro’s monograph Homo-amory in Beowulf: A Queer Touch on Old English Literature, under consideration for Routledge’s Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture series. This book continues Vaccaro’s discussion of homo-amory, and its potential application. He is also working on another forthcoming monograph: Sadomasochistic Beowulf: Psychic and Somatic Dispersals in Old English Literature. This manuscript is under consideration by the Medieval Institute Publication’s ‘New Queer Medievalisms’ series.
At the time of this essay’s publication, there have been no formal reviews of Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy. However, this volume’s limited engagement with queer theory has been questioned on social media, leading Mary Rambaran-Olm to conclude (via Twitter) that one of the contributors “[…] trivializes queerness (@ISASaxonists).” Rambaran-Olm’s critique speaks to both to this particular volume’s shallow theoretical engagement as well as the broader field’s cursory adoption of contemporary critical approaches.
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@ISASaxonists (Mary Rambaran-Olm). “Speaking of other marginalized groups, this edition has a couple of queer authors but the author of a piece on Beowulf &queerness is straight cis-gendered &is not an expert in queer theory. This author trivializes queerness. I will let my queer colleagues like @erik_kaars 18/26.” Twitter, 27 Dec. 2019, 2:05 p.m., https://twitter.com/ISASaxonists/status/1210667953605238784.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Robert E. Bjork for reading an initial draft of this essay. I am also grateful to Mary Dockray-Miller and Peter Buchanan for providing copies of their essays in Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy prior to its publication. I am indebted to my anonymous reviewer, for their thorough and thoughtful feedback.
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Price, B.A. Potentiality and Possibility: An Overview of Beowulf and Queer Theory. Neophilologus 104, 401–419 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09636-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09636-8