Abstract
The title of Jacqueline Murray’s essay “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible,” in Bullough and Brundage’s Handbook of Medieval Sexuality is revealing of the status of the medieval lesbian in contemporary scholarship.1 In this essay, Jacqueline Murray decries the fact that the medieval Western lesbian has been regularly elided in most literary criticism first under the rubric “homosexual” in mainstream woman history, and under the rubric “woman” in studies of medieval homosexuality which have focused almost exclusively on male homosexuality. She observes: “Of all groups within medieval society lesbians are the most marginalized and least visible” (191).
The presuppositions we make about sexed bodies … are suddenly and significantly upset by those examples that fail to comply with the categories that naturalize and stabilize that field of bodies for us within the terms of cultural conventions. Hence, the strange, the incoherent, that which falls “outside,” gives us a way of understanding the taken-for-granted world of sexual categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might be constructed differently.
Butler, Gender Trouble, 110
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Notes
Jacqueline Murray, “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible,” in Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, eds., The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. (New York: Garland, 1996), 191–222. With regard to pre-modern Europe, it is important to point out that my use of the word “lesbian” is not the same as what is often implied by it today. What I mean by “lesbian” in the Middle Ages is the emotional and sexual attachment between two women. It does not include the dimensions of political activism or engagement with which the modern notions of lesbianism and homosexuality are often connected, nor is it associated with the politics of gender identity.
Steven Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” in Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), 159.
D. Fisher and L. Schehr, eds., Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
See also Martine Antle and Dominique Fisher, eds., The Rhetoric of the Other: Lesbian and Gay Strategies of Resistance in French and Francophone Contexts (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2002).
This colonialist move has been aptly analyzed by Chandra Mohanty, in the context of Western feminists’ “colonization” of third world women; see her “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988): 61–88. This paper extends many of Mohanty’s conclusions on Western feminist and hegemonic discourses on “third-world women” to the particular case of medieval Arabic lesbianism and its reception by Western scholars.
On the explicitness of the Arabic tradition, see my “Lesbian Sex and the Military: from the Arabic Tradition to French Literature,” in F. Sautman and P. Sheinghorn, eds., Same-Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 179–98. Similarly, in this article, I am interested only in explicit descriptions of lesbian sexual behavior, as opposed to what Judith Bennett has dubbed “lesbian-like,” that is the proposition to study the social history of the lesbian in the Middle Ages by considering the lesbian as a larger category that would include all single women. See Judith Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9.1–2 (January–April 2000): 1–24.
Michèle Perret, “Travesties et transsexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine,” Romance Notes 25.3 (1985): 328.
In Christianity, female cross-dressers (saints, real life or fictional characters) were viewed more positively than one might assume because such women thus demonstrated their desire to become men and attain a higher level of being. For a useful overview of cross-dressing, see Vern Bullough’s chapter in Handbook in Medieval Sexuality, 223–42. For cross-dressing in hagiography, see John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism,” Viator 5. 1 (1974): 1–32.
On cross-dressing in medieval French literature, see Michelle Szkilnik’s “The Grammar of the Sexes in Medieval French Romance,” in Karen J. Taylor, ed., Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature (New York: Garland, 1998), 61–88
See also Valerie Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross-Dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996)
Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Cf. M. C. Lyons, The Arabic Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-Telling, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
For an overview of women warriors in the Arabic tradition, see Driss Cherkaoui, Le Roman de ‘Antar: Perspective littéraire et historique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000).
On the relation between the incest motif and later lesbian episode, see Diane Watt, “Read My Lips: Clippying and Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Livia, Anna, Kira Hall and Ed Finegan, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 1997), 167–77
On incest in the Middle Ages, see E. Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Diane Watt, “Behaving Like a Man? Incest, Lesbian Desire, and Gender Play in Yde et Olive,” Comparative Literature 50.4 (1998): 265–85
Diane Watt, “Read my Lips”; Jacqueline de Weever, “The Lady, the Knight, and the Lover: Androgyny and Integration in La Chanson d’Yde et Olive,” Romanic Review 81.4 (1991): 371–91
Nancy Vine Durling, “Rewriting Gender: Yde et Olive and Ovidian Myth,” Romance Languages Annual 1 (1989): 256–62
Robert Clark, “A Heroine’s Sexual Itinerary: Incest, Transvestism, and Same-Sex Marriage in Yde et Olive,” in Karen J. Taylor, ed., Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature (New York: Garland, 1996), 889–905.
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11.
Judith Butler writes: “The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original,” in Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), 31.
This is Robert’s Clark conclusion in “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama,” New Literary History 28.2 (1997): 341. It is also Watt’s overall conclusion in cited in both these articles.
All citations of the verse epic Yde and Olive are from the latest edition of the text, namely Barbara Anne Brewska’s unpublished dissertation, “Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive I, Croissant, Yde et Olive II, Huon et les Geants: Sequel to Huon de Bordeaux” (Ph.D Vanderbilt, 1977)
All translations are mine. An earlier edition of this text is that of Max Schweigel, Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive: Dreifortsetsungen der chansun von Huon de Bordeaux, nach der einzigen Turiner handschrift (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1889).
Louis Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791,” Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980–81): 11–25.
This has been particularly well articulated in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Although Yde and Olive is written in a Picard dialect (with some East Frankish and Walloon forms), thus associated with the North and the Arabian Nights would have entered France through the South (Spain or Italy), one can still speak of cultural encounters. There is indeed a growing body of evidence that documents commercial and religious links between Northern France and the Mediterranean since at least 1087. Michel Rouche, “L’Age des pirates et des saints (Ve-Xie siècles),” in A. Lottin, ed., Histoire de Boulogne-sur-mer (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983), 48.
Ibn Nasr al-Katib, The Encyclopedia of Pleasure, ed. and trans. Khawam (Aleppo Publishing, 1977), 192. A modern Arabic edition of this text has been done by Khaled Atiyya in a series entitled “Arabic Literary History of Sexuality,” with the publisher’s name and date of publication (purposely?) blackened out; the entire text is printed on paper overlaid with prints of large red trees, making the reading challenging, possibly in order to evade easy recognition of the subject matter and censorship. The chapter on lesbianism is absent from the Arabic edition.
On oral performance as a privileged moment of creation, see Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). While Lord focuses on Homer, his theoretical framework is helpful in understanding the complexity of the Arabian Nights, its oral existence in the Middle Ages, about which we have limited knowledge, and its written record.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31.
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© 2007 Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt
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Amer, S. (2007). Cross-Dressing and Female Same-Sex Marriage in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. In: Cuffel, A., Britt, B. (eds) Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-Modern World. Religion/Culture/Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604292_6
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