The Medieval Entertainment Channel: The Shrek Quartet

Abstract

For the past several years, whenever I teach Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” (ca. 1385), students say, “it’s like Shrek.”¹ At a cultural moment in which everything is available everywhere at once, what we formerly thought of as a unidirectional (that is, chronological) arrow of influence and allusion has morphed into a matrix of multiplying and constantly reorganizing relations and affinities. Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), by day beautiful, human, and white,² and by night ugly, ogre, and green, is a Loathly Lady analogue that people encounter in the realm of pop culture before meeting, if ever meeting, her medieval sisters. Fiona and the Loathly Lady live in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “great time”: in which cultural productions break through the boundaries of their historical moment, and, I would add, swirl around in a kaleidoscope of new, never to be repeated, patterns.³

These complex temporal reckonings, and especially an expanded understanding of contemporaneity, the now, begin my rumination…on history and time, past and present. Such thinking leads me to a concept of queer history, for in my view a history that reckons in the most expansive way possible with how people exist in time, with what it feels like to be a body in time, or in multiple times, or out of time, is a queer history—whatever else it might be. Historicism is queer when it grasps that temporality itself raises the question of embodiment and subjectivity.

Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities”

They don’t tell you what time it is; they tell you what kind of time it is.

Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali”