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Today is sex and gender day! I think this happened last year too. Must be something about Fridays.
"Naked as a Nedyll": The Eroticism of Malory's Elaine in Morte Darthur -- Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College
I came in about 3-4 minutes into the talk and I'm not sure that the paper I'm hearing is the one in the program. It seems to concern the story of Havelock the Dane with touches of Hugh of Lincoln and ... ah, I seem to be in the wrong room. Just a moment. Ok, right room now.
The paper compares different versions of Lancelot's encounter with Elaine and how Lancelot's emotional reaction is portrayed, and the uses of nudity (including "nudity" that involves wearing undergarments) in provoking that response.
With a Name Like Silence, It has to be Good: Food for Thought, Erotic Gastronomic Language, and Appetite for Morality in Le Roman de silence -- Sarah Gillette, Western Michigan Univ.
(I'm a sucker for papers on Silence since it involves a cross-dressing, passing chivalric heroine.) At a crucial early point in the story, personifications of Nature and Nurture debate over the protagonist's fate and there is a description of Nature's desire to create a perfect being, using metaphors and imagery of cooking a grand dish. But there's also a thread of sexual desire not merely being imagined as appetite for food, but competing with it for control of the experiencer. There is an emphasis on how Nature is being immoderate in her creation in making Silence almost too perfect (an early Mary Sue?), but that this excess perfection is, in part, what enables Silence to express both a feminine and masculine nature. But having done so, Nature (in the context of the Nature-Nurture debate) is upset that SIlence chooses to follow a masculine role. (The back-story is that there's a law that only men** can inherit, so Silence's parents raise her, their only child, as a boy.)
**Corrected from the originally-posted error.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes towards the Homoerotic: The Latin and Vernacular Evidence -- Christopher T. Vaccaro
It's the old problem of trying to find clues to actual behavior in the literature of prohibition and penalty. A number of penitential handbooks were examined to see what types of same-sex sexual activities were described and how and whether they were differentiated according to age, types of activities, etc. There is a regular distinction in penalties depending on whether the act has been committed once or whether it has become habitual. Boys and molles are given much lighter penalties and are explicitly linked to adulterous women in the evaluation of the sin. There is also language that can reasonably be interpreted as differentiating several types of sexual acts. The Anglo-Saxon penitential texts introduces a word that doesn't quite correspond to the Latin nomenclature for active and passive sexual roles. The baedling apparently indicates a man who habitually has sex wtih other men. But unlike the Latin language there's no indication of an active or passive role, and there are penances given for "if a baedling fornicates with a baedling". This suggests that the current Foucaultian idea that "homosexual identity" is a purely modern concept may derive from too narrow an examination of historic cultures. The examples provided on the handout also include one lone mention of women fornicating with women (and, like other texts, mentioning masturbation in the same breath as an equivalent, if lesser, act).
Today is sex and gender day! I think this happened last year too. Must be something about Fridays.
"Naked as a Nedyll": The Eroticism of Malory's Elaine in Morte Darthur -- Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College
I came in about 3-4 minutes into the talk and I'm not sure that the paper I'm hearing is the one in the program. It seems to concern the story of Havelock the Dane with touches of Hugh of Lincoln and ... ah, I seem to be in the wrong room. Just a moment. Ok, right room now.
The paper compares different versions of Lancelot's encounter with Elaine and how Lancelot's emotional reaction is portrayed, and the uses of nudity (including "nudity" that involves wearing undergarments) in provoking that response.
With a Name Like Silence, It has to be Good: Food for Thought, Erotic Gastronomic Language, and Appetite for Morality in Le Roman de silence -- Sarah Gillette, Western Michigan Univ.
(I'm a sucker for papers on Silence since it involves a cross-dressing, passing chivalric heroine.) At a crucial early point in the story, personifications of Nature and Nurture debate over the protagonist's fate and there is a description of Nature's desire to create a perfect being, using metaphors and imagery of cooking a grand dish. But there's also a thread of sexual desire not merely being imagined as appetite for food, but competing with it for control of the experiencer. There is an emphasis on how Nature is being immoderate in her creation in making Silence almost too perfect (an early Mary Sue?), but that this excess perfection is, in part, what enables Silence to express both a feminine and masculine nature. But having done so, Nature (in the context of the Nature-Nurture debate) is upset that SIlence chooses to follow a masculine role. (The back-story is that there's a law that only men** can inherit, so Silence's parents raise her, their only child, as a boy.)
**Corrected from the originally-posted error.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes towards the Homoerotic: The Latin and Vernacular Evidence -- Christopher T. Vaccaro
It's the old problem of trying to find clues to actual behavior in the literature of prohibition and penalty. A number of penitential handbooks were examined to see what types of same-sex sexual activities were described and how and whether they were differentiated according to age, types of activities, etc. There is a regular distinction in penalties depending on whether the act has been committed once or whether it has become habitual. Boys and molles are given much lighter penalties and are explicitly linked to adulterous women in the evaluation of the sin. There is also language that can reasonably be interpreted as differentiating several types of sexual acts. The Anglo-Saxon penitential texts introduces a word that doesn't quite correspond to the Latin nomenclature for active and passive sexual roles. The baedling apparently indicates a man who habitually has sex wtih other men. But unlike the Latin language there's no indication of an active or passive role, and there are penances given for "if a baedling fornicates with a baedling". This suggests that the current Foucaultian idea that "homosexual identity" is a purely modern concept may derive from too narrow an examination of historic cultures. The examples provided on the handout also include one lone mention of women fornicating with women (and, like other texts, mentioning masturbation in the same breath as an equivalent, if lesser, act).
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Date: 2010-05-14 03:48 pm (UTC)Should that read that only men can inherit, or do her parents not want her to inherit?
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Date: 2010-05-14 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 10:43 pm (UTC)