Heterosexuality as a threat to medieval studies

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 14-29

  Schultz, James A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845531110     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2006.0060     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Allen J. Frantzen, Before the doset: Same-Sex Love from "Beowulf to "Angels in America" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1, 15.
2. For the strongest arguments see Glenn Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xv, xviii, 38-47;
3. Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 180-82, 199-205;
4. Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xi-xxii, 45-16,90-94,137-38.
5. 1 have addressed this issue more briefly in James A. Schultz, "Bodies that Don't Matter: Heterosexuality before Heterosexuality in Gottfried's Tristan," in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 91-110, here 95-96, 103-5.
6. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 225.
7. Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O. Laumann, and Gina Kolata, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 31.
8. Janet E. Halley, "The Construction of Heterosexuality," in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 82-102, here 91,98.
9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Gender Criticism," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 271-302, here 285.
10. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Tears of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.
11. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 46, emphasis in original.
12. Susan Schibanoff, "Sodomy's Mark: Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, and the Medieval Theory of Authorship," in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 28-56, here 48.
13. Aristotle, Physics, in Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols., Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:315-446, here 194b30, 915a21;
14. Metaphysics, in Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, in ibid., 2:1552-1728, here 1013a30, 1013b23.
15. Schibanoff, "Sodomy's Mark," 48-49.
16. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in Barnes, The Complete Works, 1:1111-1218, here 729b1.
17. The Complete Works, Ibid., 730a25.
18. Frantzen, 1, 14-15.
19. Sedgwick, "Gender Criticism," 275, emphasis added.
20. How different is "same-sex" from "homosexual" anyway? It still makes sexual object choice the paramount criterion, which may not have been the case for many of the kinds of relations we lump together as "same-sex." See Leila J. Rupp, "Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality," Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 2 (2001): 287-302, here 294-95.
21. Like Frantzen, Jeffrey J. Cohen also opposes "same-sex" to "heterosexuality" (Medieval Identity Machines [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 105).
22. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981; orig. publ. 1912-36), Second Part of the Second Part, Question 154, Articles 1, 12. The quotation is from Article 1.
23. Summa theologica, Ibid., Article 12, Reply Obj. 4.
24. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 196.
25. Arnold Davidson, "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality," Critical Inquiry 14 (1987): 16-48, here 37.
26. Pierre J. Payer, "Confession and the Study of Sex in the Middle Ages," in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 3-31, here 14, 12.
27. Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, Ibid., 5.
28. The Penitential of Theodore, in Medieval Handbooks of Penance, ed. John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 179-215, here 1.2, 184-86.
29. Payer, "Confession and the Study of Sex," 6-7.
30. David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 133-34.
31. Cited in Halley, "The Construction of Heterosexuality," 91-92, 94-95.
32. Quoted from Singleton's commentary to Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. with commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 2:270.
33. For sensible remarks on the fraught question of medieval and modern sexual "identities" see Joan Cadden, "Sciences/Silences: The Natures and Languages of 'Sodomy' in Peter of Abano's Problemata Commentary," in Lochrie, McCracken, and Schultz, Constructing Medieval Sexuality, 40-57, here 52;
34. Mark Jordan, "Touching and Acting, or The Closet of Abjection," Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 2 (2001): 180-84, here 182-83.
35. Barrie Ruth Straus, "Freedom through Renunciation? Women's Voices, Women's Bodies, and the Phallic Order," in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 245-64, here 245, 246, 255, emphasis added.
36. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, Ibid., 249 (twice), 252, 256,259.
37. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, Ibid., 255.
38. Jacqueline Murray, "Introduction," in Murray and Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline, ix-xxviii, here xxii-xxiii.
39. Straus, "Freedom through Renunciation?" 251, 253, 255, emphasis in original.
40. Sedgwick, "Gender Criticism," 293.
41. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 119, 118, 120. Hereafter cited in text.
42. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (London: Routledge, 1993), 3-44, here 33.
43. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Ibid., 33.
44. The transformation of marriage into heterosexuality is common. Barrie Ruth Straus begins her queering of Emily that way. Jeffrey Cohen has a number of ways of eliding the two: King Alfred's wedding feast is his entry "into institutionalized heterosexuality"; Yvain is rewarded for "circumscribing his energy within a heterosexual, socially approved coupling," that is, "the new vision of marriage disseminated by the Church"; in the Charette Chrétien "queers" this same "newly dominant formulation of heterosexuality" (Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, xx, 87, 106).
45. Marilyn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn confuse heterosexuality and gender in a different way: a series of illustrations to Christine de Pisan's Othea invites the viewer to see an "economy of female desire . . . that is not paradigmatically heterosexual" because it draws "on female agency and authority" ("Queering Ovidian Myth: Bestiality and Desire in Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea," in Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, 3-27, here 6, see also 9,16).
46. This is clearly a challenge to normative gender arrangements. But why is it a challenge to heterosexuality? On the importance of distinguishing sexuality and gender, especially for feminists, see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 94-95.
47. This is hardly surprising in view of Dinshaw's stated goal. Although she says she wants to "historicize," she is not really interested in large cultural structures or paradigms in their synchronic complexity. She is not interested in describing the conceptual structures of a particular time and place. She is committed instead to the creation of communities over time, connections from one place in the present to small "pieces of history" (39): she is motivated by a "desire . . . for partial, affective connection, for community, for even a touch across time" (21). She is more interested in diachronic threads across time than synchronic webs in a particular time.
48. Glenn Burger, "Shameful Pleasures: Up Close and Dirty with Chaucer, Flesh, and the Word," in Burger and Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages, 213-35, here 214.
49. When this sentence reappears in Chaucer's Queer Nation, "heterosexuality" has been replaced by "sexuality" (Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation, 4).
50. Schibanoff, "Sodomy's Mark," 48-49.
51. Glenn Burger makes a similar point: "Dinshaw's . . . attempt to 'touch' the queerness of the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, as well as 'real' medieval queers . . . does so by distinguishing their queer voices from a 'Chaucer' that is fundamentally and crucially heterosexual" (Chaucer's Queer Nation, xv, emphasis in original).
52. Carolyn Dinshaw, "Chaucer's Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer," Exemplaria 7, no. 1 (1995): 75-92, here 77.
53. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62.
54. Burger, Chaucer's Queer Nation, xviii, emphasis added.
55. Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies, xix, xvi.
56. See the few pages in which George Chauncey summarizes to powerful effect the evidence for the very recent and deliberate creation of the heterosexual norm in the United States, concluding that "in an important sense, there is no tradition of heterosexuality in this society" ("The Queer History and Politics of Lesbian and Gay Studies," in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, ed. Joseph A. Boone [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000], 298-315, here 311, emphasis in original).