This is the archive of the discussion which followed the publication of "Medieval Masculinities" as a hypertext article. The discussion took place in November, 1994, and only posts which were distributed through the Interscripta list appear here.
From jjcohen@gwis2 Sun Nov 13 14:58:29 1994
Subject: medieval masculinities: new discussion
During the week commencing Monday, November 14, Interscripta will be sponsoring a discussion of the write-up of the Medieval Masculinities discussion which took place in this same forum last November and December.
The essay version of "Medieval Masculinities" is available in two versions: an ascii (plain) text, which will be distributed to all Interscripta subscribers along with this note; and a hypertext version which collates the article with the seven weeks of the discussion archive, a bibliography, and some notes. Of the two versions, the second is the superior one: it takes advantage of hypertext technology to enact its argument in the rhetoric of its presentation.
The hypertext Masculinities article is accessible through the Labyrinth, which can be reached via any Web browser (e.g. lynx or Mosaic) at:
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/labyrinth-home.html
The article will be in the Interscripta section of the "Labyrinth Electronic Center."
Most people should be able to enter the lynx browser simply by typing the word "lynx" at their unix prompt; then type "g" and the Labyrinth address. Personally, I advise that you try to read the article with a more sophisticated browser, like Mosaic; to do this you may have to visit your school's computer lab. The advantage of Mosaic is that you will have a much more comfortable, user-friendly environment in which to view the piece. In creating the hypertext version of the article I tried many different readers, and found Mosaic Netscape (the newest of them) by far the most problem-free. Also, if you don't have a direct Internet connection, you can always get a copy of Netscape for free from NCSA (accessible via the Labyrinth), download the ten texts of the Masculinities discussion, and then read them as a local file on your Mac or Windows PC.
On Monday I'll be posting an opening statement, and then a bit later some more on hypertext and gender construction.
I realize that this is a busy time of year, and for that reason, I'm keeping the discussion brief. For most of us the temptation will be to shelf the article for future reading (at least, I know I'd be tempted to do that if I weren't the one who wrote it!); I ask you to please read it right away and access the hypertext version as soon as possible so that you'll be able to share your comments during this short discussion.
Jeffrey
_________________________
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Department of English and Program in Human Sciences
The George Washington University
From jjcohen@gwis2 Mon Nov 14 20:03:01 1994
Subject: Masculinities II: Opening Statement
Much has changed in the year now separating us from the instigation of the six week Interscripta "Medieval Masculinities" discussion.
Gender studies continues to be an important umbrella term under which scholars in a wide range of disciplines cluster their critical inquiries. The conference circuit is full of theoretically informed panels and papers, from "Queer Chaucer" at last July's New Chaucer Society in Dublin to a vast array of gender studies panels at next May's Kalamazoo (including a session on "Arthurian Masculinities" that will feature a version of the article you have been sent). Books and articles relevant to the topic have continued to appear; most significant among these has been Clare Lees' collection _Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages_, surely high on every medievalist's reading list.
If I were composing the first post of the discussion over again today - the one about Masculinity and Halloween - I'd be writing not of a quiet Cambridge neighborhood filled with children in plastic costumes, but of a more riotous street scene in Washington, D.C., where a carnival of cross-dressing culminated in a high heel race (I believe someone dressed as Rose Kennedy won, though it was hard to tell because the person dressed as Priscilla Queen of the Desert kept pulling her back). Still, the questions I would offer wouldn't differ much: identity remains a category every bit as problematic and worthy of interrogation.
In the week ahead we are going to discuss two things: the write-up of the masculinities discussion from last year, and the future of "medieval masculinities." Having covered as much ground as we did (and a brief glance at the archive will remind just how much that was), where do we go from here? What questions remain unanswered, what approaches must be rethought? You need not have contributed to the discussion the last time around to participate in this one; I'm interested in hearing as many voices as time will allow.
All I request is that you take the time to read through the article carefully, and if possible make an attempt to access the hypertext version. The latter represents a significant advance in the possibilities for scholarly essays. Aware of the delicate line a moderator must walk when reducing the many voices of a discussion (in this case, fifty-five) into the one voice of a write-up (my own), I decided that hypertext would be the ideal medium for such a compilation. When working through the hypertext article, a reader can call up the full text of posts I refer to in only a few words; the posts' authors can fully speak in their own voice, without the interference of my editing or summary. The reader can then return to the article, or pursue the discussion through the archive, perhaps following the thread to its end. Notes and a bibliography complete the collation. (The bibliography is meant to be a living document, with frequent updates; I realize that as it stands it is woefully incomplete, and would be grateful to anyone who would pass along references to add to it).
Send whatever comments you have to the list if you wish to share them in this second colloquium, or to me privately if you prefer not to make them public. Eventually the archive of this discussion will also be linked via hypertext to the Masculinities discussion now on the Labyrinth. --- Jeffrey
________________________ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Department of English and Program in Human Sciences
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
Subject: change of address
Several Interscripta subscribers have been trying to reach me at a Harvard email address included in the header to most of the posts in the "Masculinities" archive now on the Labyrinth. That address is no longer valid. When I first moderated the discussion I was teaching in the History and Literature program at Harvard; as my opening statement indicated, though, my institutional affiliation has changed. My new email address is: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
The correct address is also displayed when you choose the very first hypertext link in the Masculinities article.
Has anyone had a chance to take a look at the article? If so, what did you think?
Jeffrey
______________________
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Department of English
George Washington University
Washington DC 20052
(202)994-6644 jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 17:58:27 NST
From: "Martin Irvine, Georgetown University" <M_IRVINE@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Hypertext Masculinities
Jeffrey Cohen's hypertext article and synthesis of the _Interscripta_ discussion is a really fine piece of work. If anyone in the profession still doubts whether e-journals and e-articles can match the intellectual value of traditional print articles they should look at Jeffrey's exemplary work. This is whole new ground for medieval studies and for the lit. profession in general. I think Jeffrey's piece will become a model and starting point for future developments in scholarly publishing on the Internet. If you haven't had a chance to read the article with all the carefully worked out hypertext links (to bibliography and archives of the discussion), please go to the Labyrinth Electronic Center (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/labyrinth-home.html; select "Electronic Center", the the Interscripta discussion on that page).
--Martin Irvine
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 11:18:04 NST
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: gender and hypertext
I'm distributing, for your comments, a copy of the preface to the hypertext "Medieval Masculinities" article.
Many of you have already seen this preface in a "cleaner" form when you accessed the article now on the Labyrinth. I'm distributing this piece in html (hypertext mark-up language) for two reasons. First, because it is a preface, it has few anchors and therefore very little "mark-up" in it, making it almost as readable as ordinary text; I thought some of you might appreciate the chance to see what a simple hypertext document looks like when not viewed through lynx or mosaic. Second, rendering the "language of power" (or, as in hypertext, "language of power")
visible is exactly what the preface -- and the study of gender -- is all about.
In what follows, you may ignore anything in <brackets> or fronted by an ampersand (" is a quotation mark, as you probably figured out); ordinarily, these commands to your software would not be visible.
My thanks to Glenn Burger and Michael Uebel for their encouragement with this piece.
---Jeffrey
______________________________________
<h3>Hypertext and Masculinities</h3>
<a name = "back">The</a> new kinds of scholarly writing and experiences of reading which hypertext enables was recognized several years ago by George Landow (<cite>Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, </cite>Johns Hopkins 1992), who wrote compellingly of the associative rather than linear logics which hypermedia encourages. A text that opens itself to the reader like a city to wander through rather than as a map that makes a geometry of that same sprawl is the kind of text Roland Barthes envisioned as writerly: <blockquote> the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text (<cite>S/Z</cite> [NY: Hill and Wang, 1974], p.4) </blockquote> The hypertext essay is a collaborative work, a space where author meets reader in a dynamic arena in which the one structures invisble paths and silently directive delimiters of experience while the other negotiates these roads according to both an unseen intention and a will to knowledge capable, perhaps, of finding other ways through the textual labyrinth, of mapping new journeys by reinventing meaning within a world always less solid than it appears. <p> Hypertext enables new scholarly methodologies, but it can also <em>enact </em> them. The fine line between word and performance (speech and action, <i>langue et parole,</i> conceptualiziation and incorporation -- I'm elaborating here by amplification, not by appositive binarism) blurs both in hypertext and, as the article which follows argues, in gender. The experience of gender is not all that different from the experience of a text connected by invisible anchors and hotspots that organize a potentially random event (reading, or being) into coherence ("meaning"). A simultaneous freedom and constriction inhere in both hypertextual spaces and gender codes: those unseen authorial hands that have structured the roads which construct the reading of a hypertext piece (and which, because self-erasing, can be approached as "authorial" only through obscured traces) can be compared to the unseen <em>naturalizing</em> processes that manufacture gender within a given society and sanction which paths of action have meaning, and which are <dfn>random </dfn> (meaningless) or <dfn>monstrous </dfn>(meaningful but dangerous, because challenging). Invisible powers lose their potency only when brought into the light. If you wish, you could download this discussion you are now reading in hypertext and examine its collected words through some other viewer, as a plain (ascii) text. Through this new optics you would suddenly see all of the strange symbols with which I have peppered the article: the little brackets that make <strong>this</strong> word appear with emphasis on your screen, and the string of code that empowers <a href="#back">this </a> word, if you touch it, to catapult you back somewhere you have already been. The forest of symbols that determine meaning within this language (<dfn>html</dfn>: hypertext mark-up language) would become visible, and after some work, comprehensible as a system. You might even be able to draw a complex map of what anchors lead to which destinations - of what words lead to what other groups of words, what texts connect to what other texts, what meaning structures lie buried deep within the hypertext. You would find that you are reading not a single text (<cite> Medieval Masculinities</cite>) but an imbricated set of <a href = "notes.html#note3">ten texts</a>, almost simultaneously.<p> Gender works in similar ways. I'm not arguing for a simple structuralism here: the submerged schemata themselves are not natural, not givens, not even necessary as they are configured; meaning is potentially in flux even within a path of hypertext links, and the only claims I make about a writer's ability to authorize meaning (and about a society's ability to authorize gender) is that it is a dangerous project that doesn't always succeed, especially because it is and must be collaborative. Nor am I making claims about "author functions" other than to point out that even when the author is dead, the author's ghost survives in that limbo between power and powerlessness that bounds interpretation. The author of the text constructs a space of possibility by closing off other spaces; the social forces that construct gender work similarly, through a complex negotiation between what is envalued as orthodox and desirable, and what is marginalized as aberrrant or condemned to the unthinkable. <p>
Gender, like hypertext, is multivocal: it contains an array of (potential) meanings, some of which will be amplified, some of which will remain silent. Hypertext enacts gender when the text is pluralized into texts, when a rhetoric of monologism is allowed to break into an experience of critical plenitude. Fifty-five voices contributed to the Interscripta discussion of medieval masculinities; one voice orders them into an article, but through intercollation with an archive and bibliography, each can also speak for itself. <p>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 13:27:43 NST
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Cum tacent ..
.. clamant?
Cicero equated silence with assent. I'm tempted to do the same, but fear that I overestimated the willingness of Interscripta's subscribers (a Freudian typo: I just wrote 'Interscripta survivors" and had to backspace) at this busy time of year to commit to another project.
"Medieval Masculinities" will remain on the Labyrinth indefinitely as a resource for students and scholars. I hope that all of you will feel free to bring its existence to the attention of those who would be interested by it but don't participate in forums like this one, or who are not medievalists. I also hope that sometime in the near future, as time allows, you will sit with one or both versions of the article, read them through, and pass your comments along to me (jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu).
It isn't too late to post something to the whole group if you'd like; I'll at least keep the forum open through the weekend, and perhaps early into next week.
Jeffrey
From: uschanov@cc.joensuu.fi (TP Uschanov)
Message-Id: <9411181649.AA14990@cc.joensuu.fi>
Subject: Re: Cum tacent ..
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 18:49:55 EET
> Cicero equated silence with assent. I'm tempted to do the same, but fear > that I overestimated the willingness of Interscripta's subscribers (a > Freudian typo: I just wrote 'Interscripta survivors" and had to > backspace) at this busy time of year to commit to another project.
Well, the "Finnish Ambrose Bierce" of the '80s and '90s, Markus Kajo, once wrote that "the most reliable way one can test 'silence gives consent' is to go to one's junior high school child's room at 5 a.m. to ask if he is awake and motivated to hurry to school to perceive new information"!
T. P. Uschanov
Dept. of Finnish Lit. & Lang. and Cult'l Studies
University of Joensuu, Finland
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 17:44:22 NST
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: lynx, again
Deb Everhart informs me that the kansas server no longer accepts lynx log-ins. But there is an even easier way to access the labyrinth using lynx if you don't have it on your home server. Telnet to guvax.georgetown.edu, and log in as "lynx" (no password).
You'll find yourself at the Georgetown home page, where the Labyrinth appears as one of the choices of where to go next.
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 20:49:41 NST
From: James W Earl <JWEARL@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: Cum tacent ..
Jeffrey--
I know I'm not the only one who began a response to your postings and
then realized more time and thought was necessary. Here at Oregon we are discussing medieval masculinities. You do not overestimate the subscribers, except perhaps you overestimate their quick-draw speed. While I am on-screen, I will only say at this point that Martin is right, that this is state-of-the-art work, and a delight to meditate on even in disagreement. My own concern with your introductory "Hypertext and Gender" discussion is that it presents an analogy which could be extended indefinitely; why not "Hypertext and Food," "Hypertext and Sports," or "Hypertext and Discourse Generally"? Though the analogy helps make the point that gender is culturally constructed, it neither proves the point nor clarifies gender theory. Just as important to me, for reasons having to do with my own cultural construction rather than Truth, is the fact that I have always treated the Library in exactly the way you describe hypertext; and I wonder whether the venture into hypertext provides a change in kind, or just in efficiency. I will not soon abandon the pleasures of wandering through a real, rather than a virtual library. Certainly hypertext does not enable us for the first time to become producers rather than merely consumers of texts.
These are just initial reactions, bound to change and develop when I finally enter the labyrinth and wander through your hypertext. Despite my cranky nostalgia for Papertext, Medieval Masculinities is the delight of the season, providing rich food for thought. Congratulations and thanks!
Jim Earl
From: ENGFOSTE@EKU.ACS.EKU.EDU
Subject: Medieval Masculinities
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Jeffrey,
I finally lynxed to the article. It is absolutely fascinating. Based on the article, I feel that I only marginally understood the entire Interscripta discussion. I have a lot of reading of primary texts to do to catch up, really. But one thing is clear to me--gender studies is a different ball game than feminist studies.
I have a couple of thoughts to add, particularly if you are thinking about what directions to take after "Medieval Masculinities." For example, what about Medieval Femininities, if such a thing exists? More importantly, I would be interested in a discussion which focussed on gender constructions--not just in literature but in society, as well as in literature--before and after the Norman Conquest. I have a theory that I would be interested in exploring further, that gender construction in the later Medieval Ages, and to which the Church seemed acutely devoted, may in part have been a reaction against less pronounced concepts of gender in Anglo-Saxon England. Notice, for instance, how many of the examples in the Medieval Masculinities discussion are not from England at all. It seems to me that we may too often assume that continental constructions of gender pervaded when, in fact, they may not have held true for Anglo-Saxon England. I wonder if there is a way to measure the extent to which mysogyny, or even simple antifeminism were defensive tactics, desperate means to subdue the Anglo-Saxons after the conquest.
If such is the case, then what is said about both masculinity and femininity in Medieval literature may have to be qualified for literature in Anglo-Saxon England. For instance, your article associates heroism with masculinity in the Middle Ages, and the discussion is both persuasive and lucid. But can we assume, as the article appears to, that Judith's heroism, for example, would have been considered anomalous, a masculine trait? Would the Anglo-Saxons have admired her for being masculine instead of feminine? In other words, would her heroism naturally have been associated with masculinity? I have doubts about that. I certainly think that the Anglo-Saxons associated dying in battle with heroism, but I am not sure about the extent to which such an associaton was linked with masculinity. Such an association is undoubtedly true for the later Middle Ages, as the examples show. And William of Malmesbury, an Anglo-Norman writer, certainly associated Aethelflaed's martial activities with masculinity. But such an association does not appear in the contemporary materials on Aethelflaed. These are some of the questions that remain for me from the Medieval Masculinities discussion.
Karen Foster.
From: rstein@purvid.purchase.edu (Robert Stein)
Subject: Medieval Masculinities
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 1994 11:48:05 -0500 (EST)
Jeffrey--
First of all, I think the article is superb. You'll see that I just
recommended it on medfem. I read it with great pleasure in the hypertext version (using lynx), and I'm going to print out the ASCII version for my untechnological students.
I was intrigued by your remarks on castration and castration anxiety. I've been working on Layamon's Brut recently, and I've found there a number of passages where castration figures as a punishment, sometimes real but mostly imagined. None of these passages are in Geoffrey of Monmouth or in Wace's Brut. One of the most intriguing is a place where Arthur has a prophetic dream which no one in his court dares to interpret because he fears "to lose those parts which he especially loved" (line 12793 Cotton Caligula--my ME text is in my office so I quote the everyman here). This may well be something to follow up on in collective discussion.
Anyway, I'm really pleased with what you did with the discussion, and I'm happy to have been a part of it.
Bob
rstein@purvid.purchase.edu
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 09:41:51 NST
From: BSLEE@beattie.uct.ac.za
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Cum tacent ..
Qui tacet, consentire videtur.
Indeed I do: the article is a digestion of heterogenous material formerly equalled only by Jonah's whale.
Because we have only a narrow telnet line out of South Africa, accessing the hypertext server is sometimes difficult, and so far I've been beset by delays and time-outs; but I heartily approve of the concept, and the opportunity to download material one wouldn't find in a library. One observation I have on the point that in gender terms women are "marked" by what they "lack" (Merchant of Venice III iv 62) is that humans have been divided into men and non-men, including children, women, idiots, giants like Grendel and so on. Women have had a lot of exposure lately - let me rephrase that: I mean feminist interest in the Middle Ages has rightly been considerable. Perhaps we need an Interscripta discussion of one of the other excluded groups: medieval attitudes to children, say.
******************
BSLEE@Beattie.uct.ac.za
******************
Brian S. Lee
Department of English
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch, 7700
South Africa
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 15:10:20 NST
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Hypertext and Food
That subject line seems appropriate since most Interscripta participants in the US are just now thinking of a feast looming this Thursday, but I'm writing in response to Jim Earl's wondering if hypertext and food, sports, or other discourses would be as valid as "hypertext and gender" (the title of my preface to the Masculinities article).
Hypertext isn't very like food, but as an enabler of discourse it might be likened to an interactive recipe. The regulation of eating (etiquette) and participation in sports (as player or spectator) are both associable with gender, since they are kinds of discourse that overlap gender construction, and are full of signs that demarcate proper and improper gendered behaviors. To pick up on the American Thanksgiving theme, in its ancient form: Mother performs the rites of basting, preparing, and presenting the centerpiece of the feast (turkey companies these days even give toll free numbers for those with questions about how these rites are performed; they're not easy, and not pleasant either); Father watches football with the other men until it's time to carve the bird, when he stands at the head of the table with a special knife and carefully cuts each slice against the grain of the flesh so that it won't shred.
Holidays are wonderful times for observing the influence of gender
construction on social roles and social spaces -- true of the Middle Ages no less than today. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the feast has been carefully presented and the tables arranged in such a way that Arthur's status as king is clearly readable from any point in the theatre of action; the Green Knight's insult of asking who among the revellers is the king is predicated on pretending that the dominance pattern written through the arrangement of the room is *not* clear. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur's feast for Lucius' envoys becomes a kind of aggressive assault not all dissimilar from his shaving of the envoys' beards later in the story. (That the preparation and serving of food can be a kind of hierarchy-maintaining assault is, again, a Thanksgiving lesson many of us rediscover each year).
So, hypertext isn't like food (I don't think), but food, sports, and almost any other kind of human discourse are imbricated in gender -- for, as Judith Butler has argued, gender itself is constructed *discursively.* Hypertext, as a performance in and through language (words become speech acts even as we watch), is therefore like gender, a performance in and through language (a system of signs, rule-bound and reconfigurable). ---Jeffrey
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 15:42:23 NST
From: John McLaughlin <johnmc@esu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: Cum tacent ..
Jeffrey:
Emboldened by the appearance of ol' Slowhand himself, I wonder if I've been missing something while lurking, bedazzled, throughout this lengthy, complicated and learned thread. I'm sure I can be enlightened, unless I resist too strongly, always a danger.
The analogies Jim sees possible between hypertext and food, arms, discourse, all lack something which I *think* has been lacking in this discussion of medieval masculinities also. This is the highly charged emotional content of the taboo against homosexuality by people trained to regard it as a clear perversion. Oh, you and I may be highly civilized, tolerant creatures; but the majority party regards all of this with deep suspicion, as being perhaps prurient, a little bit pornographic, and certainly...twisted. This may amuse us no end; but it is a reaction we should pay attention to, since it provides us with structural clues to tensions we otherwise miss in analyses of texts composed in an age when the red-hot poker was a ribald joke but also a regal punishment.
But I probably missed that part of the discussion, it all went past me so fast. I did venture into hypertext exploration, very tentatively. It gets quickly dizzying. Thank you for that -- most enjoyable.
John McLaughlin
English - ESU
<johnmc@esu.edu>
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: homosexuality and medieval masculinities
I must admit to not fully understanding the implication and intention of John's recent post, and share some of Bruce's reservations. Perhaps, John, you would like to say a few words about the way you were framing your points: were they about "us" readers of and contributors to Interscripta, about the hypertext masculinities article, and/or about the Middle Ages? "People," "you and I," "majority party," "all of this"; "prurient," "pornographic," "twisted." How do those terms align?
In response to Grover's query: you can learn more (and gather much relevant bibliography) by accessing the hypertext article, choosing the link to the Archive, and then following the hyperlinked thread on "gender theory." There you'll find references to the most important texts in the essentialism vs. constructivism controversy, which sets out to answer the question you posed about sexuality and identity in premodern cultures. I'm about to add an excellent new piece to the bibliography that utilizes queer theories to begin to step outside the impasse this controversy can lead to: Glenn Burger's provocative essay "Queer Chaucer" (*English Studies in Canada* 20.2 [June 1994]). Highly recommended.
Finally, to those of you who wrote to express Thanksgiving condolences after the post I composed about gender, aggression, and food preparation: many thanks, but believe it or not I wasn't speaking from experience!
Jeffrey
From: "Bruce W. Holsinger" <bwh2@columbia.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: Cum tacent ..
On Mon, 21 Nov 1994, John McLaughlin wrote:
> The analogies Jim sees possible between hypertext and food, arms, discourse, > all lack something which I *think* has been lacking in this discussion of > medieval masculinities also. This is the highly charged emotional content > of the taboo against homosexuality by people trained to regard it as a clear
> perversion. Oh, you and I may be highly civilized, tolerant creatures; but the > majority party regards all of this with deep suspicion, as being perhaps > prurient, a little bit pornographic, and certainly...twisted. This may > amuse us no end; but it is a reaction we should pay attention to, since > it provides us with structural clues to tensions we otherwise miss in > analyses of texts composed in an age when the red-hot poker was a ribald > joke but also a regal punishment.
These sorts of universalizing assertions about homosexuality worry me. I'm glad Professor McLaughlin is a "highly civilized, tolerant creature"; he should have our warm congratulations for being so generous and open-minded. At the same time, though, I wonder what exactly the "taboo against homosexuality" might refer to; when I read about "people trained to regard it as a clear perversion", I wonder what "it" is: is "it" _sodomy_ in particular? Or is "it" supposed to refer to "homosexuality" in general? Would Professor McLaughlin like to give us his definition of "homosexuality"? What evidence does he have that anyone in the middle ages found "homosexuality," a modern term encompassing a universe of emotions, affections, identities, and practices between persons of the same sex, "twisted"? Sure, lots of folks found _sodomy in particular_ to be prurient, "a little bit pornographic" (though I'd also love to hear Professor McLaughlin's definition of pornography), and . . . "twisted". But who says that homosexuality is the same thing as sodomy? I personally would also like to dissociate myself from the "we" that finds "all of this" amusing (and please don't react with a polemic against the "politically correct" who just don't get the jokes anymore; I can laugh at the Miller's Tale as much as the next fella).
Bruce Holsinger
Columbia University
From: "GROVER FURR" <FURR@apollo.montclair.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: Cum tacent ..
WERE there homosexuals in the Middle Ages? I mean in the same sense as today -- persons whose exclusive sexual orientation was to the same sex; who formed long-term homosexual relationships. I don't mean "persons who had sexual encounters with the same sex occasionally or frequently, but who also had heterosexual encounters." Is there a source book about this?
There used to be a listserver called MEDGAY, but I haven't received anything from it in months.
Grover C. Furr
English Department
Montclair State University
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043
(201) 655-7305
furr@apollo.montclair.edu
From: John McLaughlin <johnmc@esu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: homosexuality and medieval masculinities
Jeffrey:
I do seem to have tripped over a live wire here, don't I? But it seemed so poorly hidden that it was almost an invitation, and here we are, close to the final roll-call, actually having a disagreement. I hope you're not too terribly disappointed at the stature of the opposition.
OK. I guess I'm still working this one through here, but all of this seemed to be dissolving in such sweet reasonableness that I thought I'd try out a different approach to the topic. As to what's aligned and what's bent -- I guess we're all still sorting out that one together, more or less, aren't we (subscribers to interscripta, readers of this thread, of the medieval masculinities article -- the road goes ever on). What could I have been thinking of, taking the risk of being called pc-basher, as I see I now am. Oh well. One more club I won't be invited to join.
I'm still working on these terms -- you clearly don't have to forgive me -- but I was trying to express, however clumsily, my sense of the deeply powerful emotions invested in sexual identity (unlike those invested in, say, food, or even sports), a sense I've seen weakly if at all expressed over the past few weeks in my reading of this file. I think the term I'm looking for is "cathexis," and I believe it's related to an adult sense of self as male or female, and is linked to powerfully expressed taboos made evident during nurturing, continued throughout adolescence, and, while subsiding as overt expression in adulthood, assumed as part of either masculine or feminine identity, embedded by then unquestioningly in personality, not at all regarded as optional or a matter of mere socialization by most people, even if they're wrong, which we all could be.
Crudely put, then, boys are reared to be distinct from girls, girls distinct from boys, from infancy onwards. Departure from these norms are heavily frowned upon, with exclusionary taboos heavily reinforced by both verbal and nonverbal means. Children who do not internalize these taboos, who persist in crossing gender lines, soon learn the heavy price to be paid for this behavior. Children who learn early to conform are rewarded for this conformity. The price paid by both conformists and nonconformists alike may well be a reduction in options and choices; the reward for the conformists is social approval of their sexual choices, and a clarification of gender roles, while the punishment for nonconformists is disapproval -- extending from mild ridicule to physical sanctions of the extreme kind referred to earlier. These people are playing for keeps; this is a serious game, life-defining, life-threatening. Survival and self- definition are the stakes. The voice of authority is loud, clear, and imperative in this area, whether you choose to conform to its demands or engage in confrontation or sabotage by subterfuge in dealing with it. For the majority of people, there appears to be little thought of questioning its power; for a small minority -- depending on whom you ask, three to ten percent -- opposition is vital (there may well be a much larger percentage, again depend on your sources, of people who flout the taboos on an experimental or temporary basis, but since these are, by definition, taboo areas, denials will be expectably forthcoming).
All of which is to say that flattening this area out into a verbal game where it doesn't really matter which figure of speech you choose -- food or sports or purely verbal discourse -- while providing an opportunity for virtuosic display of the kind encouraged by the taboo masters, doesn't nearly do justice to the heavy emotional price exacted in this particular, self-defining area, where at the very least the publicly- appearing personality is created, with spillover into areas where you wouldn't expect sexuality or gender to matter much, but where it certainly does appear, asserting its right of priority -- over food, sports, verbal discourse, what have you.
If you're waiting impatiently to tell me that this is precisely what you've been saying all along, then perhaps you're right. I have gotten lost in the fog of neologism and jargon in this discussion -- to the point where I have obviously succumbed and created my own little Scotch mist in weak imitation -- and I'll tell you right now the archness of tone and the self-congratulatory unanimity on these difficult points has been a factor in keeping me silent on the sidelines, shaking my head. If that also is a distortion of your intended meaning, then perhaps we can split the difference on some of this. For my part, I apologize for my clumsiness in trying to be amusing where I was obviously offensive, being indirect and suggestive where I should have said what was on my mind. While not a homosexual myself -- I'm just a conformist, after all -- I have friends in this difficult situation who have borne the brunt of the cruelty and mockery to which I'm referring. From my reading of the Middle Ages, the situation was not so very different. Over the years, I've come to see the Miller's Tale as a particularly nasty joke, producing nervous laughter and involuntary contraction of the sphincter muscles at its barbaric climax. Medieval masculinities? In the end, I think the choices then were as narrowly framed and the taboos as heavily -- even more heavily
-- enforced as anything we have in the late 20th century. If that means there's not a lot to be happy about in this area, then I think that is the case.
John McLaughlin
English - ESU
<johnmc@esu.edu>
From: John McLaughlin <johnmc@esu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: Cum tacent ..
Bruce:
I deeply regret being so offensive to you in my recent posting, where my own twisted sense of humor may have trivialized my actual sense of the opposition engendered in our society to any loosening of narrow gender boundaries in behavior. This is, as I have attempted to say in my recent posting to Jeffrey, a highly volatile taboo area in our culture, and to pretend otherwise is to betray innocents into confrontation they might well regret deeply. What is an amusing verbal game among the professoriate is nowhere quite so amusing for people in the hands of moralistic, self-appointed authorities defending the status quo.
Anything I might have implied or suggested beyond that I apologize for. If my attempt at clarification in response to Jeffrey leaves you with something less than a sense of satisfaction, I hope you will be in touch again. To repeat as little as possible from that posting: I think homosexuals were treated very little differently in the middle Ages from the way they are treated in the late 20th century, with much the same narrow taboos in place. Not much has changed, in my view; the causal acceptance of gay-bashing and prison rape in America would be evidence I'd accept as demonstrating this continuing hostility to anything going much beyond very narrow boundaries of acceptable "masculinity," hedged around as it is by stringent taboos. So any discussion of medieval or modern "masculinity" that assumes widely acceptable pluralism is based on a misperception of social reality in either case.
John McLaughlin
<johnmc@esu.edu>
From: "Kevin T. Grimm" <grimm@Vela.ACS.Oakland.Edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Hypertext and Food--footnote
As the subject line suggests, this is a brief response/note to Jeffrey's posting on hypertext and food.
On Mon, 21 Nov 1994, Jeffrey Cohen wrote:
Mother performs the rites of basting,
> preparing, and presenting the centerpiece of the feast (turkey companies
> these days even give toll free numbers for those with questions about how
> these rites are performed; they're not easy, and not pleasant either);
> Father watches football with the other men until it's time to carve the
> bird, when he stands at the head of the table with a special knife and
> carefully cuts each slice against the grain of the flesh so that it won't
> shred.
In recent years there have also been 800 numbers giving would-be Fathers instruction in carving. The existence of both kinds of phone "hot-lines" suggests the national perception of the waning of traditional (and heavily gendered) activities.
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the feast has
> been carefully presented and the tables arranged in such a way that
> Arthur's status as king is clearly readable from any point in the theatre
> of action; the Green Knight's insult of asking who among the revellers
> is the king is predicated on pretending that the dominance pattern
> written through the arrangement of the room is *not* clear.
Perhaps (nay, certainly) I quibble here (because my point is irrelevant to Jeffrey's central point about the feast as sign), but the the GK's question is both insulting and reasonable, because Arthur ("childgered" and acting out a silly romance convention) is *not* in his assigned seat. There is a significant absence, or at least displacement, in the "theatre of action" which might well be thought to disrupt its otherwise easy readability.
In the
> Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur's feast for Lucius' envoys becomes a
> kind of aggressive assault not all dissimilar from his shaving of
> the envoys' beards later in the story.
I agree with the assessment of the feast, but Arthur does not, to my
recollection or my hasty rechecking of the text, shave the envoys beards. Part of the point of the feast is that, though an agressive assault, it is an thoroughly civilized one, appropriate to the circumstances, as the forced shaving of the envoys would not be.
Kevin Grimm
Oakland University
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: In Reply to John and Kevin
On Thursday I'll send out the note that will officially end the brief Interscripta discussion of the Medieval Masculinities write-up. If anyone would like to send out a post before that time, I'm happy to distribute it. Has anyone had difficulty with the hypertext article? Would anyone like to share their impressions?
John: as far as "sweet reasonableness" goes, you may want to check out the "Dissent" thread in the discussion archive, which contains substantial pieces by Jim Earl, Abigail Young, Michael Toch, and others (all of which are connected by hypertext links), as well as a series of replies. You may also be interested in the "Gender Theory" thread, designed to make some of the jargon and neologisms that can be so off-putting a little more comprehensible. But if the article still seems too specialized (or "clubby") to be useful to you and to your students, I'd be interested to hear that: it wouldn't take much to expand via hypertext some of the denser portions. The problem for me is that I've worked with the text for too long to be able to spot those areas anymore.
Kevin: As far as the Alliterative Morte goes, I ought to have chosen a word less confusing than envoys to describe the legates from Rome who surrender the city to Arthur. I was arguing that this later episode, in which the two men are forcibly shaved, isn't much different from the overwhelming and aggressively theatrical feast which Lucius' envoys are served early in the story (and this feast later finds an exact and gruesome counterpart in the elaborate repast of the Giant of Mont Saint Michel). Both this episode and the Gawain one are discussed in the Masculinities archive. You won't find a hypertext link to them, so here's where the search capabilities of whatever Web browser you're using come in handy. You'd have to move from week to week through the archive, but eventually you'd be able to track down all the references to both works (there are four to five for each).
Jeffrey
From: John McLaughlin <johnmc@esu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Cum tacent
Dear Jeffrey:
Maybe I'm hypersensitive, or maybe I just don't understand hypertext -- sorry, have comprehension difficulties with the imbrications of referentiality in hypertextual discourse. But I just can't shake the feeling I've been dissed. A man poses a fairly straight question -- were the Middle Ages any less heterosexist than the 20th century? -- and he gets directed to go talk to somebody else in the Labrynth. I already know what Jim Earl thinks. I asked what you thought.
It's possible people are silent because it's not worth their while attempting to engage in direct discussion here. I fell for it once; I'm not likely to do so again.
Here's what I thnk, Jeffrey: Sexual identity is no Halloween game, no Peer Gynt onion. It's a deeply cathected, heavily determined element of personality, whether a matter of genetic predisposition or social conditioning. The heavy Western bias towards heterosexuality, from Biblical times forward, is clear in mainstream texts threaded through the historical period with which we are primarily concerned. The dreadful consequences visited upon those who violate these anti-homosexual taboos is abundantly clear. The result is an equally clearly defined masculinity and opposed femininity with very few shadings. This may be regrettable from a number of points of view, repressive on all concerned, hostile to social change which a considerable number of people would wish to see advanced. It is, however, an historical condition which we cannot wish away, and to deny its reality is to misread the major texts of the Western traditions.
Now, that's a position I've yet to see fully argued in the main stream of this discussion, whether it's been noted in hypertextual side-references or otherwise, unless I'm misreading or have skipped too much of the central presentations over the last two months. It's clearly your option as moderator to dismiss it as unworthy of discussion or to show it as dead wrong. On the record, I don't think I should be holding my breath.
John McLaughlin
<johnmc@esu.edu>
From: "Martin Irvine, Georgetown University" <M_IRVINE@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Re: Cum tacent
John raises an important point about the historical construction of gender and sexuality, and while he may feel personally dissed, I don't think he should. Interscripta is an open forum, but like everything in contemporary academia, personal investments and identity politics often produce more heat than light, more posturing and positioning than open discourse. Perhaps the point John has made has been taken for granted by most people, and therefore not articulated at the surfaces of the discussion on masculinities and gender. But his point needs to be brought into the debate precisely because of the real and lived history of identities that existed and continue to exist.
--Martin Irvine
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Closing Statement
This message will serve as both a partial reply to John McLaughlin's recent posts and a closing statement to the brief discussion of the "Medieval Masculinities" write-up.
John grew impatient with me because I directed him to the hypertext article and its intercollated archive rather than answer his question directly. I was attempting to point out to him, as gently as possible, that the concerns he was raising had in fact been addressed both in the previous discussion and in the literature contained in the Masculinities bibliography. The danger of electronic forums (Ansaxnet, medfem, etc.) is that they encourage their users to think of knowledge as accessible passively, on demand: pose a question, receive twenty erudite responses within three days. Interscripta doesn't quite work that way. The "Medieval Masculinities" discussion which took place last year was a collaborative project to explore the meaning of "gender," "sanctity," and heroism" in a forum set up to counteract the short attention span for which other lists have become notorious. The hypertext article is its permanent achievement: it's not mine (the moderator and editor), but belongs to all fifty-five people who contributed. We offer it to the academic community and to the interested public for their use. If it encourages its readers to think critically about the construction of manhood in the Middle Ages, about the nature of gender then and now, about the possibilities enabled through resources like the Net, the Web, the Labyrinth, and hypertext, then we will have succeeded.
Three stages of hard work characterize the project: the enormous task of researching and speaking about the topic that was necessary to carry it through the six weeks of last year's discussion (a labor shared by fifty-five discussants and several hundred silent participants); the task of organizing the vast amounts of material generated into a coherent whole (a project I was happy to undertake, mainly because I was convinced of its value); and the difficulties faced by the users of the hypertext article, who may find themselves in a virtual space that isn't always easy to navigate, for a variety of reasons.
John's difficulty was partly with the terminology used, especially the neologisms and jargon that seem to characterize much contemporary discourse about gender (or, for that matter, much contemporary discourse). Some of the "new" terminology is unavoidable: as Samuel Johnson pointed out in the Preface to his dictionary, whenever a community of intellectuals thrives, a language's store of words is destined to increase as old ways of thinking yield to other possibilities of conceptualizing the world. At other times the lack of clarity is wholly the fault of my writing: I am interested in hearing about such places in the article so that they can be better expressed, for the piece should be as accessible as possible. Yet I must say this: no responsible intellectual would think about joining a conversation about (for example) Old English metrics, unless they had at least invested a little time in finding out some basic terminology (half-line, caesura). I don't think it's too much to ask for those interested in current gender debates -- or interested in condemning them -- to first familiarize themselves with some of the debate's general terms.
That brings me to Grover's and to John's questions about homosexuality in the Middle Ages. John wanted a straight answer from me, but I'm not sure that his question as phrased can be answered. I pointed out some of the literature on the constructivism vs. essentialism debate, an introduction to which is available through a hypertext series of links in the Masculinities archive. As many of you guessed, my leanings are toward constructivism: personally I believe that identity is something that is invented and reinvented by and through culture, place, and time. Can "homosexuality" exist in an era that has no term for (and therefore no conceptualization of) "homosexual"? "Homosexuality" itself isn't any one thing: it's open to any number of definitions. "Heterosexuality" works (or doesn't work) in the same way. I'd like to turn the question around and ask, Did heterosexuals exist in the Middle Ages?
Now the detractors of this discussion will snicker because that query seems so silly. It isn't. "Heterosexuality" is a loaded term these days, and is meant to encompass between sixty and ninety-nine percent of us (depending on whose percentages you use, and where one classifies problematic categories like "bisexuality"). Sex researchers cannot agree what precisely "heterosexuality" means, and end up constructing various scales of attraction through which subjects often *move* over time. Did medievals think of themselves in relation to their own sexed identities as we moderns do? If the "Masculinities" discussion is to be believed, probably not. Post-Freud, it's difficult for us to separate who we are from the composition of our sex lives (and from an interest in the sex lives of others). What's true of the here-and-now, though, seldom holds consistently true for the vast expanse of times and geographies we cluster under the rubric "the Middle Ages." Is it possible to conceive of a time that, even though knowable only through the lens of the present, is also radically different - provocatively so? Most medievalist would answer "yes." Then why is it so surprising that Sigmund Freud and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim might mean two very different things when they ponder the relationship between sex(uality), identity, and the body? John McLaughlin and Jeffrey Cohen live seven hundred years closer together, and yet their conceptual paradigms couldn't be further apart.
What unites John and I -- and, I assume, all of the subscribers to the Medieval Masculinities discussion -- is the shared belief that asking these questions and struggling toward answers is important work. None of what I've written today isn't contained within or implied by the discussion organized in the Medieval Masculinities hyptertext article - a piece whose title reflects that gender in the Middle Ages wasn't simply about "either/or" kinds of sexuality (masculine or feminine, homosexual or heterosexual), but about an array or plurality of genders that can be clustered under a big, plural term. That recognition saves the discussion from anachronism rather than blithely ignores contextualization. Utopian, I know (and perhaps strange to hear from someone who, in the last Interscripta discussion, was writing of the *dangers* of utopianism) -- but not, I hope, naively so.
I urge those of you who have not yet had a chance to peruse the article will do so in the near future; when you do, please drop me a line and let me know what you think. The bibliography is meant to be a living resource, so that if there are article and books that you think should be included, likewise let me know. In closing, I'd like to quote the final sentences of the article itself:
Although understanding medieval masculinities may be the goal of our inquiry, it will never be its full achievement. The investigation that stops moving, that settles down with comfortable answers will end its narrative and vanish; gender study, like its very object, must always be in performance in order to be alive.
--- Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Department of English and Program in Human Sciences
The George Washington University
Washington, D.C.
jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 1994 17:07:21 NST
From: Jeffrey Cohen <jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: medieval masculinities: afterthought
Although the discussion of 'Medieval Masculinities" is officially over (soon I'll archive that discussion and link it to what exists on the Labyrinth already, as well as make some minor revisions to the article), I thought it would be appropriate to share with this forum the reaction of some scholars outside of the field of medieval studies to the article.
On December 8, I presented "Medieval Masculinities" at the Seminar on Rhetoric, a monthly meeting of Washington area academics who are interested in understanding how argumentation proceeds both inside and outside their disciplines. The Seminar is sponsored by the George Washington University, but attracts scholars from many nearby institutions; their background ranges from English and History to Philosophy, Communications, and Public Administration. Very few of the participants felt they possessed the technological know-how to access the hypertext version, even though most felt comfortable with using the Internet for email; clearly a technophobia exists that will continue to inhibit full use of resources like the Labyrinth for some time (more on that later). Those who did explore the hypertext article rather than its "vanilla," word-processed cousin found it at times disorienting, but intriguing.
One question in particular I found revealing. A colleague who teaches Government at GWU asked, "T.S. Eliot described the process of reading as one of making love to the text; how is this article like making love?" I'm always slightly suspicious of "erotics of reading" metaphors, but this one helped clarify some of the gendered expectations that some readers have brought to the Masculinities article in particular (but also to places like the Web more generally). One cannot make love *to* a hypertext piece; one can only make love *with* it; it won't be subdued, and it does not subdue (it does not "come to a point" - there is no "Eureka!" effect, no rhetorical movement that leads to the admission "I have been conquered [persuaded]"). In hypertext, experience (journey) is more valuable than epiphany (destination); it's the choice of being a nomad rather than a pilgrim. In feminist terms, this opposition has been characterized as "reading like a woman" vs. "reading like a man" -- a gendering which has obvious limitations, but points out important cultural biases about the experience of reading and the 'point' of writing, expectations that deeply influence how scholarly work is evaluated. In fact, the question of how to evaluate the article caused the most concern, especially as voiced by the dean of the college (a woman), who will eventually be judging it as part of my tenure review, an examination predicated upon doing original work. Is the Masculinities article original? Paradoxically, the piece is original mainly in its embrace of community and its de-centering of authorship; in many ways it seems medieval, in that originality is not one of the values its "argument" is predicated upon.
Anxiety was voiced about the accessibility of the piece: a historian objected that he felt excluded by the essay, both because of its jargon and its form (its use of technology/hypertext, he argued, renders it remote rather than accessible). The Seminar in Rhetoric was founded on the belief that scholars from different disciplines should communicate across their disciplinary languages (its aims are similar to those of Interscripta in that way); we have all come to acknowledge, though, that in order to make finer distinguishings within our fields, their will always be an inherent language barrier that roughly corresponds to learning the new material tools (scanners, centrifuges) that refine science. Still, the possibility of a glossed version of the article was suggested, and it is something I am considering (though I'm a bit cautious about that degree of self-insertion, especially because it would mean glossing other people's writing; hypertext is valuable because it eliminates, largely, that necessity by allowing those voices summarized in the article to speak solo in the linked archive).
On a related note: I've just finished teaching a medieval survey course which examined, among other things, gender and power in the Middle Ages. I required my students to log into and explore the Labyrinth, and then later to take a glance at the Masculinities article and to find parts of the archive that deal with texts that we have read. Surprisingly I discovered that few of my students had ever used the Internet for research before (many of them did not even have email accounts). They found both exercises valuable, and I believe assignments like this one go a long way toward assuaging that technophobia I mentioned earlier.
Best wishes for a successful end of the term and happy holiday season, Jeffrey
____________________
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Department of English and Program in Human Sciences
George Washington University Washington DC
jjcohen@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu