A “Wrangling Parliament”: Terminology and Audience in Medieval European Literary Studies and Lesbian Studies

Abstract

An important challenge facing any search for a lesbian premodern comes in the form of terminology.1 We have inherited rigorous interrogations of language and identity from twentieth-century theory: structuralism, feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, rhetoric, and more. So far, this legacy seems to have generated several major lines of inquiry crucial for literary studies: (a) the recovery of historical evidence pertaining to medieval sexuality and materiality; (b) “queer” readings that disrupt sex/gender and past/present categories and binaries, as well as categories of periodization; and (c) readings of human desire, past and present. Sahar Amer’s Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (2008) presents the most recent development, offering analysis informed by postcolonial theory as well as by queer/gender theory, and thus challenging the European lesbian premodern project with exciting new questions about cross-cultural interactions and influences.2 In practice, lines of inquiry, whether historical, queer, lesbian-feminist, or psychoanalytic, frequently overlap, and each approach has the potential to collide/elide/side with political, social, and psychological concerns of present-day individuals who understand themselves (their identities) as lesbian, straight, bisexual, or queer.KeywordsReading StrategyAudience MemberQueer TheoryArabic LiteratureLesbian StudyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.