Disputing the Cisgender Body in A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Whether in its medieval or modern instantiations, flesh conjures to mind the various material forms and networks that constitute the body. Historically, medieval theologies on the body tend to gender fleshiness and carnality as feminine, while the mind and the spirit are gendered as masculine. One surprising and understudied example that dramatizes these debates on the gender between the body and the soul is A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes, a mid-fifteenth century Carthusian body/soul debate poem. Despite its conventional didactic theme, Disputation has provoked a lot of interest among scholars, primarily regarding the gender of the soul and the body. By bringing together medieval trans, feminist, and queer studies, my argument will consider how Disputation centers on the flesh as a thinkable node of matter that can become haunted, transformed, and even defiant in how it inscribes and assigns an identity to the body. In this way, Disputation presents a body that verbalizes a felt sense of gender identity while actively undoing — or rather disputing — the material signifiers of sex as conferring a legibly gendered subject, creating a trans plurality of voices and bodies within the poem that ultimately dissolves fleshy and textual boundaries.