Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa Harris Kersti Francis Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2018 285 pp. Whether or not you like this volume will depend on your methodological point-of-view. Strict historicists will find this book emotional, incendiary, and subjective, yet Harris’ scholarship is one of the most exciting and poignant feminist analyses of the Middle Ages published in a decade. If you’re a scholar who hates the idea of identity politics in the classroom or in one’s methodology, or the thought that “the personal and political are also historical,” this book is decidedly not your cup of tea (4). And that’s a shame, because to miss reading Obscene Pedagogies is to miss what this reviewer hopes will play a major role in the future of medieval studies: an intersectional critique of medieval misogyny. Influenced both by Black feminist thought and Harris’ own lived experience as a mixed-race woman, this is a book that tackles medieval violence against women (whether real or imagined), and exposes the way obscenity can both create and destroy community. Beyond its investment in the Middle Ages, Obscene Pedagogies takes on an equally-ambitious task: “recognizing how the past’s violence lives on in the present” (9). Harris draws connections between medieval lyrics celebrating sexual violence to modern displays of rape culture by athletes, presidents, and, in several powerful moments, examples drawn from both medievalist scholarship and interpersonal interactions. Obscene Pedagogies is indebted in particular to the works of Carolyn Dinshaw, Sara Ahmed’s recent Living a Feminist Life (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2017), and Nicole Nolan Sidhu’s Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Despite the recent publication of Dr. Sidhu’s excellent volume on obscenity, Harris’s monograph deftly distinguishes itself from prior work by arguing for the pedagogical benefit of obscenity for medieval sexual education and its relationship to modern rape culture. It is in these connections that Ahmed’s influence is most apparent. Chapter one, for instance, connects several erotic medieval lyrics voiced by and for women with the impact of twentieth and twenty-first century iterations of gender-segregated abstinence-only sexual education on contemporary cultural consciousness, using examples from Harris’ own upbringing within American Protestant purity culture to powerfully demonstrate the mental efficacy and impact, both harmful and helpful, of same-sex sexual pedagogy. Harris’ prose [End Page 219] is sharp, witty, commanding, and invites debate; excerpts from Obscene Pedagogies would be extremely generative for an undergraduate course on medieval sex, gender, lyric, or women’s writing, while its introduction should be suggested reading for every medievalist in light of our field’s current cultural crisis. In five chapters and two appendices, Obscene Pedagogies covers a wide range of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Middle English and Middle Scots literature; two appendices, “Songs of Lusty Maidens’ and “Songs of Wantonness” bring to light several previously-unstudied lyrics. Chapter One, “‘Felawe Masculinity’: Teaching Rape Culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” connects Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale” to the 2016 Ched Evans rape trial in Wales. This chapter is unique as the sole section to focus on a canonical medieval text, making it perhaps the most immediately useful for the medievalist instructor. Focusing on the use of “swyve” in The Canterbury Tales and the treatment of rape and women’s bodily autonomy in the twenty-first century, Harris argues that obscenity “creates gendered pedagogical community and teaches men that sexual aggression is both necessary and predatory” (24). The second chapter, “‘With a Cunt’: Obscene Misogyny and Masculine Pedagogical Community in the Middle Scots Flyting,” also examines the interconnection between masculinity and misogyny in sixteenth-century Scottish insult poetry. As in chapter one, this section argues that men use obscenity to build community and teach each other sexual mores, but whereas the code of masculinity espoused in the Canterbury Tales emphasizes having as much sex with as many women as possible, Harris demonstrates here that the literature of the Scottish court nearly two centuries...