Relational Virginity and Nonbinary Gender: La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis

Abstract

ABSTRACT “Virgins,” to quote Sarah Salih, “are good to think with.” This holds true for medieval saints and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics alike. Scholars of medieval gender have demonstrated that virginity functioned as a sexuality, a form of devotion, and even a gender unto itself in the Middle Ages. In that spirit, and drawing on recent work in transfeminist studies, this article proposes virginity as a form of nonbinary gender—as opposed to femininity, androgyny, or third gender, as it has previously been understood—in Old French hagiography. Works like La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis ask us to account for virginity’s relationality and its embrace of contingency, a convergence that transfeminist medieval and virginity studies can together provide. Virginity as nonbinary gender, in turn, points to the relationality of all gender, to the inherent disorganization and enmeshment of gender itself.