The feminine erotic in Drasta Houël’s Créoleries

Young adults in university environments are increasingly exploring gender variant identities and challenging binary constructions. Knowledge about the lived experiences of trans and non-binary young people in higher education, however, is partial. Our research into Anglican Foundation Universities in England begins to address this lacuna. In particular, chaplains may find themselves acting as a bridge between the equality, diversity and inclusivity policies of universities and the Anglican Church’s official rejection of both same-sex marriage and the writing of new liturgies for trans folk; this may be especially the case for queer students who have personal connections with the Christian faith. We argue there is a need for deeper reflection on the notion of safe space and the cis-construction of trans and non-binary folk as vulnerable and we ask whether protection and vulnerability discourses create contradictions that undermine agency and positive visibility of trans and non-binary young people. This article adds to research in the field by bringing together religious and gendered identities at UK universities; it draws on interviews with trans and non-binary folk to explore experiences of chaplaincies and campus spaces.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the politics of representing Black queer and trans subjectivities in the recent documentary film and photography of South African lesbian visual activist Zanele Muholi. While Muholi's work has been most often been positioned as an artistic response to the hate-crimes and violence perpetuated against Black lesbians in South African townships, most notably acts of sexual violence known increasingly as corrective rape, I argue that Muholi's documentary texts trouble the spatial, gendered, and highly racialized articulations that make up an increasingly global corrective rape discourse. The article considers how her visual texts foreground and (re)visualize Black queer and trans gender experiences that relocate, challenge, collaborate with, and at times, perform, masculinity as means to subvert heterosexist and racist constructions of township space and the Black gendered body.

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Currently, the emphasis of research on culture-loaded terminology in the Chinese Government Work Report lies in developing translation strategies, with limited analysis of the cognitive process that translators undergo during the translation process. However, Conceptual Integration Theory has gained significant attention in recent years for its effectiveness in analyzing cognitive activities. This paper employs the Conceptual Integration Theory as a theoretical framework to analyze culture-loaded terms in the Chinese Government Work Report. This analysis involves the use of the conceptual integration network, including generic space, cross-space mapping, selective projection, blending, and emergent structure, as well as the construction of mental spaces. It has been found: (1) Translators utilized four mental spaces, namely the original terms space, translator space, generic space, and translation space. Through cross-space mapping, the original terms space and translator space projected a shared, abstract structure and organization into the generic space. The elements of the original terms space and translator space were then projected into the translation space within the constraints of the generic space. (2) The simplex network is unsuitable for translating these terms, while the other three conceptual integration networks do. Translating these terms with a mirror network is deemed to be the simplest method, while the two-scope network is the most complex. This paper aims to illustrate the thinking process of translators and offer suggestions for translating these terms.

Trans Chaplin Rox Samer (bio) A body in process, in transformation, an incomplete body able to merge with other bodies—or other things—and create new bodies … this new body, for all its composite weirdness, strikes us as immediately recognizable rather than entirely alien: an insight into our own bodily experience, whether remembered from childhood or glimpsed in dreams. —Tom Gunning1 The lift of an eyebrow, however faint, may convey more than a hundred words. —Charles Chaplin2 In the weeks following my top surgery in December 2019, I enjoyed many a movie and television series with my care web.3 As my body healed and I turned my attention to preparing for the spring 2020 semester, including a course on US film history, I was taken with the most iconic and popular of historical media figures: Charlie Chaplin. The filmmaker's short films and silent features supported the recalibration of my body-mind as I prepared to re-enter the social world. They would also become films that I'd return to, that my own body would recall over the coming year, as I started taking testosterone and continued to transition with the minimal surveillance from cis society, quarantined at home with my cats and partner as my only witnesses. Chaplin's films, surprisingly, gave image to both the changes I yearned for and those I joyfully experienced. Until quite recently, transgender media studies has centered the study of transgender representation, meaning the analysis of film and television's few canonical trans characters. But the last five years have seen a renaissance in the field with a number of studies devoted to trans aesthetics, genre studies, [End Page 175] and industry studies revealing what is trans about the most mainstream, most popular, and oldest film and television fare.4 Among these, Cáel M. Keegan's Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (2018) demonstrates how the Wachowskis established a cinematic language for sensing beyond gender's dictated forms, and Quinlan Miller's Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (2019) reveals the camp humor of 1950s and 1960s sitcoms to be brimming with gender nonconformity or queer gender. Their archives and methods are welcome in contemporary trans political discourse where trans activists, journalists, and scholars' paranoid readings routinely cite anti-trans violence—particularly the murders of trans women of color. Time and again, this discourse reduces trans women of color to a signifier for white supremacist and transphobic violence.5 As Jules Gill-Peterson argues, it's high time we shed "the predictive control that is the hallmark of paranoia for the much messier and potentially more pleasurable terrain of perverse laughter."6 Trans life is teeming with awkwardness and joy. Thus, while it may sound antithetical to much popular trans discourse, we find ourselves addressed by much film and television, past and present, including the futures of science fiction and humor of comedy (and not only when the butt of jokes). Here I demonstrate how the silent film comedian Charlie Chaplin, through a pantomime of agile, embodied shifts across not only gender but also species and kingdom, gave early moving image to trans phenomenology. Cinema and media studies has long acknowledged how "queer positions, queer readings, and queer pleasures are part of a reception space that stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexuals and straight positions."7 Here I show how trans positions, readings, and pleasures likewise exist beside and within those of cisgender scholars and spectators. In what Tom Gunning once called Chaplin's "cinematic body" and "plastic ontology" and what André Bazin called the character Charlie's "unlimited imagination in the face of danger" and "total indifference to the category of things held sacred," one can perceive a trans way of life in all its awkward sensational and somatic glory.8 This trans retrospectatorship, which not only decodes but also encodes meaning, invites further reencounters and models a media studies methodology that affirms the very possibility of gleeful transition in the present.9 [End Page 176] Chaplin's oeuvre is replete with fluctuating forms of queer gender. In several short films, Chaplin evokes the early-twentieth-century figure of...

Reviewed by: Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms ed. by Kay Turner, Pauline Greenhill Helen Miriam Bendix (bio) and Regina F. Bendix (bio) Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. Edited by Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. 358pp. Leafing through Transgressive Tales, one is first struck by the unpresuming, quite wonderful illustrations by Bettina Hutschek. They guide one aesthetically into yet another, albeit timely, set of analyses of—not only—Grimm [End Page 155] fairy tales. “Queering the Grimms” is such an appealing subtitle that one understands the choice. The tales from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s paradigmatic collection have had a tremendous influence on readers worldwide, other tale collectors, and—as amply attended to in this volume—literary authors, as is evident, for instance, in Jennifer Orme’s analysis of Jeanette Winterson’s reworking of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Readers will be glad to know that the volume also contains comparative essays, such as the chapter “Queering Gender,” in which Pauline Greenhill, Anita Best, and Emilie Anderson-Grégoire explore versions of “Peg Bearskin” and “La Poiluse” for the lead character’s capacity to control and undermine female and male roles in arranging her sisters’ and her own destinies. We also find here Margaret Mills’s translation of an Afghani tale performance of “Boxwoman,” prefaced with a multilayered and suggestive exploration of women’s transgressions as imagined within an all-male story realm. The collection has grown and matured over nearly fifteen years, taking its beginnings in teaching and work with interested students, coalescing with colleagues at conferences, and finally resulting in this volume. In their introduction to the thirteen essays, editors Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill point out that with all the feminist analysis and recasting of tales, “queer readings seem absent from feminist fairy-tale criticism” (3). She who knows how to look will, however, find transgression in abundance in many tale types, and to prove the point, the editors include an appendix titled “Trans and Drag in Traditional Folktales”; this appendix groups a selection of Aarne-Thompson types under headings such as “animal trans,” “animal drag,” “bio trans,” and “gender drag.” The essays are divided into four sections. In the first section, “Faux Femininities,” the contributors discuss the relations of embodiment and gender in the Grimms’ fairy tales. In the second section, “Revising Rewritings,” the contributors revisit rewritings of classic tales, which proves perhaps an easier ground to find issues of gender and sexuality explicitly examined. In the third part, “Queering the Tales,” the contributors turn “more directly to the ways that Grimms and other tales can redirect presumptions of sexuality and marriage away from the hetero norm” (20). The last section, “Beyond the Grimms,” contains, in addition to the contribution by Mills, Eliot Mercer’s queer adaptation of “The Grave Mound.” Within such a plethora of contributions, there naturally are also quite diverse approaches to what constitutes queerness, where it is located, and how to analytically cast it. We detect a spectrum here that ranges from uncovering more breadth and nuance in the reading of gender roles and sexuality all the way to asserting difference, including and beyond the homoerotic. Jeana Jorgensen begins her chapter, “Queering Kinship in ‘The Maiden Who Seeks Her [End Page 156] Brothers,’” with Judith Butler’s assessment of fantasy from Undoing Gender as “not the opposite of reality, it is what reality forecloses” (69)—a choice that most of the contributors could have followed: as fictional narrations, fairy tales do revel in the impossible but imaginable. If earlier scholars have found reason for tale worlds to fulfill poor narrators’ fantasies of excess food, wealth, and sociopolitical ascent, it should not surprise us that in the twenty-first century, scholars and retellers alike find explorations and transgressions of gendered, even bodily norms—fantasies, one can be quite certain, that were there all along, just as the desire for excess and power has not gone away. There is not space to dwell on all the cases presented—which is not meant to detract from their merit. In the opening chapter Cristina Bacchilega equates the only two Grimm heroines with the attribute of cleverness as women challenging heteronormativity. Kevin Goldstein...

Tibullus 1.8 offers a prime example of the theatrical manner in which characters are arranged onto the elegiac stage. The puer Marathus adorns himself in front of a mirror, as if he were a courtesan in Roman comedy, in the hopes of attracting an unresponsive girl named Pholoe. He arranges his locks in various modes, puts on make-up, gets a manicure, and wears tight-laced shoes (1.8.9-14). Nikoloutsos (2010) has interpreted this account as an allegory for the practice of writing elegy in late 1st-century-B.C.E. Rome. Yet, despite this interesting metapoetic reading, the significance of Marathus’ transvestism for the construction of gender in Tibullus Book One as a whole has been left unexplored. Borrowing Butler’s concept of drag as a practice that exposes the imitative nature of gender and challenges established definitions of man and woman as polar opposite categories (1990), this paper will argue that in poem 1.8 Tibullus fashions a puer whose body serves as a site for the performative reiteration of gender norms and simultaneously undercuts the active/passive binarism. Marathus’ oscillation between masculine and feminine positions, I shall further argue, bears resemblance to, and thus can shed more light on, the Tibullan narrator’s own gender fluidity and his failure to adhere to the hegemonic model of virtus. Marathus’ cultus demonstrates that gender is, as Butler has put it, “a stylized repetition of acts” (1940: 140), a practice that requires that a set of certain rules be followed or ‘cited’ visually and behaviorally. However, in Marathus’ case the participation in this citational process results in the production of a queer (= strange, odd, ambiguous, eccentric) body. Marathus strives to change his sexual identity and become the amator of Pholoe by paradoxically enhancing his androgynous appeal as a puer delicatus. Although this strategy of approaching the opposite sex makes no sense at the erotic level - indeed, Pholoe rejects Marathus (1.8.49-50) - it does at the poetic level. Tib. 1.8, I shall argue, produces an interesting blending of genre and gender. Marathus is portrayed as tener (1.8.51), a term used by Tibullus in Book One to refer to the delicacy and refinement of his art (Nikoloutsos 2007). Pholoe, on the other hand, is described as dura (1.8.50), a pejorative term that Latin elegists use to refer to epic poetry (e.g., Cairns 1984, Kennedy 1993, Keith 1994, Wyke 2002, Miller 2004). Pursuing the metapoetic connotations behind Pholoe’s construction further, I shall consider various passages (Hor. Carm. 1.33-6-7, 2.5.17, Stat. Silv. 2.3.10), which emphasize the duritia of Pholoe and link her with the epic, heroic world.Building on James’ observation that Marathus embodies features of the elegiac poet-lover (2003), I shall argue that the gender indeterminacy of the boy calls attention to the queerness of the Tibullan narrator best illustrated in 1.2, 1.3, and 1.5. Tibullan poetry, I shall conclude, renders puer and vir not as antithetical, but as homologous categories.

It is commonly accepted that gender matters (whether cisgender, transgender/trans*, gender non-binary, genderfluid, gender queer, agender, or other) and many are raising awareness about the fact that gender always seems to matter. That gender matters, and always matters, does not necessarily mean, however, that gender needs to be authenticated or endorsed by the state.
 In fact, based on a feminist and queer reading of human rights, this interdisciplinary article asserts that state-sponsored sex/gender assignment through the practice of sex/gender registration must halt. It argues that mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration disproportionately infringes the emerging right to gender identity autonomy and the right to the legal recognition thereof. Most often, our Western heterosexual cultural system of gender, which posits the existence of two oppositional and complementary gender identities, anchored in so-called natural and binary sex, goes hand in hand with material and discursive forms of violence and entails various forms of unequal power dynamics. Hegemonic in nature, the heterosexual cultural system of gender pervasively regulates many (if not every) aspects of all bodies’ lives and being, including by legal means. The law upholds and certifies that specific gender regime, inter alia, by assigning a sex to individuals at birth (through the registration of a claimed evident, objective, natural element to be found on or in the body by inspection). Policies of mandatory (binary) sex/genderregistration therefore constitute the cornerstone of the legalisation of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which produces not only the conventional feminine and masculine gender identity (i.e. women and men) but also sex (i.e. females and males).
 This article suggests that, as long as the law refuses to go beyond the compulsory male/female (or even male/female/other) framework, it will be complicit in upholding the undesired consequences of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which affect all persons of whatever gender or physical features. Therefore, undoing remaining forms of global gender injustice, as well as respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights relating to gender identity, requires the abolishment of sex/gender registration instead of expanding the available gender markers. Indeed, this article finds that current state practices do not pursue a legitimate aim, and even if they do, mandatory sex/gender registration does not pass the proportionality test that is required in the assessment of restrictions of fundamental rights. A human rights analysis of official sex/gender in the age of gender self-determination finds mandatory sex/gender registration to be a disproportionate measure and recommends that states change their current practices. Doing so would be beneficial to cisgender and trans* individuals alike.

<p><br />It is commonly accepted that gender matters (whether cisgender, transgender/trans*, gender non-binary, genderfluid, gender queer, agender, or other) and many are raising awareness about the fact that gender always seems to matter. That gender matters, and always matters, does not necessarily mean, however, that gender needs to be authenticated or endorsed by the state.</p><p>In fact, based on a feminist and queer reading of human rights, this interdisciplinary article asserts that state-sponsored sex/gender assignment through the practice of sex/gender registration must halt. It argues that mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration disproportionately infringes the emerging right to gender identity autonomy and the right to the legal recognition thereof. Most often, our Western heterosexual cultural system of gender, which posits the existence of two oppositional and complementary gender identities, anchored in so-called natural and binary sex, goes hand in hand with material and discursive forms of violence and entails various forms of unequal power dynamics. Hegemonic in nature, the heterosexual cultural system of gender pervasively regulates many (if not every) aspects of all bodies’ lives and being, including by legal means. The law upholds and certifies that specific gender regime, inter alia, by assigning a sex to individuals at birth (through the registration of a claimed evident, objective, natural element to be found on or in the body by inspection). Policies of mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration therefore constitute the cornerstone of the legalisation of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which produces not only the conventional feminine and masculine gender identity (i.e. women and men) but also sex (i.e. females and males).</p><p>This article suggests that, as long as the law refuses to go beyond the compulsory male/female (or even male/female/other) framework, it will be complicit in upholding the undesired consequences of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which affect all persons of whatever gender or physical features. Therefore, undoing remaining forms of global gender injustice, as well as respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights relating to gender identity, requires the abolishment of sex/gender registration instead of expanding the available gender markers. Indeed, this article finds that current state practices do not pursue a legitimate aim, and even if they do, mandatory sex/gender registration does not pass the proportionality test that is required in the assessment of restrictions of fundamental rights. A human rights analysis of official sex/gender in the age of gender self-determination finds mandatory sex/gender registration to be a disproportionate measure and recommends that states change their current practices. Doing so would be beneficial to cisgender and trans* individuals alike.</p>

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Whilst the existence of 'a minor genre' of poems 'arguing against fruition'2 has been acknowledged for several decades,3 that genre (and its complementary antithesis) has received little serious and no comprehensive attention, despite its interest both for scholars concerned with the renewed exploitation of classical texts in the Renaissance and for those concerned with the representation of sexuality in times of uneasily shifting social mores. In both these areas, a clearer understanding can be derived from a comprehensive view of a generic field which has hitherto never been fully mapped.It was Dryden who said of Ben Jonson's relationship to the Ancients that 'you track him every where in their snow';4 in this essay, I shall be tracking the many travellers across the snow of a single first-century Latin text, the 'Fragment' attributed to Petronius Arbiter. I shall explore the shifting sexual politics of this text's intertexts as they represent or re-present their differing sociopolitical contexts and shall also examine the gender role-play of their protagonist voices, both male and female (and neuter). In Boileau's appropriately phallic metaphor for textual imitation, I hope to demonstrate how each contrives 'jouter contre son original'.5The Latin text was first printed in 1579 and fathered upon [Gaius] Petronius Arbiter, courtier of Nero, presumably because of his reputation as author of the Satyricon, first printed (in abridged extracts) in 1482, with further editions in 1499, 1520, 1565 and (in superior texts) 1575 and 1577.6 Amongst other sensationally explicit sexual adventures, Satyricon describes regrettable male sexual inadequacy; the ashamed Encolpius addresses his recalcitrant organ (I quote from William Burnaby's 1694 translation):At what time, raising myself on the Bed, in this or like manner, I reproacht the sullen impotent: With what face can you look up, thou shame of Heaven and Man? that can'st not be seriously mention'd. Have I deserv'd from you, when rais'd within sight of Heavens of Joys, to be struck down to the lowest Hell? To have a scandal fixt on the very prime and vigour of my years, and to be reduc'd to the weakness of an Old Man?, I beseech you, Sir, give me an Epitaph on my departed vigour; tho' in a great heat I had thus said,He still continu'd looking on the ground,Nor more, at this had rais'd his guilty Head,Than th'drooping Poppy on its tender stalk.7This exhortatory form combined with a parallel in Ovid's Elegies 3.7.13-148 to become a conventional trope, with English instances in Nashe's Choise of Valentines, Richard Head's The English Rogue, and 'Imperfect Enjoyment' poems by Etherege, 'Sir C.B.', Mulgrave, Rochester and Aphra Behn.9 Petronius's notoriety as the frankest apologist of unwilling failure of consummation may have made him seem the appropriate candidate for paternity of a fragment celebrating consummation voluntarily eschewed:...Carnal pleasure is brief and nasty, and the thing once done disgusts. So let's not rush blind and headlong at it like beasts on heat, for love flickers, its flame dies down; let's instead play like this endlessly, like this, lying lip to lip. There's no work nor shame in this; pleasure is and was and will long be here, where nothing fails and we are always just beginning. (My translation)The fully inflected Latin text offers us a plural ungendered speaker - 'irruamus iaceamus' (4, 7) - sexual forepleasure is presented as total gender fluidity (like the multiplicitously various couplings of Satyricon) in a timeless present ('sic sic sine fine' [6]) where there is no need to 'carpe diem', because foreplay brings no climax and therefore no Ovidian post-climactic sadness; the poem indeed professes a grammar of eternal delight - 'iuvit, iuvat et iuvabit' (9).The fragment found its first English translator in that dedicated classicist Ben Jonson:10. …

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone.

Safe spaces that matter: Material semiotics, affective bodies and queer readings of clinical spaces in Winnipeg, Canada

Across ages and cultures, music has been associated with sexual allure, gender inversion and suspect sexuality. Music has been theorised as both a putative agent of moral corruption and an expressive mechanism of gender and sexual signification, capable of arousing and channelling sexual urges and desires. This research examines musically facilitated expressions of queerness and queer identity, asking how and why music is used by queer musicians and musical performers to express non-normative gender and sexual identities. A queer theoretical approach to gender and sexuality, coupled with interdisciplinary theories concerning music as an identificatory practice, provides the theoretical landscape for this study. An investigation into queer musical episodes such as this necessitates an exploration of the broader cultural milieu in which queer musical work occurs. It also raises questions surrounding the corpus of queer musical practice—that is, do these practices constitute the creation of a new musical genre or a collection of genres that can be understood as queer music? The preceding questions inform an account of the histories, styles, sensibilities, and gender and sexual politics of camp, drag and genderfuck, queer punk and queercore, as well as queer feminist cultures, positioning these within musical praxis. Queer theory, music and identity theories as well as contemporary discussions relating to queer cultural histories are then applied to case studies of queer-identified music performers from Brisbane, Australia. A grounded theoretical analysis of the data gathered in these case studies provides the necessary material to argue that musical performance provides a creative context for the expression of queer identities and the empowerment of queer agency, as well as oppositional responses to and criticism of heterosexual hegemony, and the homogenisation and assimilation of mainstream gay culture. Resulting from this exploration of queer musical cultures, localised data gathering and analysis, this research also supposes a set of ideologies and sensibilities that can be considered indicative and potentially determinant of queer musical practice generally. Recognising that queer theory offers a useful theoretical discourse for understanding the complexities and flexibility of gender and sexual identities—particularly those that resist the binary logics of heteronormativity—this project foregrounds a question that is relatively unanswered in musicological work. It asks: how can musicology make use of queer theory in order to produce queer readings and new, anti-oppressive knowledge regarding musical performance, composition and participation? To answer this, it investigates the history of resistance towards embodied studies of music; the disjuncture between competing discourses of traditional and ‘new’ musicology; and recent developments in the pursuit of queer visibility within music studies. Building upon these recent developments, this work concludes that the integration of queer theoretical perspectives and queer aesthetic sensibilities within musicological discourse allows for a serious reconsideration of musical meaning and signification. In the development of a queer musicology, a committed awareness of queer theory, histories, styles and sensibilities, together with an embodied scholarly approach to music, is paramount. It is through this discursive nexus that musicology will be able to engage more fully with the troubling, performative and contingent qualities of gender, sexuality and desire.

This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today as trans and genderqueer. These queer readings of Södergran’s poems seek to move away from traditional interpretations of her work while resisting the application of fixed meanings onto them. Locating potential manifestations, opposed to identifications, of trans expression can open up new possibilities for understanding the complexity of Södergran’s writing and how contemporary readers can consider their own positionality as they navigate and renegotiate their place in the queer worlds Södergran built. This essay argues that Edith Södergran’s avant-gardist world-building of materially and aesthetically genderqueer poetic subjects contributes to her own revolutionary brand of Finland-Swedish modernism.

This essay takes a new approach to the well-known meeting between two late-medieval English visionary women, Margery Kempe and the anchoress Julian of Norwich, as described in The Book of Margery Kempe. In this analysis their conversation subtly evokes a long history of women concentrating their subversive power through intimate, spiritual exchange, a history reaching back to the Biblical Visitation scene and expressed in its medieval artistic and literary instantiations. A queer reading illuminates the way that such female same-sex relationships challenge patriarchal systems by offering a privileged access to God outside clerical supervision. By examining Margery and Julian’s encounter, Luke’s Visitation passage, its depiction in a late-medieval Book of Hours, and comparing two different Middle English translations of a Visitation vision in Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations, the full transgressive effect of queer touch between women—or even its unspoken possibility—emerges.