Embracing Queerness in Medieval Literature
Part III: Why We Should Still Care About Medieval Literature
What do things that happened thousands of years ago have to do with us in 2024?
Everything, it turns out. As Mathew Kuefler points out in “Homoeroticism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Acts, Identities, Cultures,” which I visited last time, “The purpose of history cannot be divorced from the present, and [. . .] the start of all history is a question posed in the here and now” (1266). We are not divorced from our pasts, no matter how much we shift, grow, transform, or progress. The present does not exist in a vacuum. We shift and grow and transform and progress because there is something from which to make these movements.
Welcome back to The Whale-Road, weary traveler! This post is the third in my three-part series on queerness in the Middle Ages and what that means for us in 2024.
In Part I, entitled “What Even is Queerness in Medieval Literature?” I explored the broadness of “queerness” and how that might look generally in the Middle Ages or medieval literature. In Part II, entitled “Queer Possibility in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” I honed in on how queer readings might apply to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And now we’ve arrived at Part III, the “so what,” the “what that means for us in 2024” part.
In two of my previous Substack posts outside this series, “Why Should We Care About Medieval Literature?” and “Justice for Brak,” I gave a so what. In the former, I reference Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. He suggests that “the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people” (8), such as Frankenstein’s monster, and “a questioning attitude needs to become habitual” (13). In response, I suggest, “If we can actively deconstruct the ways that our thoughts and thought processes predispose us to certain understandings but also certain practices, then I think we can arrive at an answer to why we read and should care about medieval literature.”
In the latter, as I revisited in Part I of this series, I state, “The lived experiences of people during the medieval period were no more monolithic than the lived experiences of people today, and medieval literature offers us a window into that world.”
I think it’s fairly easy for someone who doesn’t really engage in medieval literature to dismiss the Middle Ages as a time when, for example, women had absolutely no rights and the world just sucked for anyone who wasn’t a heterosexual man. Even medieval literature itself is fraught with examples of exactly that. In other words, it’s easy to monolithize the Middle Ages because we know, with or without literature, that historically, even in the Western World, human rights have been shaky at best and downright deadly at worst.
But this view simplifies reality in a way that suggests the world was one way when actually, the world was many ways with many moving parts. A queer lens, for one, using evidence presented in medieval literature, could shed some light not just on homosocial relationships but also on homosexual relationships, could offer an asexual view of characters who don’t appear overtly sexual, could question the ways that people were othered in some sort of normative society while still giving agency to those othered people.
When Grendel attacks those sleeping men, we’re meant to hate him. He’s a monster. He’s “other” than human. But what if we reminded ourselves that he was outcasted, that he and his mother were never given the opportunity to become part of that human community?
What if allowed the possibility for Lord Bertilak and Sir Gawain to be something other than heterosexual?
To do so would be to disregard years of tradition dismissing the existence of the queer, whether in a gender/sexual sense or simply in an anti-normative sense. To disregard years of tradition is always a dangerous step for progress. And that’s why we need queer theory.
And that’s why we need medieval literature, too: to shed light on the past, to affirm, to remind, to enlighten. Queerness has always been among us. Men and women have defied gender systems for centuries. Men and women have been something other than heterosexual for centuries. Social binaries like “masculine and feminine” as we know still them today in 2024 are fragile, and medieval literature shows us that they’re fragile when we look at characters like Sir Bertilak and Sir Gawain, whether their interactions are simply homosocial or actually homosexual.
There’s also something to be said about introducing “queerness” into a conversation around medieval literature as soon as it’s taught in a classroom, even if through different wording. Showing the vulnerabilities of characters and the ways in which they defy normativity can be really empowering to any reader. Add to that that many people first introduced to literature like, say Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, might do so expecting not to find any sort of representation for them, such as on the basis of gender and sexuality, and yet a queer reading would enable exactly that representation!
Of course, “representation” has become a dirty word in many parts of the United States, but that’s another discussion to be held outside this post.
In short, a queer reading of medieval literature and an acknowledgement of the queerness that is present in medieval literature opens up our history and allows us to grow in the present.
And these conversations are happening, dear reader. They’re happening right here on Substack, on my classmates’ pages and my professor’s page and other serious academics’ pages. They’re happening on WordPress, from which I shared a post in Part II. They happen on Tumblr and on sites like Hyperallergic that might even be lesser known. They are all over the Internet.
These sites are not ones you might associate with serious academic thought. Why is that? Have we enmeshed ourselves so deeply into “Scademia” that only certain “sources,” like peer-reviewed journal articles accessible in a library database or a book published by a well-known critic or specialist, can contain serious academic thought? Certainly not! In fact, these mediums open the discussion further, allowing serious academic thought—or critical thought in general—to reach wider audiences.
In today’s world, we can talk about queerness and medieval literature seriously and with care without a prior stamp of approval.
In 2024, the world is much different than in the Middle Ages. Texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf are more easily printed and disseminated. Intellectual discourse can occur much more rapidly through websites like blogs and discussion forums as well as emails and text messages. These conversations are happening because they’re important to someone and because they shed new light.
So why ought we to stifle these conversations or disregard them in academic settings, like a classroom or a formal essay, just because they weren’t filtered through “Academia” in the first place?
Thanks for sticking with this part’s line of thinking, dear reader. And there won’t be an until next time, because that’s a wrap for me. Instead, take care out there, and enjoy your journeys across the whale-roads of the world!
Works Cited (and Referenced, for good measure)
Donoghue, Daniel, editor. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. Translated by
Seamus Heaney, W.W. Norton and Company, 2019.
Kuefler, Mathew. “Homoeroticism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Acts, Identities, Cultures.” The American Historical Review, vol. 123, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1246-1266. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26581375.
Limbrey, L.B. as scornalott. “Queer As Folklore: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Witching Hour. WordPress, 18 March 2020, https://scornalott.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/queer-as-folklore-sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight/.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Simon Armitage, W.W. Norton and Company, 2007.
Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2010. EBSCOhost,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=390177&site=eds-
live.
Tran, Hanh-Nhan. “Sir Gawain and Lord Bertilak's. . . Courtship?” In Honey’s Company. Substack, 21 February 2024, follow this hyperlink because Substack is embedding it by default.