Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (56 page)

33. Ibid., 39.

1. Acta Sanctorum
   , cited in Shulamith Shahar,
   Childhood in the Middle Ages
   , trans. Chaya Galai (New York, 1990), 11.
   

2. On the widespread medieval European practice of child abandonment, see John Boswell,
   The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
   (New York, 1988).
   

3. The book of Matthew is the source of all the biblical passages that argue the spiri- tual excellence of the condition of childhood, all of which express the same theme: “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3–6). See also Matthew 11:25 (“thou hast . . . re- vealed . . . unto the babes”) and Matthew 19:14 (“Suffer little children and forbid them not”). While it might be argued that these passages stress the full humanity and dignity of the child, it is equally true that they address the child’s marginal and degraded status; par- allel passages referring to lepers can be found.
   

4. See Matthew 2:16.
   

5. Bartholomew of England,
   Liber de Proprietatibus Rerum
   (Strasbourg, 1485), trans. and cited in Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” in de Mause,
   The History of Childhood
   , 136.
   

6. Shahar,
   Childhood in the Middle Ages
   , 19.
   

7. For his analysis of how silence speaks in the history of childrens’ sexuality, see Michel Foucault,
   The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction
   , trans. Robert Hurley (London, 1990), 27–30.
   

8. Caption to an engraving by F. Guérard cited in Philippe Aries,
   Centuries of Child- hood: A Social History of Family Life
   , trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962), 110.
   

9. Kincaid,
   Child-Loving,
   13.
   

10. See George Anderson, “
    Beowulf
    , Chaucer, and Their Backgrounds,” in
    Contempo- rary Literary Scholarship
    , ed. Lewis Leary (New York, 1958); E. T. Donaldson,
    Chaucer’s Poetry
    (New York, 1958); R. J. Schoeck, “Chaucer’s Prioress: Mercy and the Tender Heart,” in
    Chaucer Criticism
    , ed. Richard Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame, Ind., 1960), 1:245–58; Ian Robinson,
    Chaucer and the English Tradition
    (Cambridge, 1972); Alfred David,
    The Strumpet Muse
    (Bloomington, Ind., 1976), esp. 209; Donald R. Howard,
    The Idea of the Canterbury Tales
    (Berkeley, 1976), esp. 277.
    

11. See D. S. Brewer,
    Chaucer
    (London, 1953); Florence H. Ridley,
    The Prioress and the Critics
    (Berkeley, 1965); Albert B. Friedman, “The Prioress’s Tale and Chaucer’s Anti- Semitism,’
    Chaucer Review
    9 (1974–75): 118–29.
    

12. Sherman Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise,”
    JEGP
    63 (1964): 599–624, esp. 605.
    

13. Louise O. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,”
    Exem- plaria
    1.1 (March 1989): 69–115.
    

14. I myself can hardly claim to rise above my critical moment in this essay. Recent read- ers of Chaucer with similar concerns include Carolyn Dinshaw, who in
    Chaucer’s Sexual Po- etics
    (Madison, 1989) argues that the author’s entire ouevre can be read as an exploration of the relationship between textuality and gender, characterized by “an understanding of liter- ary endeavor as masculine acts performed on feminine bodies” (25). Dinshaw closes her book with an admirable attempt to queer her paradigm (or, rather, to argue that Chaucer’s paradigm is ultimately queer) by drawing the reader’s attention to the Pardoner as a walk- ing deconstruction of this heteronormative hermeneutic. I believe the Prioress’s tale rewards analysis in this context even more richly. See also Carolyn Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer,”
    Exemplaria
    7.1 (Spring 1995): 75–92; Catherine S. Cox, “Grope wel bihynde”: The Subversive Erotics of Chaucer’s Summoner,”
    Exemplaria
    

    7.1 (Spring 1995): 145–177; Steven F. Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale,”
    Exemplaria
    6.1 (Spring 1994): 115–140; Glenn Burger, “Kissing the Pardoner,”
    PMLA
    107.5 (October 1992): 1143–1156.
    

15. Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 607.
    

16. Gottfried of Strassburg,
    Tristan
    , cited and trans. in McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates,” 136.
    

17. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoana- lytic Experience” and “The Signification of the Phallus” in
    Écrits: A Selection
    , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977); see also
    Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freu- dienne
    , ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York, 1982); Sigmund Freud,
    Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
    , introduction by Steven Marcus, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1975); see also Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolu- tion of the Oedipus Complex,” in
    Medicine and Western Civilization
    , ed. David Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995).
    

    Alan Sinfield abstracts the conventional wisdom of our era felicitously, noting the fa- miliar “malfunction in the Oedipal family romance—unbalanced love of a boy for his mother, effort of a boy to replace an absent or inadequate father, identification of a boy with his mother.” Alan Sinfield,
    The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment
    (New York, 1994), 162.
    

18. Hawkins, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 611.
    

19. While it may seem odd to argue that the Jews in this tale are stand-ins for Christ- ian patriarchy, the argument is not an original one. See Sigmund Freud,
    Moses and Monotheism
    , trans. Katherine Jones (New York, 1997): “The hatred for Judaism is at bot- tom a hatred for Christianity” (117).
    

20. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in
    Reclaiming Sodom
    , ed. Jonathan Goldberg (New York, 1994), 256–257.
    

21. Geoffrey Chaucer,
    The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue
    , ed. V.
    

    A. Kolve and Glending Olson (New York, 1989), 427.
    

22. For the most striking instances of the medieval convention of using grammatical metaphors in a sexual context, see Alan of Lille,
    The Plaint of Nature
    , ed. and trans. James
    

    J. Sheridan (Toronto, 1980); Jan Ziolkowski,
    Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual
    (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
    

23. Without making an argument about social tolerance, or even general prevalence, it would be unreasonable to believe that English schoolboys in Chaucer’s day—as today, as everywhere—did not occasionally have consensual sex with each other. See Bray,
    Homo- sexuality in Renaissance England
    : “There is evidence that homosexuality was institution- alised not only at the universities but also in grammar schools and even in the village schools” (52).
    

24. “Up to the time of the Wilde trials—far later than is widely supposed—it is unsafe to interpret effeminacy as defining of, or as a signal of, same-sex passion. Mostly, it meant being emotional and spending too much time with women. Often it involved excessive cross-sexual attachment” (Sinfield,
    The Wilde Century
    , 27). See also Traub: “To the extent that heterosexual desire in Shakespearean drama is often associated with detumescence . .
    

    . and homoerotic desire is figured as permanently erect, it is the desire of man for man that is coded as the more “masculine’” (
    Desire and Anxiety
    , 134).
    

25. To suggest that this point has been much debated would be to understate.
    

    See, famously, Michel Foucault’s foundational dictum: “The sodomite had been a tem- porary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” Foucault,
    History of Sexuality
    , 1:43. Or Bray,
    Homosexuality in Renaissance England
    : “To talk of an individual in this period as being or not being ‘a homosexual’ is an anachronism and ruinously misleading. The temp- tation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was ac- cepted as part of the common lot” (16); or David M. Halperin,
    One Hundred Years of Ho- mosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love
    (New York, 1990): “There was no conceptual apparatus available for identifying a person’s fixed and determinate sexual
    orientation
    , much less for assessing and classifying it” (26); or Bruce R. Smith,
    Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics
    (Chicago, 1991): “On one particular point of knowledge we need to be absolutely clear: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sex- uality was not, as it is for us, the starting place for anyone’s self-definition” (11); or Di- Gangi,
    The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama
    : “Early modern homoeroticism cannot be defined as a minority sexual practice or a discrete erotic identity” (1).
    

    For dissent, based primarily on interpretation of religious texts, see Allen Frantzen, “Be- tween the Lines: Queer Theory, the History of Homosexuality, and Anglo-Saxon Peniten- tials,”
    Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
    26.2 (1996): 255–295: “I wish to sug- gest that the Anglo-Saxon penitentials refer to categories of persons, not simply to acts which a variety of persons could perform” (258); or see Bruce W. Holsinger, “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the
    Divine Comedy
    ,” in
    Premodern Sexualities
    , ed.
    

    Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, with the assistance of Kathy Lavezzo (New York, 1996): “There is a very deep sense in which the
    Commedia
    itself, through its careful segre- gations of sinners, its immense formal structures, it subtle but effective interpellations of sin- ners, defines and locates its inhabitants’ identities—past, present, and future—through the deviant acts and desires for which they are punished” (244); or Jordan,
    The Invention of Sodomy
    : “Peter Damian attributes to the Sodomite many of the kinds of features that Fou- cault finds only in the nineteenth-century definition. . . . The idea that same-sex pleasure constitutes an identity of some kind is clearly the work of medieval theology” (163–164).
    

    For less polemical formulations see Gregory W. Bredbeck,
    Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlow to Milton
    (Ithaca, 1991): “Can we speak of the sodomite? Yes, we can. But we must continually recognize that this sodomite—this potentiality for subjective inscriptions—is at best only tangentially related to the actual rhetoric that professes to inscribe it” (185); or Goldberg, “Introduction”: “To follow Foucault à la lettre, the Renaissance comes before the regimes of sexuality, and to speak of sexuality in the period is a misnomer. This is in- deed the case if sexuality is taken as a marker of identity, definitional of a core of the per- son, and these essays, as I have already suggested, take great care not to suggest that gay or lesbian identity can be found in the texts at hand. Yet this does not mean that the anachro- nism of speaking of sexuality in the Renaissance is not to be risked” (5); Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches”: “I argue that there was a web of cultural relations operating in Chaucer’s world that we would now call heterosexuality, and that it operated as a norm in the way Foucault suggests post-Enlightenment sexuality does. At the same time, I want to be clear that the deviations I call ‘queer’ here are
    not
    organized into an opposing sexuality in Chaucer’s culture, but exist, rather, as unorganized sexual behaviors—because the het- ero norm keeps them that way” (82, n. 14); and Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
    ”
    Diacritics
    24.2–3 (1994): “There is good late medieval evidence that sexual acts were fundamental to an individual subject’s sense of self and location in larger cultural structures” (207).
    

    This essay is less careful and clear about protecting Chaucer from anachronism than most would deem wise.
    

26. See Sinfield: “It is not necessary to assume an even development, whereby one model characterizes an epoch and then is superseded by another. There may have been in early modern Europe, especially in aristocratic circles, coteries where something like our concept of the same-sex-oriented individual developed, though the concept was still nei- ther coherent nor generally known” (
    The Wilde Century
    , 31).
    

27. See Jonathan Goldberg,
    Sodometries
    (Stanford, 1992): early modern sexual ideolo- gies formed “the sites upon which later sexual orders and later sexual identities could bat- ten” (22). Also note Lee Patterson’s point, in
    Negotiating the Past: The Historical Under- standing of Medieval Literature
    (Madison, 1987): “Oversimplified history . . . serves to stigmatize discordant textual elements as interpretive errors, modern subjectivities to be put down to a failure of historical knowledge” (45). Obviously, there is a place for studies such as DiGangi’s, with the stated goal of “denaturaliz[ing] the association of homoerotic desire with social transgression” (16); equally obviously, this essay has different goals.
    

28. In most medieval Christian hermeneutic theories, the spiritual truth is veiled with- in the feminized body of the letter—the Christian reader must therefore penetrate the body of the text by means of the masculinizing process of allegorical interpretation. Be- cause we are here presented with an antiphallic Christianity, this trope is not invoked in this context.
    

29. Lee Edelman,
    Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
    (New York, 1994): In the early modern period, “we enter an era in which homosexuality becomes so- cially constituted in ways that not only make it available to signification, but also cede to it the power to signify the instability of the signifying function
    per se
    , the arbitrary and ten- uous nature of the relationship between any signifier and signified. It comes to figure, and to be figured in terms of, subversion of the theological order through heresy, of the legiti- mate political order through treason, and of the social order through the disturbance of codified gender roles and stereotypes” (6).