***
"I have no real reason for uploading this note and it will probably be deleted; I just have a perverse wish to vent against such tripe.
The first eighteen lines of The Canterbury Tales, to cite what is probably the best-known passage of early English literature, articulate a dense web of cultural relations that structures and locates individual subjectivity, a web that we may call "heterosexuality." The lines seek to situate humans in the grand scheme of the cosmos, in relation to both the physical and the spiritual realms. They do this by specifying a network of categories, of binary oppositions...that structures the world of the Tales (and the world that produced the Tales) - and they begin with an act of masculine penetration of the feminine: "What that Aprill with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote." April/March, summer/winter, male/female, active/passive, desire/inertia (or desire/dullness, as T.S. Eliot would have it), fecundity/barrenness, generative nongenerative, sky/earth, spiritual physical, knowledge/the unknown, outside/inside, public/private, health/illness: a whole cultural paradigm, structuring the seasons, the labor, the physical life, and the spiritual development of humans, is set up: male pierces female to the root.
-- A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Carolyn Dinshaw
Diacritics © 1994 The Johns Hopkins University Press
OH PLEASE. SHUT UP AND DIE. It's HIS because there's no word for ITS in Middle English. March is NOT called female. Just cos you see PENIS ALLUSIONS everywhere does NOT mean they're there: it just means you are profoundly desperate to have something "FRESH" to add to a library of Chaucer criticism in which anything remotely useful you might have to say has ALREADY BEEN SAID. How the HELL do you get 'labor', 'a whole cultural paradigm' and 'spiritual development of humans' from the stupid rain chasing away the stupid drought? You get THE WEATHER REPORT, that's all you get. Taking the first 18 lines of The Canterbury Tales and calling it a 'dense web of cultural relations that structures and locates individual subjectivity' also known as 'heterosexuality' is just STUPID PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL POSTURING. You're MUTILATING a great work by appropriating and contextualizing it to suit your own devious queer-theory gender-studies agenda and THAT'S SHAMEFUL. NOW GO AWAY AND DIE.
It should be noted that the venom in my vent is due to my bad lungs and worse temper at being awake at 1:30am researching this crap in an attempt to write lucid essays."
The original article sounded funny enough to check out, so here are some other gems:
"It is certainly true that innocent kisses often occur between men at moments of heightened emotion in late Middle English texts-just kisses, as when Arthur and his court regretfully kiss Gawain goodbye as he sets out on his journey [596]. Such kisses represent conventional cultural practice, informed by the rules of courtesy and hospitality; there is nothing problematic about men's kissing one another per se in the medieval romance context, as there might be today in the United States."
This is a very problematic passage, since there's something problematic about men kissing women - what more with men kissing men?!
"The Fathers and Doctors of the Church saw that kisses between men could be sinful, a possible first step in homosexual encounters that were spoken of in terms of one partner's feminization-terms that make homosexual relations parodic of heterosexual ones. Though they are not in themselves mortal sins, Aquinas discerns in the Summa theologiae, kisses come to be treated as such "ex sua causa," "because of a wicked intention," as the Blackfriars edition renders it; kisses that are intended to arouse, to incite venereal pleasure, are properly called libidinous and are condemned as mortal sins. Earlier, Peter Damian ("The Jerome of our times," according to Bernard of Constance) had written in his Liber Gomorrhianus that "whoever is found in a kiss alone. . . will be justly subjected to the whole range of ignominious discipline" ("qui solo osculo ...omnibus illisprobrosae disciplinae confusionibus merito subjacebit"). The comprehensive and influential Penitential of Cummean (seventh century) regards kissing, either "simpliciter" or in various degrees of erotic involvement, among homosexual acts to be censured.'"
"The role reversal in the bedroom is represented on the first day as Gawain and the female deer-barren hinds and does-are hunted in narrative tandem. The animal whose slaughter is described is the mirror image of Gawain: finally killed, the throat is cut, the limbs are cut off, the doe is eviscerated, and her insides are unlaced [cf. 1334]. In a passage whose length has always been a puzzle-we know the gentry must have loved this detail; but it does seem excessive in this carefully structured romance, and such detail is repeated in the narration of the following two hunts (of male animalshthe animal body is split to pieces. I suggest that this unlacing of the body is the poem's visual representation of straight gender identity's failing. When such identity fails, the body perceptually disaggregates, because it's that heterosexual identity matrix that-ideally and tenuously-accords unity to the body in the first place. The straight gender behavior that Gawain enacts is so fundamental that without its guarantee of unity he is subject to-or, better, of-corporeal disaggregation. And such disaggregation threatens the possibility of meaning itself: "The image of [man's] body," says Lacan, "is the principle of every unity he perceives in objects" [Seminar 2: 166, qtd. in Butler, Bodies 77]."
"Gender, desire, and anatomy here are not, and don't have to be, unified. He kisses him just like a woman, but he doesn't break like a little girl. The parody of heterosexuality that emerges as we read these kisses serves to denaturalize for us such a notion of Christian heterosexual identity... We could imagine that Bertilak had more agency in this whole plot than he finally admits to Gawain-that his sending his wife in to Gawain was a way of bonding himself, via the woman, to the man... But Gawain is not a character given to parody, and neither is this poem interested in pursuing the homoerotic links that would unsettle its project of representing Christian knighthood. Any liberatory potentials of this parody such as recognizing a positive erotic impulse between Bertilak and Gawain and linking it to identity are unthinkable in the culture of this poem"
Funny - so much of what she says is unthinkable in the culture of the poem.
