front cover of Constructing Medieval Sexuality
Constructing Medieval Sexuality
Karma Lochrie
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

A groundbreaking examination of sexuality in the Middle Ages.

This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives-literary, theological, philosophical, medical, historical, and art historical-to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires.

Always considering sexuality in relation to gender, the body, and identity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of that period. Examining a range of medieval texts and images, the contributors explore the medieval understanding of sodomy, the historical construction of heterosexuality, the polymorphous erotics of female mysticism, and the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, and religion. This work not only offers new perspectives on the ways in which queer theory might inform our views of sexuality in medieval Europe, but also suggests that medieval constructions of sexuality may offer important contributions to both queer theory and the history of sexuality.These essays, situated in the context of current debates, linger over various definitions of medieval sexuality; they speak to each other in their differences and their similarities to further productive thinking about the sometimes conflicting and always fascinating ways in which the Middle Ages regarded sex and sexuality. Contributors: E. Jane Burns, U of North Carolina; Joan Cadden, U of California, Davis; Michael Camille, U of Chicago; Dyan Elliott, Indiana U; Louise O. Fradenburg, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mark D. Jordan, U of Notre Dame; Steven F. Kruger, CUNY.
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Heterosyncrasies
Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t
Karma Lochrie
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In the early twentieth century, marriage manuals sought to link marital sex to the progress of civilization, searching for the history of what they considered to be normal sexuality. In Heterosyncrasies, Karma Lochrie looks to the foundation of modern society in the Middle Ages to undertake a profound questioning of the heterosexuality of that history. Lochrie begins this provocative rethinking of sexuality by dismantling the very idea of normal through a study of the development of statistics in the nineteenth century. She then intervenes in contemporary debates about queer versus ostensibly stable heterosexual social and sexual categories by exposing the "heterosyncratic" organization of sexuality in the Middle Ages and by clarifying the dubious contribution that the concept of normality has made to the construction of sexuality. In medieval texts from the letters of Heloise to Lollard heretical attacks on the Church, to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, medical discourse surrounding the clitoris, and finally the Amazons of medieval myth, Lochrie focuses on female sexuality in the Middle Ages in an effort to discern a less binary, more diversified understanding of it. Lochrie demonstrates how the medieval categories of natural and unnatural were distinctly different from our modern categories of normal and abnormal. In her work we see how abandoning heteronormativity as a medieval organizer of sexualities profoundly changes the way we understand all sexualities - past, present, and possibly even future. Heterosyncrasies is a milestone in the study of sexual identity politics, revealing not only how presumptions of normality obscure our understanding of the past, but also how these beliefs affect our present-day laws, society, and daily life.
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front cover of Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature
Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature
Edited by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
In Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala bring together established scholars and new voices to illuminate a previously understudied but consequential element of life in the Middle Ages. Contributors focus on representations of women’s friendships in medieval European literature and their afterlives both to historicize them and draw out the finer nuances of the multitude of forms, affects, values, and ethics that emerge within those friendships. This volume examines works by Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Marie de France, female saints, and late-Middle Scots poets alongside lesser-known late medieval lyrics and Middle English romances to chart women’s friendships and their many and sometimes conflicting affinities with the cultural categories of gender, religion, politics, and sexuality. In addition to exploring the parameters of female friendship across a range of texts and historical contexts, contributors evaluate the political, religious, and civic structures negotiated in public and private and engage with the long history of theory and philosophy on friendship. The result is a theoretical and historical rubric for the future study of women’s friendships in medieval texts and beyond.

Contributors:
Penelope Anderson, Andrea Boffa, Jennifer N. Brown, Christine Chism, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Laurie Finke, Carissa M. Harris, Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Clare A. Lees, Karma Lochrie, Gillian R. Overing, Alexandra Verini, Usha Vishnuvajjala, Stella Wang

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