IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 620: Gender, Sexuality, and Medieval 'Otherness' in Medieval and Modern Literature

Tuesday 4 July 2017, 11.15-12.45

Organiser:	Amy Burge, College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh
Moderator/Chair:	Rachel E. Moss, Université de Paris I
Paper 620-a	A Tale of Two Kings: Masculinity, Race, and the Medieval in C. S. Pacat's Captive Prince Trilogy (Language: English) Amy Brown, University of Sydney Index terms: Gender Studies, Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Sexuality
Paper 620-b	Opposites Attract: Reading Sex and Gender in Medieval and Modern Romance and Advice Literature (Language: English) Amy Burge, College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Sexuality
Paper 620-c	Say Yes to the Dress: Using Maid Marian and Medievalism to Interrogate the Present-as-Past (Language: English) Valerie B. Johnson, Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park Index terms: Gender Studies, Medievalism and Antiquarianism
Abstract	Gender has generally been conceived of as binary - masculinity and femininity are defined by their difference from one another. So too has the Middle Ages been seen as 'other' - strange and unfamiliar to an apparently more liberated 'modernity'. The three papers in this session deal with these connected strands of 'otherness' - gender and the 'medieval'. Featuring papers on masculinity, orientalism, and the imagined medieval past as a space of sexual otherness; medieval and modern advice literature and narratives of sexual progress; and female cross-dressing in postmedieval Robin Hood, the panel fundamentally asks: what does such alterity reveal about our medieval and modern selves?