IMC 2017: Sessions
Session 720: Other Spaces: Gendered Tensions between Inside and Outside
Tuesday 4 July 2017, 14.15-15.45
| Sponsor: | Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS) |
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| Organiser: | Liz Herbert McAvoy, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea University |
| Moderator/Chair: | Liz Herbert McAvoy, Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Research (MEMO), Swansea University |
| Paper 720-a | The Mystic and the Birthing Chamber (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Religious Life, Theology, Women's Studies |
| Paper 720-b | Material Girl: Lady Bertilak and the Agency of the Bed-Chamber in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Secular, Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Women's Studies |
| Paper 720-c | Thomas Hoccleve's Series, the Poet’s Study, and Unmanly Interiority (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English |
| Abstract | This session aims to examine through the lens of gendered analysis the mutually dependent, yet apparently dichotomous notions of inside and outside in the Middle Ages, particularly in terms of how these operated in material, literary, and iconographic contexts. The medieval walled garden, for example, comprised both a sanctuary and a place of confinement; the anchorite in her cell was both part of, and yet ideologically excluded from society; the lady's bedchamber could become the locus of barriers, seduction, and enclosure. Closer examination of the multifaceted tensions generated by and between apparently 'dichotomous' spaces, both material and imaginary, will serve to reveal a series of 'other' spaces within which apparent differences are able to be resolved and which ultimately present a model of human entanglement that challenges the epistemology of the oppositional binary model. |