“Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies”
Karma Lochrie
From Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 180-200.
“Queering" is a project of contestation, in Judith Butler's words, "a
contestation of the terms of sexual legitimacy." It works through the hyperbolic
appropriation and reversal of the delegitimization signified by the term
"queer," transforming it into a site of opposition. "The hyperbolic gesture
is crucial to the exposure of the homophobic ‘law’ that can no longer control
the terms of its own ab-jecting strategies," according to Butler.' For
Butler, as for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queering is a performance that exploits
and exposes "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances
and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements
of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made)
to signify monolithically.”2
The historical reach of the queering project, according to these two
definitions, seems to be confined to the modern regimes of sexuality that
it presupposes -homophobic laws and monolithic sexualities. Yet as Jonathan
Goldberg, Louise 0. Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, Simon Gaunt, and others
have argued, queering risks the anachronism of speak-ing of sexuality in
the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order to challenge and disrupt historicist
and literary assumptions and practices. Queer read-ings, like queer histories,
seek out those dissonances, gaps, and excesses of meaning that signal heteronormative
protocols of representation and that enable a disruption of those same
protocols.3 The risk involved in queering premodern histories and texts
derives from the lack of organizing terminology -heterosexual, homosexual,
and bisexual- and from the identity politics invested in these categories.
Queering does not seek to discover or install lesbian and gay identities
in premodern subjects or histories; rather, it risks the anachronism of
speaking of sexuality in the first place to unsettle the heterosexual paradigms
of scholarship; to con-test medieval representational practices across
sexual, gender, and class lines; and to produce readings of medieval texts
that trouble our assump-tions about medieval culture and textual practices.
The venture of queering medieval mystical sex runs two risks,
of find-ing sex where it is not (or where it is only "convention") and
of anachro-nism -of lodging sex at the center of the mystical experience
and sexu-ality at the core of the mystic's identity. Queering, however,
is not simply
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
an inversion of the not-sexual, or conventional, into the sexual. If
it were, it would amount to no more than a "reverse-discourse" that rein-states
the very terms and categories it seeks to overcome.4 Not only does
the translation of the previously conventional or metaphorical language
into the sexual merely reverse the terms of heteronormative paradigms without
changing them, it implicitly deploys a repression model of the history
of sexuality.5
The "queer tendencies" of my title is deliberately vague in its refer-ence-to
mystical acts, to the slippage between acts and tendencies ex-ploited by
the "Don't ask, don't tell" military policy, to the territory that is opposed
to those acts (as in the acts/identities paradigm), to the mystic's desire,
to the trajectory of this essay. My purpose is to emphasize that "queer"
is not simply a reconstructed term for homosexual or ho-moerotic, but a
category marking the sexual as the site for a variety of cultural struggles.
To queer late medieval female mysticism is to posit one such site of
cultural struggle and to endeavor to unsettle our current ways of under-standing
it. Constructions of feminine desire and sexuality, religious par-adigms
of devotion, and modern medieval scholarship are all implicated and cast
into doubt through this queering. At the end of this essay, I will consider
whether the queer tendencies in female mystical practice signify opposition
or transgression.
Mystical Love Noir
Women's spirituality during the late Middle Ages is usually considered
to be marked by erotic, nuptial, and maternal themes, along with an in-creased
attention to Christ's humanity.6 Medieval scholars have posi-tioned this
spirituality in a patrilineage extending back to the language of the biblical
Song of Songs and its commentaries, the secular tradition of courtly love,
and Cistercian and Franciscan influences on late me-dieval piety.7 What
emerges from most accounts of women's spirituality of the late Middle Ages
is a highly romanticized or, alternatively, allego-rized vision of their
practices of mystical sex and a rigidly heterosexual-ized version of their
sexuality.
There is, in effect, a master narrative of medieval mystical devotion
that remains unquestioned in spite of the evidence of women's mystical
texts. This master narrative works in a variety of ways to preserve its
own heterosexual framework and to restrict the domain of what we re-gard
as sexual in mystical texts. As with most master narratives, there is some
truth in this one-that is, that much of mystical sex is both heterosexual
and reflective of the Song of Songs tradition. However, I want to argue
that mystical sex is not always so conveniently located in the locus deliciarum
of the Song of Songs and that mystical sexuality is not limited to a heterosexual
model. Medieval scholars usually "find"
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mystical sex within the "place of delights," the garden of the Song
of Songs, and the format of the sponsa Christi, the Bride of Christ.8 A
vir-tual bower of bliss inhabited by the mystical lover, this place of
delights seduces her with its voluptuousness. Here, the lover becomes enflamed
with desire and awaits the kiss of her beloved and his entrance into her
voluptuous but sealed garden (Song of Songs 5:1-4). The conventions of
courtly love lend themselves to this location and scenario of mystical
devotion by emphasizing the lover's suffering and languishing for the absent
beloved.9
Yet these two traditions of the allegorization of the Song of
Songs and its sentimentalization in the "place of delights” are not the
only provinces in which mystical sex occurs. These traditions help us to
understand some-but not all-of the various kinds of sexual experiences
found in mystical texts. By adhering too closely to these alternative constructs,
we miss other equally important aspects of mystical eroticism. I want
to focus on one that rarely gets discussed, and that is the violence and
disturbing darkness of mystical love and sex in women's texts. This kind
of mystical love-what might be called love noir-cannot be safely "fit"
into the courtly love tradition, since it is women, and not men, who are
the subjects of its sexual violence and despair. Queering occurs through
a reversal of secular and mystical love conventions, which in turn
dis-lodges and disperses the gender categories they support.
This potential of mystical discourse to exceed and collapse modern
categories of gender and sexuality is observed by the important scholar
of medieval female mysticism, Caroline Walker Bynum. In her early work,
Jesus as Mother, Bynum issues a warning against our tendency as schol-ars
to make clear delineations between sexual and affective mystical ex-periences
and, at the same time, against our desire to preserve gender boundaries
and the implicitly heterosexual paradigm we bring to medieval mysticism.
Bynum acknowledges that she, too, is guilty of trying to pre-serve these
boundaries, and she cautions against this inclination to separate sex from
other kinds of mystical ecstasy and masculine from feminine:
Medieval authors do not seem to have drawn as sharp a line as we do between sexual responses and affective responses or between male and female. Throughout the Middle Ages, authors found it far easier than we seem to find it to apply characteristics stereo-typed as male or female to the opposite sex. Moreover, they were clearly not embarrassed to speak of all kinds of ecstasy in language we find physical and sexual and therefore inappropriate to God.10
Bynum's concern in this passage is that she is perhaps applying too rig-orously modem notions of sex and sexual categories to her own account of Cistercian maternal and nuptial imagery in the twelfth century. What
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
Bynum seems to allow for here is the mystical transgression of categories
of sexual difference and social identities and a queering of the language
of ecstasy.
Yet Bynum's virtual acknowledgment that mystical sex may not be separable
from other kinds of affective mystical experiences contradicts most of
the argument of her book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. In this work she steadfastly
denies or ignores the sexual and erotic as categories of investigation,
while in her other work, she explicitly calls for a "wip-ing away" of modern
constructions of the sexualized body in order to historicize the medieval
body. In her view the medieval body has "less to do with sexuality than
with fertility and decay.”11 It is only fair to recognize that this dismissal
is part of an overall strategy in much of her work of rehabilitating the
study of women's mysticism from some admittedly reductive views of sex
and sexual repression. She reveals this agenda in her discussion of mystical
union with Christ:
Physical union with Christ is thus described not only in images of disease and torment but also in images of marriage and sexual consummation; it sometimes culminates in what appears to be or-gasm….Although scholars have, of course, suggested that such re-actions are sublimated sexual desire, it seems inappropriate to speak of "sublimation." In the eucharist and in ecstasy, a male Christ was handled and loved; sexual feelings were, as certain contempo-rary commentators (like David of Augsburg) clearly realized, not so much translated into another medium as simply set free.12
It is interesting in this passage that Bynum translates mystical sex into something not worth investigating. She does not acknowledge the pos-sibility that sex, like the body, as she so convincingly shows, might also be constructed. She hints at such a construction when she links the nup-tial imagery and sexual imagery with disease and torment, yet she is too quick to eliminate sex and eroticism from her analysis. Where Bynum discusses eroticism in her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast, it is always ad hoc, that is, it is linked with specific images of fertility and decay. She devotes only one sustained discussion to eroticism in her entire book. What she comes so close to saying-that eroticism and sex in the reli-gious experiences of medieval women were constructed in terms of vio-lence, suffering, and decay-is what makes mystical sex unrecognizable to modern sensibilities, both religious and secular, and what makes it capable of transforming the mystic's body and soul. Mystical sex is not just "sex as we know it," but that more troubling field of experience that strays into the realms of violence, suffering, and torture. Bynum succeeds in deromanticizing mystical sex by insisting on removing it from the locus deliciarurn, the masculine idealizing gaze of courtly love, and the domestic bliss of the Bride and Bridegroom. Yet once she removes
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sex from these contexts, it seems to disappear entirely from her works,
as though it were no longer "sex" without these conventions.
Bynum shows us that aggression, violence, masochism, and dark de-spair
are as fundamental to the visions of some women mystics as the tropes of
marriage and the languorous desire that we usually think of in connection
with mystical sex. Eroticism and sex inhabit more perverse and polymorphous
regions than is usually acknowledged, whether through the imagery of hunger
and voraciousness so abundantly documented in Bynum's work or in the extremes
of suffering found in many late medieval mystical texts. This kind of mystical
desire is queer in its effects-ex-ceeding and hyperbolizing its own conventionality
and fracturing the discourses of mystical love and sex.
The poems and letters of Hadewijch, the thirteenth-century Flemish
mystic and beguine, contain some of the most erotic and, at the same time,
disturbing images of mystical sex there are. In her writings, love is not
a tasting of the sweet apples of the beloved Bridegroom but a never-satiated
hunger and a hell of suffering, even of disgust:
As Hell turns everything to ruin,
In Love nothing else is acquired
But disgust and torture without pity;
Forever to be in unrest,
Forever assault and new persecution;
To be wholly devoured and engulfed
'In her unfathomable essence,
To founder unceasingly in heat and cold,
In the deep insurmountable darkness of Love.
This outdoes the torments of hell.13
The torment of desire is a frequent theme of Hadewijch's poetry, and
it is not simply the absence of the Beloved that creates this torment.
Holy love itself is a hell of persecution, unrest, and disgust, as well
as a vora-ciousness. It is wanton, ferocious, and implacable.
If Hadewijch’s poetry and visions remind us of the medical treatises
on lovesickness or the symptoms of courtly love, it is because of the consistent
emphasis in both on love's violence and its narcissism. The narcissism
of courtly love discourse, enacted in the linguistic display of much secular
poetry, is displaced in mystical discourse by the violence done to, the
lover's violated body. Angela of Foligno's (1248-1309) expe-rience of Love's
visitation is similar to those described by Hadewijch:
And then at once she was filled with love and inestimable satiety,
which, although it satiated, generated at the same time inestimable
hunger [famem inextimabilem], so that all her members were un--
strung and her soul languished and desired to fly away [omnia mem--
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
bra tunc disjungebantur et anima languebat et desiderabat per-venire]. And she wished neither to see nor to feel any creature. And she did not speak and did not know whether she could speak, but within she spoke, clamoring that God not let her languish in such a death, for she thought life to be death.14
Sexual consummation is achieved with a violence which she mistakes for
death itself. There is no mistaking the narcissism of this experience,
nor its connection with violence. At the same time, it marks a liminal
experience for Angela by which she crosses over the boundaries of speech
and the body into death.
Finally, the analogy between female mystical discourse of sex and courtly
love simply ignores entirely the role that gender plays. Although the violence
of lovesickness can affect both men and women, it is most often conceived
of in the Middle Ages as a masculine affliction. The dis-course of courtly
love, too, is a violent one that is more often directed at women than at
the frustrated lover.15 The terms of courtly love are sim-ply not
adaptable to the discourse of women mystics because they are gendered,
and we must be careful not to subsume the violence of the sex-ual language
in their writings to masculine uses of the language of courtly love. By
reversing this convention, the women mystics sometimes con-test the idealizing
strategies of male abjection and the spiritualized mythos of courtly love.
Violence, enslavement, demonic desire, torture, and even death become
defining "negative experiences" of mystical love and sex-experiences that
lead to a dissociation of speech and thought from human subjectiv-ity.16
Bernard of Clairvaux and Richard of Saint Victor both emphasize the extremes
of violence that characterize the limit experiences of mys-tical eros.
For Bernard, holy love is both violent and narcissistic:
What a violent, consuming, impetuous love this is! It thinks only of itself, disregards everything else, despises everything, is satisfied with itself! It confuses stations, disregards manners, knows no bounds. Proprieties, reason, decency, prudence, judgment are defeated and reduced to slavery.17
This experience of love bears an uncanny resemblance to Hadewijch's
experience of Love in her poetry -as violent, disgusting, indecent, irra-tional,
unmannered, transgressive, and narcissistic.
Richard of Saint Victor (d. 1173) describes the insatiability, violence,
and persecution of this mystical love in his treatise, the Four Degrees
of Violent Charity. Each of the four degrees of love-wounding, binding,
languishing, and, finally, disintegration of mind and soul in its unifica-tion
with Christ-is characterized by a form of violence, and, in fact, Richard
views this violence as one of the main distinguishing features
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of holy love from other kinds of love-familial, marital, or parental.18
That these mystical transports are also sexual is no secret in Richard
of Saint Victor's work, for he draws analogies between each of the four
de-grees of spiritual and human love.19
For many female mystics, as for Bernard and Richard, mystical sex was
not a courtship of lover and beloved, nor was it a nuptial metaphor: it
was a frightening, violating, and debilitating experience, as the exam-ples
of Angela and Hadewijch suggest it was. Neither the voluptuous, seductive
imagery of the Song of Songs nor the convention of courtly love really
explains the darkness of this version of mystical sex, although the darker
zones of mystical sex are often contained within these dis-courses. Nor
does the tradition represented by the works of Bernard of Clairvaux and
Richard of Saint Victor explain what it meant for women to engage in this
violent sex with the figure of Love or with Christ.
The queering of mystical tropes for love and desire occurs at
the sites of these conventions through the dislodging of the particular
masculin-ist fantasies associated with each. In the words of Bernard
of Clairvaux, this queer love "confuses stations, disregards manners, knows
no bounds," and it precipitates a crisis in the conventions through the
dissonance it
enacts. Since cultural models of courtly love were based on the impossibility
of female desire, the assumption and expression of mystical desire in courtly
terms already exposes the heterosexual laws it usurps. Mystical and
courtly notions of love are based, too, on the idea of masculine heterosexual
suffering for the Beloved, a suffering that is constructed
upon the repression of the feminine. By confusing the "stations" of
suf-fering, female mystics could queer the heterosexual and masculinist
stric-tures governing mystical desire and love. With the reversal and crossing
of gender boundaries comes a loss of the idealizing effects of the
courtly and mystical love tropes, leaving, in Hadewijch's words, "nothing
else ...but disgust and torture without pity." What has always been "there"
in courtly conventions - the suffering and ennoblement it produces - is
re-moved from this idealizing ideological framework and becomes ... strange,
queer.
The troubling of these medieval idioms of mystical love represents
only one kind of queering that occurs in female mysticism. In addition
to stripping away the idealizing and masculinist fantasizing effects of
mystical love rhetoric, the desire of the female mystic often strays from
the heterosexual realm she is assumed to inhabit as Bride of Christ. Because
of the presumptive heterosexuality of most mystical scholarship, the question
has never been asked, What does it signify when a female mystic desires
and adores the feminized body of Christ.20 In addition to addressing this
question, I want to examine how scholarship has worked hard not to ask
it in the first place and, finally, to offer some directions for future
queering.
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
Mystical Sexuality
The feminization of the body of Christ is usually considered to be one
of the most distinctive features of late medieval piety and the devotion
of female mystics in particular. This feminization is regarded as part
of a cluster of shifts in devotional belief and practice emphasizing Christ's
humanity, physical access to the sacred, and the deployment of social roles
to define Christ's relationship to the mystic as mother, husband, lover,
and child. Yet scholars almost never explore the feminized body of Christ
as lover to female mystics. In Caroline Walker Bynum's im-portant study
of food imagery in women's religious discourse, Holy Feast and Holy Fast,
the feminized body of Christ is made legible almost ex-clusively (and safely)
as a nonsexual maternal body. The maternal Christ offers his breasts to
suckle the female mystic; he gives birth through the wound in his side;
and he feeds the suffering, sinful soul with his body,as a mother does.
In its generative and nurturing capacity alone the fem-inized body of Christ
is made to signify. Not only does her understand-ing of the maternal cancel
out the sexual but it requires interventionist gender correction to avoid
any queer tendencies. In spite of the gender dislocation that occurs when
the female mystic identifies with the fem-inized Christ, Bynum argues,
she always made the necessary gender- and by implication, sexuality -adjustments
in her mystical intercourse: "Female imitatio Christi mingled the genders
in its most profound metaphors and its most profound experiences. Women
could fuse with Christ's body because they were in some sense body, yet
women never forgot the maleness of Christ.”21 It is ironic that Bynum,
who indulges in the brief self-criticism quoted earlier in this essay,
continues nevertheless to deploy a heterosexual model for understanding
the feminized body of Christ in relation to male mysticism and an asexual
model in the case of female mysticism. In the quotation above she
desexes the feminized aspects of Christ and renders his gender entirely
masculine, and the sexuality of female mystic, safely heterosexual.
Women were not the only ones to correct ambiguous sexuality in their
relationships with Christ, according to Bynum. Twelfth-century Cister-cian
monks, in particular, "had a problem," says Bynum: "For if the God with
whom they wished to unite was spoken of in male language, it was hard to
use the metaphor of sexual union unless they saw them-selves as female....
[One] solution ... was of course to seek God as female parent, with whom
union could be quite physical (in the womb or at the breast." The problem
that is never explicitly named is homosexuality. The ever-vigilant Cistercian,
on his guard against the heterosexual crisis, makes the necessary adjustment
by assuming the role of child to parent and eliminating sexuality altogether
from his affective relationship with Christ. As she notes, this solved
the "problem" of the metaphorical sex--
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ual union with a male Christ.22 It is as though the mystics were engaged
in a gender-correction process during their ecstatic transports in order
to avoid the embarrassment of a homosexual union.23
In order for the heterosexuality of female mysticism to remain intact,
an awful lot of adjustments need to be made, forcing us to wonder whose
paradigm this is anyway: Bynum's (and that of most scholars of mysti-cism)
or the female mystic's? The instability of the heterosexual para-digm of
mystical desire requires constant vigilance and correction on the part
of the scholar to maintain it and to occlude the queer tenden-cies. When
the devotee is male, he desires (but never identifies with) Christ's feminized
body, while the female devotee identifies with the feminized body, ever
reminding herself in her more erotic transports that Christ is male.
There is no evidence in the mystical writings usually cited of such
gender and sexuality policing by female or male mystics; however, there
is evidence of scholarly intervention when mystical genders and sexual-ities
stray from heterosexual paradigms. The queer desire of female mys-tics
for the feminized body of Christ is excluded by Bynum's interpreta-tion
of that feminization in terms of his maternity. Christ's feminization is
chiefly expressed through his maternal physical and spiritual quali-ties,
and his maternity, in turn, is assumed to be asexual. The queer cri-sis
posed by female mystical desire is thus averted by the assumption that
the maternal disavows the sexual.
The mystical maternal body of Christ, however, does not enact such
repudiation of the sexual but "opens a mesh of possibilities" for the queering
of categories -of mystical devotion, the body of Christ, female desire,
and the medieval construction of maternity. Bynum frequently cites Catherine
of Siena to exemplify the maternity of Christ and the mystic's infantilized
relationship to his body, but I would insist upon the conjunction of the
erotic with the maternal, and of mystical pleasure with nurturing:
With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her
towards the wound in his side. "Drink, daughter, from my side," he said,
"and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight
that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated
with its overflowing goodness." Drawn close in this way to the outlet of
the Fountain of Life, she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, and
still more eagerly the mouth
of her soul, and there she slaked her thirst.24
Bynum consistently interprets such accounts as "nursing metaphors" in which Catherine of Siena merges her own suffering with Christ's. Her desire here is tantamount to a "eucharistic craving" that suspends all other appetites, according to Bynum's analysis. The explicitly sexual na--
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
ture of Christ's gesture and the erotic desire expressed in Catherine's
slaking of her thirst is disallowed by the nursing metaphor and a mod-ern
asexual construction of maternal nurturance.25
Queering Christ's gesture and the mystic's desire requires that the
reader entertain an open mesh of possibilities, including not only the
maternal's potential to function erotically here but the sacred wound's
polysemy. When the wound is not made to signify monolithically -when excluded
meanings are (re)introduced into the domain of cultural legi-bility -queer
possibilities begin to signify as dissonant sites in heteronor-mative mystical
discourse. The queer already inhabits Christ's gesture and Catherine's
response at the site of his wound once the heterosexual matrix is suspended.
Another cultural reference point becomes visible: Christ's wound as vulva/vagina-and
an ulterior form of mystical de-sire becomes possible.
The sexual nature of the mystic's devotion to Christ's wound is made
explicit in one of the most important texts of Franciscan mysticism, the
Stimulus Amoris by James of Milan. Mystical union between soul and God
is figured as a joining of wounds in a mystical act of copulation. In fact,
Wolfgang Riehle argues for a "typical and quite consciously intended analogy
between this wound of Christ and the female pudenda." Further-more, Riehle
suggests a kind of punning on words, vulva and vulnus. The "copulation"
of mystical soul with Christ thus occurs at the site of his wound (vulnus),
which is transformed into the female vulva when vulnus vulneri copulatur,
"wound is joined to wound.”26 The key to the idea of the joining of wounds
is that the lover's soul becomes wounded with love, and this wounding in
turn allows him to join in Christ's suf-fering. In James of Milan's text
the speaker is enflamed with desire for entrance into the wound. Elsewhere
in the Stimulus Amoris, the wound is an object of the speaker's desire
for union (copulo, copulari).27
James of Milan even uses the metaphor of the wound as a "gate of Paradise,"
invoking that famous garden of delights, the paradise enclosed, which is
usually reserved for the female Bride and the allegorical figure of the
Church in Song of Songs 4:12: "My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed,
a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up." Christ's wound is the open garden
through which the locus deliciarum is achieved. The physical union of Christ
and lover in the Song of Songs occurs at the "hole in the wall" where Christ
"put his hand" and "my bowels were moved at his touch." In the Stimulus
Amoris text, this image is reversed so that Christ invites penetration
through the hole in his side and offers consolation and rest as well as
inebriation and innumerable delights. There, the lover/speaker drinks,
eats, meditates, and experiences "such an abundance of delight that it
is impossible for [him] to describe.”28
This reversal of the Songs of Songs tradition in which Christ becomes
the feminized lover has never been commented on, as far as I know.
In the Stimulus Amoris and elsewhere, gender and sexuality are transitive,
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rather than binary and monolithic. Christ's wound becomes the site of
the "garden enclosed" usually occupied by the intact vagina of the femi-nine
lover, and thus becomes queer.29 Whether or not there is a specific
pun on vulva and vulnus, as Riehle suggests, the Stimulus Amoris text provides
a cultural template for making such an identification of vulva/ vagina
and wound.
This transitivity of wound to vulva/vagina, of masculine to feminine
bodies, and of sexualities is most vividly rendered in late medieval de-votional
imagery.30 In one fourteenth -century illustration of the Man of
Sorrows, the wound is detached from Christ's side and dramatically en-larged
to life-size, somewhere in excess of two inches (Figure 9.1). Here, it
is the focus of the viewer's devotion, rather than one among many de-votional
objects associated with the crucifixion. Inscribed around its edge is the
claim that this image is the exact size of the wound of our Lord, who suffered
death for us. Such inscription is a fairly common invoca-tion to devotional
practice among wound images by providing a vivid, quantifiable measure
of Christ's suffering and hence his love. At the same time, the sexual
connotation of this image is unmistakable. The visual conjunction of wound
and vagina provides a visual pun of vulva and vulnus, such as Riehle finds
in the Stimulus Amoris.
In the Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, the wound stands alone
(Figure 9.2). The text states that this wound measures the distress and
the bounty of Christ's suffering for us. It also represents the wound-ing
that is meant to take place in the viewer's heart, as in the Song of Songs,
so that he or she is "wounded with desire." An object of adora-tion and
love, this wound is also the object of violence, suggested in the surrounding
implements of torture. Suffering and love are conjoined in acts of violence
inflicted not only on the body of Christ, but also, by im-plication, against
the feminized wound/vulva.
This last image is part of a devotional book of hours designed for
a fe-male patron, Bonne of Luxembourg, a wealthy woman who would later
become the mother of Charles V. Not all these images were designed ex-plicitly
for women, but there is evidence in devotional texts for and by women that
the wound was a focus for sexual experiences of mystical union. Religious
instruction and devotional texts for women explicitly invite them to touch,
kiss, suck, and enter the wound of Christ.31
A key to the gendered inscription of Christ's wound in medieval de-votional
texts for women is obliquely alluded to in the thirteenth-cen-tury devotional
manual for religious women, Holy Maidenhead. This text is a defense of
virginity by means of a harsh polemic against the horrors of marriage.
In it the virgin is warned against losing that which joins her to Christ:
"And you, blessed maiden, assigned to him with the mark of maidenhood,
break not that seal which seals you together.”32 The writer alludes
to the unbroken hymen, the unruptured seal that guarantees her relationship
to Christ and that is lost irrevocably in mar--
riage. There is another reference embedded in this imperative.
When the author says, "Break not that seal which seals you together," he
uses for "you" the word inc, the dual second personal pronoun meaning "the
two of you." The mark of maidenhead, the virgin's intact vagina, is joined
in yet another seal to Christ.
This sealing of Christ and devotional lover through the vulvic (or
vagi-nal) wound, the mark of Christ's love and the
virgin's virginity, is trans-lated into contractual language. Christ's
body becomes the charter of his love, by which he binds us to him and guarantees
through his suffer-ing the promise of divine bliss. He authenticates this
charter with his wound as a seal (Figure 9.3). Christ appends the "wound
in my heart" as a seal to the charter of his body in, this image, and in
others, he provides the names of his witnesses and the imprint of a notary
public.33 In this image, Christ's wound is both seal and vagina,
the broken seal and the open vagina to which the virgin in Holy Maidenhead
offers her own un-broken, intact genital seal. While this image is later
than the Maiden-head text, the latter invokes the same kind of association
between the wedding vows that the female religious and Christ exchange
and the joining of "wounds," vulva/vagina and vulnus, that we found in
the Stim-ulus Amoris.
Karma Lochrie
The wound of Christ is one aspect of the feminization of Christ's body,
and it exists in a representational nexus of a woman's vulva and vagina
and documentary imagery of institutional seals. By bringing this nexus
to the reading of medieval mystical texts by women, we are forced to confront
the "problem," as Bynum calls it, of mystical sexuality and of the feminization
of Christ's body. The queering of Christ's body and of mystical desire
is more common in female mystical discourse than has yet been considered
by medieval scholarship.34 Efforts to queer mystical desire and sexuality,
including this one, should not seek merely to un-cover or activate the
sexual dissonances in mystical discourse; they must also interrogate the
queer-effects of such phenomena. In this case, what is signified by the
queer tendencies of female mystical discourse?
By destabilizing gender and sexuality categories that deeply structure
mystical experience and religious devotion, queer mystical rapture seems
to offer a cultural site of resistance, opposition, or transgression for
me-dieval women mystics. Valerie Traub's work, however, cautions us to
examine not only the representation of "other" sexualities and desires,
but also their capacity to signify. For example, she argues that Renais-sance
discourse about female tribadism and sodomy was possible pre-cisely because
feminine homoerotic desire "did not signify.”35 Her con-clusion raises
a question for this study of female mystical discourse, namely, are the
queer tendencies documented here finally illegible for medieval culture
because of the very gender and sexuality imperatives they appropriate?
At stake in this question is that potential for the "con-testation of sexual
legitimacy" cited by Butler as central to the project of queering.
As both Judith Butler and Jonathan Dollimore point out, all such con-testation
occurs within the dominant cultural codes of legibility and ideologies.36
The case of female mystical erotics is further complicated by the fact
that medieval mystical discourse exists apart from-and of-ten as an alternative
to-the social order of women mystics and the medieval church. Mystical
discourse insists upon a position both outside the institutional regime
of the church and inside its foundation through the Word of God.37
The regulatory economies of medieval society and religious systems inform
mystical discourse and circumvent it. This prob-lematic position of mysticism
in medieval society casts in doubt its ca-pacity for a contestation of
sexual and gender codes, for a "transgressive reinscription" of those codes.38
Within the context of language, however, mystical discourse is able
to queer, disrupt, and expose the normative surfaces of language and the
conventions language sponsors.39 The polymorphousness of Christ's body,
with its feminine genital wound and its simultaneous masculine prop-erties,
introduces confusion at a very foundational level of religious lan-guage
and, therefore, of religious devotion. The confounding of courtly love
tropes in configurations of mystical love by female mystics exposes
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
those "abjecting strategies" of courtly love conventions and the fantasies
of masculinity they support. Assessing the queer-effects of female mys-tical
desire-that is, its power to signify-is more difficult.
In Bynum's work and in most medieval scholarship on the subject, fe-male
mystical desire signifies only when it is heterosexual, when it con-firms
the masculine conventions of mysticism. When it becomes queer, it fails
to signify, or it is corrected to signify monolithically. Heterosex-uality
is an imperative in scholarship of medieval mysticism, resolving the more
radical discontinuities of female mystical discourse within the dominant
tradition even as it blunts the operations of female desire and pleasure.
From Hadewijch's fierce inversion of the courtly love tropes of mystical
desire to Catherine of Siena's erotic coarticulation of the erotic and
the sexual, female mystical discourse confounds gender and the het-eronormative
categories it inhabits, queering them, causing them to lapse, balk, and
swerve.
Such a possibility for queering exists in the feminizing of Christ's
body, in the genitalizing of his wound in representational art, and in
the discursive expressions of feminine desire. This desire is potentially
op-positional in that it seeks to disturb these same categories, and in
the process, it exposes the heteronormative laws governing most mystical
discourse. The transpositioning of vulva to Christ's wound, the partial
feminizing of Christ's body, and Catherine's pleasure contest our own categories
for understanding the cultural archives available to medieval mysticism
-categories of feminine and masculine, typologies of love, sexualities,
and desire. These possibilities for the queer are not foreclosed by the
conventions deployed in medieval mysticism, nor are they ren-dered harmless
by the fact that female mysticism occupied a narrow and problematic position
within medieval culture.
Both male and female medieval mysticism are desperately in need of
more such queering, and both medieval scholarship and modern theo-rizing
about sexuality are equally in need of new "meshes of possibil-ity," to
borrow Sedgwick's words. Neither the acts/identity distinction nor the
focus on same-sex desire is adequate or desirable as a framework for queering
medieval mysticism.40 The medieval queer offers us an op-portunity to "queer"
contemporary discourse about the history of sexu-ality and contemporary
queer theory, opening up a mesh of possibilities within it and challenging
its categories of understanding. This particu-lar example of the medieval
queer invites us to rethink the "queer" in ways that are less exclusive
of female sexualities and desires and less assuming of modern identity
categories. Finally, as Judith Butler has ar-gued, queering as an oppositional
strategy needs to theorize the complex interrelationship between gender
and sexuality:
One deciding issue will be whether social strategies of regulation,
abjection, and normalization will not continue to relink gender and
Karma Lochrie
sexuality such that; the oppositional analysis will continue to be
under pressure to theorize their interrelations. This will not be the
same as reducing gender to prevailing forms of sexual relations
such that one "is" the effect of the sexual position one is said to
occupy. Resisting such a reduction, it ought to be possible to assert
a set of non-causal and non-reductive relations between gender and
sexuality, not only to link feminism and queer theory, as one might
link two separate enterprises, but to establish their constitutive
in--
terrelationship.41
The pressure to theorize the interrelations of gender and sexuality comes not only from contemporary social strategies of oppression but from his-toricizing strategies as well. Scholars of queer theory and medieval studies ought to seek out that mesh of possibilities between gender and sexual-ity, between medieval and modern structures of oppression, and among the queer of different historical periods. Female mystical discourse of-fers one such pressure point for theorizing the queer in the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.
Notes
1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 232.
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1993), 8. For a discussion of the parameters and stakes of queer
theory, see Teresa de Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities:
An Introduction," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3,
no. 2 (1991): iii-xviii. David M. Halperin defines the noun “queer", as
a positionality rather than a positivity, describing "a horizon of possibility"
in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 62. Halperin also warns of the political liabilities
and potential for appropria-tion in the use of the term, but maintains
that it is nevertheless useful for "a radical re-versal in the logic of
homophobic discourses" (66). For his full discussion of the term, see 62-67.
3. 1 am paraphrasing Jonathan Goldberg, who calls for risking anachronism
in his in-troduction to Queering the Renaissance, ed. Goldberg (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994),~ 5-6. Louise 0. Fradenburg and Carla
Freccero call for "dislodging and indeed queering the truth-effects of
certain historicist practices -especially historicist practices that repudiate
the roles of fantasy and pleasure in the production of historiography,"
in GLQ: A Journal of-Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1, no. 4 (1995), Premodern
Sexualities in Europe, ed. Fradenburg and Freccero, 375; see also 377.
Simon Gaunt regards queer read-ing as a way of "examining how representations
of transgressive sexualities define and produce the limits of heterosexual
norms and of ‘troubling' heteronormative paradigms"; "Straight Minds/Queer
Wishes,” GLQ 1, no. 4 (1995): 441. See also these essays revised and reprinted:
Fradenburg and Freccero, eds. Premodern Sexualities (New York: Rout-ledge,
1996), xili~xxiv, 153-174.
4. I am using Butler's term "reverse-discourse," "in which the defiant
affirmation of queer dialectically reinstalls the version it seeks to overcome,"
in Bodies That Matter, 21.
5. This is a problem with Richard Rambuss's otherwise interesting work
on seven-teenth-century -devotional poetry, "Pleasure and Devotion: The
Body of Jesus and Seven-teenth-Century Religious Lyric," in Queering the
Renaissance, ed. Goldberg, 253-79. While
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
Rambuss succeeds in revising the conventional view of Christ's body
by emphasizing its permeability and penetrability, he ends up merely reinstalling
this Christ and homo-erotics for the previously heterosexual model without
examining the gender and religious ideologies entailed. See also Karma
Lochrie, "Desiring Foucault," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
27(Winter 1997): 3-16.
6. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum's definitions of affective
spirituality, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food
to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 26,
28, 153-61. Bynum locates a "feminization of re-ligious language" in late
medieval spirituality, in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spiritu-ality
of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
129-69. For other overviews of affective spirituality, see Clarissa W.
Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 129-31, 136-38, 147-49, 154-S8,
and Andr6 Vauchez, Les laics au Moyen Age: Pratiques et exp6riences religieuses
(Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1987).
7. For a discussion of the secular contribution to mystical language
of love, see Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum
and Its Commentaries (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990), 24-27.
8. See John Bugge's analysis of sexualized virginity, as an example,
Virginitas: An Es-say in the History of a Medieval Idea, Archives internationales
d'histoire des idees, series minor 17 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975),
59-96.
9. See Wack's brief discussion of the overlapping of the discourses
of lovesickness and spiritual eroticism in Lovesickness in the Middle Ages,
18-27.
10. Bynum, Jesus As Mother, 162.
11. Carolyne Walker Bynum, "The Female Body and Religious Practice
in the Later Middle Ages," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body,
ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Urzone, 1989),
162, reprinted in Bynum, Fragmenta-tion and Redemption: Essays on Gender
and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Urzone, 1991), 182.
12. Bynum, "Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth
Century," in Fragmentation and Redemption, 133-34. See also Bynum, Holy
Feast and Holy Fast, 248.
13. Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Columbia Hart (New York:
Paulist Press, 1980),356.
14. "Et tune post hoe statim repleta fuit amore et satietate inextimabili,
que quamvis satiet, generat tamen maximam famem tantum inextimabilem, quod
omnia membra tunc disjungebantur et anima languebat et desiderabat pervenire.
Et volebat nec sentire nec videre aliquarn creaturam. Et ipsa non loquebatur
et nescit quod potuerit loqui extra; set intus loquebatur, intus clamans
quod non faceret earn tantam mortem languere, quia vi-tam extimabat mortem";
Angela of Foligno, Le Livre de 1'exp0rience des vrais fideles: Texte latin
publie d'apres le manuscrit d'Assise, ed. and trans. M.-J. Ferr6 and L.
Baudry, (Paris: Droz, 1927), par. 75, pp. 156-58; trans. in Bynum, Holy
Feast and Holy Fast, 248. Compare this vision with Vision 7 of Hadewijch,
in Hadewiich: The Complete Works, 280.
15. For a discussion of the aggression in this type of discourse, see
Toril Moi, "Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy
of Courtly Love," in Medieval Lit-erature: Criticism, Ideology and History,
ed. David Aers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 11-57.
16. 1 am borrowing the term from Foucault, who borrows it from Georges
Bataille, to characterize eroticism that is transgressive and that seeks
the absence of limitations, lead-ing to a "veritable destruction of [the]
subject, in its dissociation, in its upheaval into something radically
'other"'; quoted in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1993), 93.
17. Trans. in Julin Kristeva, Tales of Love, by Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 166: "0 amor praeceps, vehemens,
flagrans, impetuose, qui praeter
Karma Lochrie
te aliud cogitare non sinis, fastidis cetera, contemnis omnia praete,
te contentus! Con-fundis ordines, dissimulas usum, modum ignoras; totum
quod opportunitatis, quod ratio-nis, quod pudoris, quod consilii iudiciive
esse videtur, triumphas in temetipso et redigis in captivitatem"; Sermones
super Cantica Canticorum, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais,
in S. Bernardi Opera, vol. 2 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957), 79,
1, p. 272. See Kristeva's discussion of Bernard's theory of violence in
connection with his com-mentary on the Song of Songs in Tales of Love,
151-69.
18. Gervais Durneige, ed., Les quatre degres de la violente charite,
Textes philosophiques du moyen age, 3 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955), par. 3, pp.
127-29.
19. See especially Dumeige, Les quatre degres, pars. 18-20, pp. 145-47.
20. Rambuss raises the possibility of a "same-sex erotic fusion" between
Catherine of Siena and Christ, but he focuses his discussion on male devotion
to Christ's body in sev-enteenth-century poetry, in "Pleasure and Devotion,"
267-68. Simon Gaunt raises a close parallel to my question in his study
of saints' lives: "Is there any room in hagiography, amidst the celibacy
or alongside the implicitly heterosexual 'bride of Christ' metaphor, for
non-heterosexual sexuahties?"; "Straight Minds/'Queer' Wishes," 441.
21. Bynum, "The Female Body and Religious Practice," 186 and 187-88.
22. Bynum, Jesus As Mother, 161. Bynum raises the example of Rupert
of Deutz, who embraced and kissed Christ without making any gender adjustments,
as one of those "oc-casional examples of monks describing what appears
to us to be a sexual union with a male God" (161). For further discussion
of this example, see Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 24-25.
23. My critique of Bynum's work is not intended to diminish its brilliance
or my own indebtedness to it. It merely calls attention to the embeddedness
of our views about sexu-ality in our work. Besides, as I have shown, there
are at least two "Bynumisms" in Bynum's work-two Bynums, in effect: the
Bynum who recognizes the ambiguated sexuality of medieval mystical discourse
and the Bynum who insists on subsuming that sexuality to other foundational
categories, such as fertility and decay, for studying women's mysti-cism.
I would like to think that I am taking the cautionary voice of Bynum I
as my lead and running with it, even though my conclusions diverge significantly
from hers.
24. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth
Kearns (Wilm-ington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1980), 156. Also quoted in
Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 172.
25. Bynum further develops this argument in Fragmentation and Redemption,
79--238.
26. Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 46. Riehle quotes this phrase,
Vulnus vulneri copulatur, from the Digby 58 manuscript version of the Franciscan
text, rather than the standard edi-tion of it. I have not been able to
consult this text, but I have checked with the standard edition of the
Stimulus Amoris, ed. Quaracchi, Bibliotheca franciscana ascetica medii
aevi, 4 (N.p.: Quaracchi, 1905). There is no exact correspondence to the
above quotation in Riehle's text in the Quaracchi edition, but there are
many that are close in general meaning. The frequent reference and invocation
to the side wound of Christ testifies to the erotic theme. The joining
of wounds - of lover wounded by love and of Christ - is fre-quently alluded
to. See Riehle, Middle English Mystics, 13, 20-21, and chaps. 5 and 14.
27. Quaracchi, Stimulus Amoris, 71-76.
28. Quaracchi, Stimulus Amoris, 73-74; and 71: "Ideoque ibi habito
et, quibus vesci-tur, cibis vescor ac ibi inebrior suo potu; ibi tanta
abundo dulcedine, ut tibi non valeam enarrare."
29. 1 am borrowing the term of gender transitivity from Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 1-2, 87-90. Sedgwick contrasts models for viewing homosexual
desire in terms of essentialist and transitivist approaches to gender.
According to essentialist definitions, gender is consti-tuted by natural
and essential features, while the transitive definitions view gender as
so--
Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies
cially constructed and therefore occupying a liminal position. Although
I am adopting Sedgwick's term here, I am not so convinced of the discreteness
of her categories.
30. Caroline Walker Bynum includes one example of the Arma Christi
from the four-teenth century in Fragmentation and Redemption, 278, fig.
7.6. She concedes that "the sexual overtones modern viewers find in such
depictions may have been apparent also to medieval viewers." One wonders
what Bynum actually means by her comment: whether medieval viewers may
have been slower to apprehend "sexual overtones," or whether they had different
images of the vulva than we do. Of course, the possibility that the female
gen-itals might have been viewed differently in medieval culture is a real
one. Thomas Laqueur suggests as much in his study of medical imagery, but
he does not provide images from the medieval period; see Making Sex: Body
and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1990), 1-62. Even if medical imagery of vulva and/or vagina was significantly
different than the wound imagery, we cannot necessarily assume that med-ical
imagery was the standard cultural construction of the female sexual anatomy.
31. For examples, see The Ancrene Riw1e, trans. M. B. Salu (London:
Burns and Oates, 1955), 130, or for the Middle English, The English Text
of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
402), ed. J. R. R. Tolkien, EETS 249 (London: Oxford University Press,
1962), 151; also Bonaventure's De perfectione vitae ad sorores, quoted
in Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in
Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990), 72-73; and Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum, ed.
John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS 287 (London: Oxford University Press,
1987), 49.
32. Hali Meiohad, ed. Bella Millett, EETS 284 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1982), 5: "Ant tu penne, eadi meiden, pet art iloten to him wip
mei[p]hades merke, ne brec nawt ou oet seil oet seilep inc togederes."
33. For a discussion of the "charter of Christ" image, see Douglas
Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul), 129-31. See also M. C. Spalding, The Middle
English Charters of Christ (Bryn Mawr, 1914), and Rosemary Woolf, The English
Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 213-14.
34. For a few specific examples of possibly queer female desire for
Christ's wounds, see Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge
and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 220; Angela of Foligno,
Le livre de 1'expgrience des vrais fideles: Texte Latin publie d'apres
le manuscrit d’Assise, ed. and trans. M.-J. Ferre and L. Baudry (Paris:
Droz, 1927), 138; Mechtild of Hackeborn, The Booke of Gostly Grace of Mechtild
of Hackeborn, ed. Theresa A. Halligan, Studies and Texts, 49 (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1979), 175-76, 321-22, 335, 352;
and Catherine of Siena quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 173.
For devotion to the wounds in medieval lyrics, see Douglas Gray, Themes
and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972), 52-54, 129-34; and Rosemary Woolf, The English Lyric
in the Mid-dle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 183-248. For the Mass
of the Five Wounds in English liturgy, see R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical
Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19 70), 84-9
1.
35. Valerie Traub, "The (In)Significance of 'Lesbian' Desire," in Queering
the Renais-sance, ed. Goldberg, 80. See also my discussion of Traub in
"Desiring Foucault."
36. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-38, 134-41; and Jonathan Dollimore,
Sexual Dissidence: Augus-tine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), 33-35.
37. See Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans.
Brian Mas-sumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 92-93,
and my discussion of mystical discourse, Margery Kempe and Translations
of the Flesh (Philadelphia: Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), chap.
2, esp. 63-64.
39. Dollimore uses this term to mean the generating of "internal instabilities
within repressive norms" and the contestation that results from this; Sexual
Dissidence, 33.
Karma Lochrie
39. 1 am borrowing Butler's remarks on "queering" as an "exposure within
language" in her analysis of Nella Larsen's Passing, in Bodies That Matter,
176.
40. For the acts/identity debate, see David M. Halperin, One Hundred
Years of Homo-sexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge,
1990), 1-53; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality:
Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to
the Pourteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980); and "Revolutions,
Universals, and Sexual Categories," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vici-nus, and George
Chauncey Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1991), 17-36; Robert Padgug, "Sexual Matters:
Rethinking Sexuality in History," in Hidden from History, ed. Duberman
et at., 54-64. For critiques of this model, see Fradenburg and Freccero,
"Introduction: The Plea-sures of History," GLQ 1, no. 4 (1995): 378-79;
Gaunt, "Straight Minds/'Queer' Wishes," 441-43; and Lochrie, "Don't Ask,
Don't Tell: Murderous Plots and Medieval Secrets," GLQ 1, no. 4 (1995):
406-7, 415.
41. Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Bodies That Matter, 240.
For further discus-sion of the debate between feminism and queer theory,
see "More Gender Trouble: Femi-nism Meets Queer Theory," ed. Judith Butler,
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall
1994); Judith Butler and Biddy Martin, eds., "Critical Crossings," diacritics
24, nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994); and Sally Driscoll, "Outlaw Read-ings:
Beyond Queer Theory," Signs 22, no. I (Autumn 1996): 30-5 1.
I