{"id":66,"date":"2012-11-13T05:52:22","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T05:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/uncategorized\/sexual-difference\/"},"modified":"2015-08-19T15:14:59","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T15:14:59","slug":"sexual-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/13\/sexual-difference\/","title":{"rendered":"Sexual Difference and the Anglo-Saxons – November 12"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been something of an Anglo-Saxon long weekend here at the University of Iowa! On Friday, of course, we had Hilary Fox’s lecture on mental illness in Old English literature<\/a>; yesterday, it was the turn of Stacy Klein<\/a> (Rutgers), who gave a talk entitled “The Militancy of Gender and the Making of Sexual Difference in Anglo-Saxon Literature.”<\/p>\n

Professor Klein’s talk looked at how the Anglo-Saxons understood sexual difference\u2014what it was that they believed made a man masculine or a woman feminine. She argued that while discussions of this topic have been hard for scholars to find in Old English literature, this is not because Anglo-Saxon writers failed to address issues of eroticism, romance or gender, but because modern people have failed to adequately understand their conceptual categories. To be male or female in Anglo-Saxon England depended not so much on sexuality or the body (indeed, bodily difference was considered to be a result of the Fall\u2014see the image of a prelapsarian Adam and Eve above, Bodleian MS Junius 11) as it did on a particular relationship with militancy\u2014the focus on warfare exhibited in the sources is not a barrier to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon gender, but rather one of the primary conceptual categories through which they expressed an understanding of sexual difference.<\/p>\n

Some of the concepts with which Klein was engaging will be familiar to those who study medieval gender\u2014the concept of the woman transcending her gender as one of the milites Christi<\/em> is a common motif in Old English hagiography, and much has been written about transvestite saints and how gender might be normative but not entirely binding. Yet at least as someone who knows nothing about Old English, there was much here that was new to me. I found Klein’s discussion of the etymologies and variable meanings of OE words like w\u00edf<\/em> and mann<\/em> to be fascinating, particularly in terms of their fluidity and their connotations of cloaking or covering. Sexual difference for the Anglo-Saxons was a spectrum across which women, at least, could move. Likewise the riddles which she discussed, one of the places in Old English literature in which we can see the discussion of gender which might be missing elsewhere\u2014here we see sexual difference and sexuality being projected onto inanimate objects, sexual difference being largely depicted in the non-human world, which if I understood Klein correctly is not something which Anglo-Saxonists have investigated much before.<\/p>\n

The big point of hesitancy in all of this was one which Klein herself raised: how do these literary gender paradigms relate to actual cultural practise? Did they open up new possibilities for women, did they reify maleness and devalue femininity, or were they serve more to create new gender roles for men<\/em>? Here I think we end up back at that key point from Hilary Fox’s lecture on Friday\u2014that people are capable of holding many contradictory ideas and values at once, and that there may not have been one single way in which these more abstract ideas about gender informed material actions. It’s a question which Professor Klein will no doubt explore in her forthcoming book, which is one I will definitely have to remember to seek out in the library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been something of an Anglo-Saxon long weekend here at the University of Iowa! On Friday, of course, we had Hilary Fox’s lecture on mental …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences-lectures"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":67,"url":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/10\/eadswiths\/","url_meta":{"origin":66,"position":0},"title":"Eadswith’s Madness – November 9","author":"Yvonne Seale","date":"November 10, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Image above: London, British Library MS Cotton Cleopatra C. VIII, f. 11.\u00a0 Ira (Anger), holding a shield, strikes with a sword at Patentia Yesterday we had our second IFGM lecture of this semester, with Hilary Fox of the University of Chicago. While the transportation gods once more weren't smiling on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Conferences & Lectures"","block_context":{"text":"Conferences & Lectures","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/category\/conferences-lectures\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/6a013486c64e2e970c017c334d8427970b.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/6a013486c64e2e970c017c334d8427970b.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/6a013486c64e2e970c017c334d8427970b.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/6a013486c64e2e970c017c334d8427970b.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":185,"url":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/13\/haskins2014\/","url_meta":{"origin":66,"position":1},"title":"Haskins Society Conference 2014","author":"Yvonne Seale","date":"November 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Image above: Holkham Lawbook. BL MS Additional 49366, f. 17r. The Haskins Society Conference has moved this year to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, the town motto of which is \"Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.\" I don't think I saw any cows over the course of the weekend, but the latter\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Conferences & Lectures"","block_context":{"text":"Conferences & Lectures","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/category\/conferences-lectures\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/6a013486c64e2e970c01b8d08ccc49970c.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":180,"url":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/01\/history-carnival-144\/","url_meta":{"origin":66,"position":2},"title":"History Carnival 144","author":"Yvonne Seale","date":"April 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Image: A celebratory dance in the margins of \"The Romance of Alexander\". Bodleian Library, MS 264, f.21v. 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At the National Museums of Scotland\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/category\/links\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/6a013486c64e2e970c01bb07ff1038970d.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/6a013486c64e2e970c01bb07ff1038970d.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/yvonneseale.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/6a013486c64e2e970c01bb07ff1038970d.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1317,"url":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/14\/george-washington-a-descendant-of-odin\/","url_meta":{"origin":66,"position":3},"title":"George Washington: A Descendant of Odin?","author":"admin","date":"September 14, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\"This article was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it please see: http:\/\/publicdomainreview.org\/legal\/\" George Washington: first President of the United States, father of his country, crosser of the Delaware, and descendant of Odin. 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National Gallery, London, NG654.] \"De Monasterio Desolato: Politics and Patronage in an Irish Frontier Convent,\" in The Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Vol. 4 (2015), 21-45. 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