Que(e)rying Aelred: Desire, Affect, Gender, and Normative Monastic Discourse
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (SSHMA)
Organizer Name
Graham N. Drake
Organizer Affiliation
SUNY-Geneseo
Presider Name
David Townsend
Presider Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 1
"A monk in the king, a cloister in the court”: Examining Aelred of Rievaulx’s Notions of Affect in His Work on the Lives of Kings
Presenter 1 Name
Peter Johnsson
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 2
Hit Me, Baby, One More Time: Aelred's Queer Desire for Past Flesh
Presenter 2 Name
Sarah Star
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 3
Interruptum est opus: Queering Loss in Aelred's Speculum caritatis
Presenter 3 Name
Amanda Wetmore
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 4
Respondent
Presenter 4 Name
Albrecht Diem
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Syracuse Univ.
Start Date
8-5-2014 3:30 PM
Session Location
Valley II LeFevre Lounge
Description
This session seeks to unpack the problematics of gender, desire, and the relation of flesh to spirit in the spiritual writings of Aelred of Rievaulx, especially De institutione inclusarum, Speculum caritatis, and De spiritali amicitia. Aelred is often gestured to, more or less reflexively, as an apogee of positive valuations of same-sex affectivity in medieval monastic culture, but the reality of his richly varied, conceptually flexible taxonymy of affect and desire offer a far more complex set of problems as to how it might (and might not) be possible to claim that Aelred queers normative discourses of monastic formation. The purpose of this session is to reassess earlier appropriations of Aelred for queer history that were sometimes grounded less in the careful analysis of such issues and more preoccupied by questions of sexual identity.
Abstracts may offer considerations of such topics as Aelred's entertainment of the queer time of mourning and of affective piety, of which he was a principal pioneer; the issue of the "closet" that has been constructed around Aelred beginning with his own works, and the way that the performance of that "closet" recapitulates itself in modern scholarship, and to what ends; the rhythms of dispassionate statements of monastic formation in alternation with dramatically affective "outbursts" in Aelred's work; the convolutions by which pleasure and fulfillment come to reside in the self-denial of pleasure and fulfillment; and the triangulation of desire for Christ with desire for the lost (male) beloved.
Graham N. Drake
Que(e)rying Aelred: Desire, Affect, Gender, and Normative Monastic Discourse
Valley II LeFevre Lounge
This session seeks to unpack the problematics of gender, desire, and the relation of flesh to spirit in the spiritual writings of Aelred of Rievaulx, especially De institutione inclusarum, Speculum caritatis, and De spiritali amicitia. Aelred is often gestured to, more or less reflexively, as an apogee of positive valuations of same-sex affectivity in medieval monastic culture, but the reality of his richly varied, conceptually flexible taxonymy of affect and desire offer a far more complex set of problems as to how it might (and might not) be possible to claim that Aelred queers normative discourses of monastic formation. The purpose of this session is to reassess earlier appropriations of Aelred for queer history that were sometimes grounded less in the careful analysis of such issues and more preoccupied by questions of sexual identity.
Abstracts may offer considerations of such topics as Aelred's entertainment of the queer time of mourning and of affective piety, of which he was a principal pioneer; the issue of the "closet" that has been constructed around Aelred beginning with his own works, and the way that the performance of that "closet" recapitulates itself in modern scholarship, and to what ends; the rhythms of dispassionate statements of monastic formation in alternation with dramatically affective "outbursts" in Aelred's work; the convolutions by which pleasure and fulfillment come to reside in the self-denial of pleasure and fulfillment; and the triangulation of desire for Christ with desire for the lost (male) beloved.
Graham N. Drake