Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, 1990-2015
Sponsoring Organization(s)
BABEL Working Group
Organizer Name
Bruce Holsinger, Rita Copeland
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Virginia, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Presider Name
Bruce Holsinger
Paper Title 1
Hermeneutics as Autobiography
Presenter 1 Name
Steven F. Kruger
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY
Paper Title 2
Glosynge Is a Glorious Thynge
Presenter 2 Name
Emma Maggie Solberg
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Bowdoin College
Paper Title 3
The Tex(t)ual Body
Presenter 3 Name
Myra Seaman
Presenter 3 Affiliation
College of Charleston
Paper Title 4
Materna Lingua
Presenter 4 Name
Nicholas Watson
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Harvard Univ.
Paper Title 5
Chaucer's Deadly Text
Presenter 5 Name
Lynn Shutters
Presenter 5 Affiliation
Colorado State Univ.
Paper Title 6
Documents and Doctrine: A Case for Chaucer's Discerning Women
Presenter 6 Name
Elizabeth Robertson
Presenter 6 Affiliation
Univ. of Glasgow
Paper Title 7
Response
Presenter 7 Name
Carolyn Dinshaw
Presenter 7 Affiliation
New York Univ.
Start Date
14-5-2015 10:00 AM
Session Location
Fetzer 1005
Description
The year 2015 marks the 25th anniversary of Carolyn Dinshaw's "Chaucer's Sexual Poetics" [CSP] a book that has had a transformative and lasting impact on the study of medieval literature and culture. More than a thematic study of women, gender, and sexuality in the Canterbury Tales, the book proposed a mode and theory of reading medieval literature--a sexual poetics--that arose from medieval hermeneutics and biblical exegesis, and that inspired a generation of readers to find new and newly feminist ways of comprehending the gendered idioms of medieval writing in their full complexity. Several of Dinshaw's key phrases from the book--"Eunuch Hermeneutics," "Reading Like a Man," and others--would become shorthand for particular interpretive turns in medieval literary studies, while initiating strands of anti-homophobic criticism that would develop in subsequent queer medievalist work by Dinshaw and others. This session will examine the legacy and influence of CSP in Chaucer studies and medieval literary studies more generally. Where has feminist literary criticism gone since CSP, and with what implications? How might we think about CSP in relation to later developments in queer and feminist theory? What did it mean to talk about "reading like a man" in 1990, and what might such a phrase imply now? Carolyn Dinshaw has agreed to serve as a Respondent for the session.
Eileen A. Joy
Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, 1990-2015
Fetzer 1005
The year 2015 marks the 25th anniversary of Carolyn Dinshaw's "Chaucer's Sexual Poetics" [CSP] a book that has had a transformative and lasting impact on the study of medieval literature and culture. More than a thematic study of women, gender, and sexuality in the Canterbury Tales, the book proposed a mode and theory of reading medieval literature--a sexual poetics--that arose from medieval hermeneutics and biblical exegesis, and that inspired a generation of readers to find new and newly feminist ways of comprehending the gendered idioms of medieval writing in their full complexity. Several of Dinshaw's key phrases from the book--"Eunuch Hermeneutics," "Reading Like a Man," and others--would become shorthand for particular interpretive turns in medieval literary studies, while initiating strands of anti-homophobic criticism that would develop in subsequent queer medievalist work by Dinshaw and others. This session will examine the legacy and influence of CSP in Chaucer studies and medieval literary studies more generally. Where has feminist literary criticism gone since CSP, and with what implications? How might we think about CSP in relation to later developments in queer and feminist theory? What did it mean to talk about "reading like a man" in 1990, and what might such a phrase imply now? Carolyn Dinshaw has agreed to serve as a Respondent for the session.
Eileen A. Joy