Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Lyric
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Special Session
Organizer Name
Rachel May Golden, Katherine Kong
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville, Independent Scholar
Presider Name
Daisy Delogu
Presider Affiliation
Univ. of Chicago
Paper Title 1
"I will suffer just as I am": Gendered Expression and Self-Awareness in Crusade Laments
Presenter 1 Name
Rachel May Golden
Paper Title 2
What Is "Self Representation" in Female-Voiced Troubadour Poetry?
Presenter 2 Name
Gale Sigal
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Wake Forest Univ.
Paper Title 3
"Mon Chans, Ma Chansso": Language, Gender, and Performance in the Troubadour Tornada
Presenter 3 Name
Anne Levitsky
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Columbia Univ.
Paper Title 4
Lancelot in Prison: Fictions of Power in Le chevalier de la charrette
Presenter 4 Name
Katherine Kong
Start Date
12-5-2017 10:00 AM
Session Location
Schneider 1130
Description
This session employs gender as a critical category of analysis to examine the voiced nature of, and expressions of emotion in, medieval French literature, lyric, and song. In so doing, the panel seeks to bring together interdisciplinary approaches, such as from literature, musicology, gender and sexuality studies, philology, and history.
While studies of gender often focus on women’s experiences, this session proposes to employ gender inclusively to consider masculinities, femininities, their intersections, marked absences, and manifestations. This kind of analysis is particularly apt for medieval French literatures because of the explicitly voiced quality of these repertories and texts. From the first-person desires of the troubadours, to the gendered dialogues of the chanson de geste, medieval French texts powerfully speak in ways that continue to influence western cultural assumptions and inspire new intellectual investigations.
In particular, we aim to examine how writers, texts, and songs encode or shape gendered positions, variously complying with or subverting cultural expectations. Further, we seek to interrogate how emotion is voiced and enacted in gendered ways, especially emotions that are typically coded as masculine or feminine, such as epic grief, maternal lament, the sufferings of fin’amour, or knightly bravado and camaraderie. In dialogue with current scholarship on emotions in the Middle Ages, we are also interested in how issues of gender might inflect the very understanding of medieval emotions themselves—as rhetoric, as performance, as affect, or as transformation. Finally, we also welcome interrogations of how gendered voices are both performed and embodied as sites of desire, violence, dominance, and power.
Rachel M. Golden
Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Lyric
Schneider 1130
This session employs gender as a critical category of analysis to examine the voiced nature of, and expressions of emotion in, medieval French literature, lyric, and song. In so doing, the panel seeks to bring together interdisciplinary approaches, such as from literature, musicology, gender and sexuality studies, philology, and history.
While studies of gender often focus on women’s experiences, this session proposes to employ gender inclusively to consider masculinities, femininities, their intersections, marked absences, and manifestations. This kind of analysis is particularly apt for medieval French literatures because of the explicitly voiced quality of these repertories and texts. From the first-person desires of the troubadours, to the gendered dialogues of the chanson de geste, medieval French texts powerfully speak in ways that continue to influence western cultural assumptions and inspire new intellectual investigations.
In particular, we aim to examine how writers, texts, and songs encode or shape gendered positions, variously complying with or subverting cultural expectations. Further, we seek to interrogate how emotion is voiced and enacted in gendered ways, especially emotions that are typically coded as masculine or feminine, such as epic grief, maternal lament, the sufferings of fin’amour, or knightly bravado and camaraderie. In dialogue with current scholarship on emotions in the Middle Ages, we are also interested in how issues of gender might inflect the very understanding of medieval emotions themselves—as rhetoric, as performance, as affect, or as transformation. Finally, we also welcome interrogations of how gendered voices are both performed and embodied as sites of desire, violence, dominance, and power.
Rachel M. Golden