Abstract
This chapter performs an intersectional reading of The Man of Law’s Tale and The King of Tars to explore how these late medieval romances construct normative power structures and argues that reproductive futurity (as imagined in these two stories) creates the crossroads that brings together monstrosity, race, and disability through their erasure. Focusing on identity elimination makes the case for attending to structures of power and oppression that create constructions of otherness in these narratives. Focusing on identity construction, and how difference is catalogued, carries the danger of reifying the worldview of these medieval narratives in our own scholarship. The two medieval narratives in this chapter are extremely invested in setting norms through their imagined reproductive futures, as they are entirely centered around the question of bodily legibility—each text defines, and thus preserves, legible bodies while eliminating illegible bodies. Considering the norm, rather than difference, as monstrous inverts the reification of race and disability presented by the texts, illustrates the structures of power that give us the imagined futures in question, and also demonstrates how they are enacted through the bodies of women.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Geraldine Heng, Empires of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Heng defines the “Constance Group” as “a literary family in which Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale … is a senior member” (181).
- 2.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Akbari writes that “Saracen,” as a term, “identified its object as religiously different (not a follower of Christ but of Muhammed), and ethnically or racially different (from Oriental regions) … the term was understood as defining alterity in both dimensions; that is, both in terms of both religion and race” (155).
- 3.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1:8 (1989), pp. 139–167. Crenshaw, a black legal scholar, coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe how multiple forms of oppression can be experienced simultaneously. She uses the analogy of “traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another.” Crenshaw points out that “if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination … But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm” (149). Crenshaw is highlighting that black women experience discrimination that does not fit within racism or sexism as distinct and neatly bounded categories, but experience it as a combination of both.
- 4.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 4, 11. Edelman argues that queer subjects are positioned against heteronormative futures, of which the imaginary future Child is a key figure. He draws on psychoanalytic theory to make that case that queer subjects should embrace the refusal of the heteronormative organization of social and political order.
- 5.
Allison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 31. Kafer challenges the ways in which futurity and temporality have been used to serve compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. She brings together feminist, disability, and queer theory to argue for an alternative, more inclusive, vision of the future.
- 6.
Medieval studies scholars have been attentive to the relationship between monstrosity and race, and monstrosity and gender in medieval narratives and materials. Debra Strickland, “Monstrosity and Race in the Late Middle Ages,” Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed Asa Simon Mittman, with Peter J. Dendle (London: Ashgate, 2012) points out that “The appellation ‘monstrous races,’ after all, suggests the intersection of two sets of ideas, monstrosity and race—which, besides apportioning the world’s monsters into discrete races, also invites contemplation of race as monstrosity” (367). Asa Simon Mittman, “Are the Monstrous ‘Races’ Races?” postmedieval 6:1 (2015), writes that referring to monstrous races as such “shapes our views of the beings, and of notions of difference more broadly” and concludes that “The central utility of the term lies not in its ability to characterize the group in question, but in its ability to cast the group that is not discussed as a race” (40, 47). Dana Oswald, in her work on monstrosity, gender, and sexuality, writes that “While physical aberration is the primary attribute of monstrosity, deviant behavior can serve to emphasize or exaggerate monstrosity” (Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature. Gender in the Middle Ages 5 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 6).
- 7.
Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15. Davis’s larger argument draws attention to the construction of normalcy and its creation of “the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (3).
- 8.
My readings of these two narratives are indebted to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theorization of narrative prosthesis. As Mitchell and Snyder state, “Narrative prosthesis (or the dependence of literary narratives on disability) forwards the notion that all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to rein in excess” (53). David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
- 9.
Rosi Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences,” in Feminist Theory and The Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), 291. Emphasis mine.
- 10.
Tory Vandeventer Pearman, Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 210), 25.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder,” 299.
- 13.
Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 211. Puar’s larger argument situates biopolitics alongside geopolitics. Her book demonstrates how sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are reorienting in the face of contemporary securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. Her work aims to demonstrate the “commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated in the propagation of the United States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation” and the “sanctioning of a national homosexual subject” (2).
- 14.
Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder,” 292, emphasis mine.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder,” 293.
- 17.
Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder,” 300.
- 18.
Verse
Verse The priest took the flesh And applied the name of Jon to it … And when it was christened It had life and limbs and a face And cried with great commotion And had skin and flesh.
- 19.
Jamie Friedman, “Making whiteness matter: The King of Tars,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 6:1 (2015), pp. 52–63. Friedman offers an incredibly compelling reading of this narrative, arguing that “the white racial body is precisely what is being constructed and continually held together across the narrative’s trajectory” rather than reading “whiteness as normative, the racial identity toward which all others universally capitulate” (53). As Friedman points out, the now-white Christian Sultan massacres 30,000 Saracens when they refuse to convert. Further, Friedman tracks how white Christians are “made” in the text, “four times in 150 lines,” saying, “his repeated Christian-making foregrounds the extent to which white Christianity requires consistent remaking in order to cohere … white Christianity is explicitly constructed here and, as their skin color shifts reveal, is also inherently unstable” (60). Friedman ultimately hopes that the “inclusion of the white body within racialized imaginaries disrupts the medieval (and modern) logic of the normativity of whiteness while also including whiteness and Christianity within the circulations of ideological and performative plasticity that heretofore have adhered more exclusively to readings of black bodies in the narrative” (61).
- 20.
Akbari points out that both in TheKing of Tars and elsewhere that “the transforming body of the Saracen is a microcosm of the wished-for assimilation and integration of the Islamic world by Christendom” (157). Akbari reads the formless birth as demonstrative of “the father’s spiritual incompleteness … in his inability to provide form that can be imposed on the matter provided by the body of the Christian princess.” The baptism then “confers on the child not just spiritual renewal but also bodily conception, as the matter provided by the mother is–at last–imprinted with the necessary form” (192).
- 21.
Heng makes this point in her reading of this narrative. She suggests that “Christianity, it seems, possesses a spiritual essence with the power to reshape biological fleshly matter” and says that the “essentialist power of Christianity to bestow bodily configurations” in this narrative means that Christianity “operates as a discourse of both culture and biology” (229–30, emphasis in the original). Heng highlights how religion and race function in this narrative as a “single indivisible discourse” (234, emphasis in the original).
- 22.
Carolyn Dinshaw describes Constance as “an essential blankness that will be inscribed by men” (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press], 1989, p. 110); Gail Ashton describes her as “passive, other, waiting to receive her identity from a world which excludes her” (The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint [New York: Routledge], 2000, p. 50); Alcuin Blamires says that “Chaucer actually appears to have gone out of his way to empty Custance of elements of what we would call agency” (Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender [Oxford: Oxford University Press], 2006, p. 110); Gania Barlow points out that Constance’s “idealized Christianity–meek and passive–enables her to serve as a demonstration of God’s active power” (“A Thrifty Tale: Narrative Authority and the Competing Values of the Man of Law’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 44:4 (2010), 397–420, pp. 407–8); Matthew Irvin writes that “Constance is constantly exposed, to the eye, the male judgment, and to the waves; the entire tale is a sort of pornography of pity, with the same competing affects of detached pleasure and consciousness of artifice” (The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer], 2014, p. 124).
- 23.
Heng reads this moment as the “impossibility” of imagining a Christian community in the East (227). Citing the fact that Constance does not have any children with the Sultan and the genocide enacted by Constance’s father after the Sultanness’s mass murder of the Christian converts, Heng writes that “the Constance romances show no interest whatsoever in imagining a re-beginning for the Islamic nation and its people as a newly (re)formed Christian community, suggesting the unimaginability–the unspeakability–of the project. If anything, we see in these romances the impossibility of re-beginning in the Orient” (227).
- 24.
Elizabeth Robertson, “Nonviolent Christianity and the Strangeness of Female Power in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 322–351. Robertson points out that “Constance is not simply a religious heroine: she is a religious heroine who disseminates, along with the seeds of Christianity, the genes of her father, emperor of Rome” (331).
- 25.
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 9.
- 26.
Robertson, “Nonviolent Christianity,” 334.
- 27.
Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 27.
- 28.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 95. Muñoz argues that queerness is future oriented. It is “the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). Muñoz “offers a theory of queer futurity that is attentive to the past for the purposes of critiquing a present” (18).
- 29.
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 32–33.
- 30.
Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 2–3. Samuels brings together literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture in to trace how “fantasies of identification” evolved in the United States from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. She examines the circulation of these fantasies between cultural representations, science, law, and policy.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rajendran, S. (2019). E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power. In: Godden, R.H., Mittman, A.S. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25457-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25458-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)