Diane Watt

The Lesbian Premodern

Book synopsis: The Lesbian Premodern invites key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies to take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography. Engaging premodernists as well as those interested primarily in modern lesbian history and literature, this book draws new conclusions on the important and often overlooked theoretical, empirical and textual work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures.

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehtas Fire (1996), Indias first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the films own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the films labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The films interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen.

Literature in pieces: female sanctity and the relics of early women’s writing

Credimus autem multo plura quam reperiantur extitisse, que aut ex illius eui torpentium scriptorum negligentia nequaquam litteris mandata fuerunt, aut descripta paganorum rabie ecclesias ac cenobia depopulante inter cetera perierunt. [And we believe that there are many more (miracles) than are now to be found, which through the carelessness of the sluggish scribes of that age were never committed to writing, or were recorded but have perished among other things when the fury of the heathen laid waste to churches and monasteries.]

Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern

The Lesbian Premodern is a collection of essays that responds to, and adapts, Michele Aina Barale’s suggestion by inviting some key scholars in the fields of lesbian studies and queer theory to take part in an innovative conversation in print. This textual discussion transgresses traditional period boundaries and offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history, geography, literary criticism, and theory. The Lesbian Premodern aims to engage those interested primarily in contemporary lesbian theory, history, and literature with the important and often overlooked theoretical, empirical, and textual work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures. Our title, The Lesbian Premodern, is deliberately provocative: both anachronistic and tautological. The term “lesbian” is widely regarded as essentialist, historically redundant, and limiting. One response to this would be to argue, following Karma Lochrie and James Schultz, that the concept of hetero-sexuality is equally anachronistic when applied to the premodern and that heteronormativity itself must be subject to scrutiny.3 However, one of the central questions this book addresses is, when has using the term “lesbian” not been considered an anachronistic gesture? It is a question that is of particular interest to those of us trained in medieval and early modern studies with a research interest in tracing love, sex, and desire between women and their reception in historical contexts prior to the Enlightenment—scholars who also work in the fields of lesbian and queer studies more generally.

A Fragmentary Archive: Migratory Feelings in Early Anglo-Saxon Women's Letters.

ABSTRACT The letters by Anglo-Saxon women in the Boniface correspondence are connected by cultural practices and emotions centered on the conversion mission that functioned to maintain connections between the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. A striking recurring focus of these letters is on loss and isolation, which connects them to the Old English elegies. Many of the letters describe the writers’ traumatic experiences that result from the death or absence of kin. These are women who endured the trauma of being left behind when others migrated overseas or who, in traveling away from their homeland, found themselves isolated in an alien environment, displaced in time as well as space. This article offers an analysis of the letters, focusing on the queer temporalities they explore, the queer emotions they evoke, and the queer kinships that they forge. It argues that the women’s letters represent fragments of an early queer archive of migratory feelings.

The Earliest Women's Writing? Anglo-Saxon Literary Cultures and Communities

Who were the first women writers in the English literary tradition? This question continues to preoccupy feminist scholars in the twenty-first century, but very few would look back to the centuries before the Norman invasions in order to find the answer. Focusing on the religious houses of Ely and Whitby in the seventh and early eighth centuries, this article reviews some of the surviving evidence of the first monastic womens writing. Looking for traces of early texts by women, it re-examines the lives of the abbesses Æthelthryth of Ely and Hild of Whitby found in the fourth book of Bedes Ecclesiastical History, alongside the account of Hild found in the Old English Martyrology, and, more speculatively, it reconsiders the case for womens involvement in the production of the anonymous first Life of Gregory the Great. This article argues that texts by women were “overwritten” by the earliest male monastic writers, a process reinforced by later scholarship. By focusing on texts associated with religious houses ruled by women, and by seeing them as the productions not of individuals but of communities, it is possible to get a fuller and more balanced understanding of womens writing in this earliest period of English literary history.

Writing a History of British Women’sWriting from 700 to 1500

How can a history of British women’swriting be written? Such a project must necessarily be collaborative if it is to attempt to be comprehensive, but even then any claim to comprehensiveness has to be qualified: paradoxically the more expansive the history, the more partial it will be. The challenges of writing such a history are perhaps even greater for scholars working in the early periods because we are forced to confront and to rethink many deeply ingrained assumptions about women’swriting. This volume focuses on a period of literary history that is often marginalized in accounts of women’swriting in English: the Middle Ages. It is a widely accepted view that there are only two women writers in English in the period before 1500, and therefore there is little to be said for an age (or ages) when women writers were so much an exception. Furthermore, the two medieval English women writers whose names are widely known, Julian of Norwich (1342/3–after 1416) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after 1439), did not think of themselves as writers or authors. Nor were they responsible for literature as it is thought of today — they did not compose poetry, or romances, or fiction of any sort. Even these two ‘named’ women writers do not comfortably fit established evolutionary models of women’sliterary history over the longue duree, with their emphases on the spread of literacy, the bias towards print culture, and the emergence of the woman poet, and ultimately of the professional author of drama or fiction.1

“A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi‐Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages – By Elizabeth Makowski

In 1423 the English confessor general of the Bridgettines, Thomas Fishbourne, employed a distinguished canon lawyer, Panormitanus, to provide a consilium, or legal opinion, to ensure the survival o...