Relational Virginity and Nonbinary Gender: La Vie De Sainte Euphrosine and La Vie De Saint Alexis
, abstract:, "Virgins," to quote Sarah Salih, "are good to think with." This holds true for medieval saints and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics alike. Scholars of medieval gender have demonstrated that virginity functioned as a sexuality, a form of devotion,...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Penn State Univ. Press
2024
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| In: |
Journal of medieval religious cultures
Year: 2024, Volume: 50, Issue: 2, Pages: 139-158 |
| IxTheo Classification: | KAC Church history 500-1500; Middle Ages KBG France KCD Hagiography; saints NBE Anthropology |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | , abstract:, "Virgins," to quote Sarah Salih, "are good to think with." This holds true for medieval saints and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics alike. Scholars of medieval gender have demonstrated that virginity functioned as a sexuality, a form of devotion, and even a gender unto itself in the Middle Ages. In that spirit, and drawing on recent work in transfeminist studies, this article proposes virginity as a form of nonbinary gender—as opposed to femininity, androgyny, or third gender, as it has previously been understood—in Old French hagiography. Works like La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis ask us to account for virginity's relationality and its embrace of contingency, a convergence that transfeminist medieval and virginity studies can together provide. Virginity as nonbinary gender, in turn, points to the relationality of all gender, to the inherent disorganization and enmeshment of gender itself. |
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| ISSN: | 2153-9650 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of medieval religious cultures
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