Though John Arnold specifically addressed me on this question, I have
been slow to answer because dirt jamming my "a" button temporarily denied
me access to my e-mail. Apologies to all.
On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, John H Arnold wrote:
> (1) Katherine Gill, in an article entitled 'Scandala: controveries
> concerning clausura and women's religious communities in late medieval
> Italy' (in S.L. Waugh & P.D. Diehl, eds, Christendom and Its Discontents,
> CUP, 1996) argues that - in one instance at least - arguments about
> religious women and containment were more to do with political and
> economic power than sexual scandal. She suggests that there is a danger
> in seeing all things to do with nuns and enclosure as sexual, or purely
> sexual. I would be interested to know what others (Jo Ann McNamara in
> particular) think about this argument...
I would not deny this for a moment. The original question was whether or
not things seen in Welsh literature were also present in other areas and
I confined my remarks to that. Secondly, I was not really addressing the
question of enclosure, which is a much larger question to which the
question of sexual myths and stereotypes is only partially relevant. Not
to pursue the issue into many pages, let me simply say that I think that
the construction of nuns as both sexually voracious and sexually
vulnerable is intended to keep them enclosed which is in itself desirable
for economic and political reasons.
> (2) In the original posting, it seemed to me that there were two things
> mentioned: nuns as sexually voracious; and nuns as a sexual challenge to
> be conquered. On the former point, we surely have to remember that there
> is also a long tradition in literature of monks as being sexually
> voracious. How gendered is this particular discourse?
I believe it is gendered in very complex ways. Again, the original
question was not addressed to the question of monks (or any men) and this
is not an area in which I have done specific research. Nevertheless, I
will say that the myth and stereotype of the perpetually rampant male is
a necessary companion to the myths and stereotypes of nuns cited above
and has much the same purpose. Further, this is particularly important
in the case of monks because the idea of women and men who live
comfortably in chaste celibacy and are capable of abandoning gender
differences to live and work together is deeply threatening to everyone
who has a vested interest in the existing gender hierarchy (whichever or
whenever we are discussing).
> (3) The examples Daron quotes below also point out that in literary
> examples at least, one can also be dealing with what Bakhtin would have
> described as the 'grotesque'; the politics and interpretation of which
> might be more complex... I am not trying to suggest that the original
> points made about this 'medieval pornography' are not valid, or that such
> a discourse (or set of discourses) were not misogynist, but I think that
> we need to be a bit more contextualised in our arguments.
I certainly agree on that. As you may have noticed by now, I don't think
that this literature is particularly misogynist in the usual sense of the
word. That is, I don't think it is directed at criticizing women or
demonstrating their inferiority. But I do think it is directed at
controlling women (and men) who have stepped outside the received order
of things. The trick about studying gender is to release it from the
"natural" order and see its specificity and adaptibility.
Jo Ann
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