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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Carolyn Dinshaw. Series Q. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. xii + 345 pages.
Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval participates in one of the most exciting current movements in medieval literary and historical studies--the attempt, on the one hand, to understand sexual regimes so dissimilar to our own that they cannot be described with our accepted terminology and, on the other, to consider what kinds of connections might nonetheless be discerned and forged between sexual acts, styles, and (possible) identities pre- and postmodern. For a while, following a certain understanding of the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, students of pre-modern sexuality seemed mostly divided into Foucauldian and anti-Foucauldian camps, emphasizing either the full otherness ("alterity") of medieval sex or its transhistorical continuity with a modern sexuality delineated by such categories as hetero- and homosexuality. More recently, and more productively, scholars like Karma Lochrie, Kathleen Biddick, Louise Fradenburg, Allen Frantzen, Glenn Burger, and Dinshaw seem intent, if in very different ways, on negotiating both alterity and connection, radical difference and contiguity.
Dinshaw's earlier Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989) was among the first books to bring feminism to medieval literary studies, and it has rightly become one of the two or three most influential Chaucer studies of the past decade. In Getting Medieval, Dinshaw moves from a feminist to a queer engagement with medieval texts. Whereas in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, Luce Irigaray was a crucial theoretical figure, in the new book Dinshaw reflects especially...
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