Coming Soon: Pavlinich's Erotic Medievalisms

Erotic Medievalisms: Medieval Pleasures Empowering Marginalized People

By Elan Justice Pavlinich
Copyright Year 2023
ISBN 9781032232058
January 31, 2023 Forthcoming by Routledge
208 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations

Full details and ordering information from Routledge are available at this link.

Book Description

Erotic medievalisms expose modern apparatuses of oppression, reclaim histories for marginalized people, and promote more inclusive representations in popular culture. Modern representations of the Middle Ages—including Santiago García and David Rubín’s graphic novel, Beowulf; Lil Nas X’s music video for "Montero (Call Me By Your Name);" Patience Agbabi’s retelling of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, entitled "The Kiss;" and some BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism) practices—challenge pervasive power structures that privilege heterosexual male dominance commonly associated with medieval origins in popular culture. This comparative study between medieval and modern texts foregrounds the sexual gratification of people who are typically excluded from representations of the Middle Ages, specifically women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Erotic displays of marginalized people in medieval contexts disrupt prevalent forms of oppression rooted in institutions that censor human experiences and they direct sexual desires towards social justice.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments


Foreplay: Eroticizing the Middle Ages


Grendel’s Cumming!: (Homoerotic) Horror in García and Rubín’s Beowulf


Ass-ention of the Black Power Bottom in Lil Nas X’s "Montero"


The Cunning Linguist of Agbabi’s "The Kiss"


BDSMedievalisms: Past, Power, Pain/Pleasure


Walk of Shame: The Conservative Assault on Sexual Liberties


Index

Author(s)

Biography

Elan Justice Pavlinich is a Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College where he teaches medieval and early modern literatures and medievalisms. His publications include cognitive approaches to the Old English Boethius and feminist approaches to Disney’s medievalisms.

CFP EXT Race and American Medievalism in the U.S. South and Beyond (2/28/22; Alabama 9/8-10/22)

From the ISSM List:

Race and American Medievalism in the U.S. South and Beyond 

Call for Papers: English Department Symposium, University of Alabama (September 8-10) 

Cultural appropriations of the European middle ages abound in American popular culture, particularly in the South. Southern investments in the middle ages and in medievalism are rooted to race, and while they begin during the antebellum period, relationships between the South, race, and the middle ages / medievalism extend well past the post-Reconstruction era, into the contemporary moment, and across America. We can see medieval iconography, for example, in the popular HBO television series Game of Thrones, in the backdrop of Spike Lee’s Oscar-winning film BlackKklansman, and in the portrait paintings of artist Kehinde Wiley.  

Similar connections between the middle ages and medievalism, race and racism, are likewise built into the architecture, topography, and decoration of American college campuses--especially in the South. Architectural features of the University of Alabama, the site for this symposium, position antebellum and gothic styles in proximity to one another; and among the many Confederate memorials on campus is a Tiffany glass window of a golden knight, with a dedicatory epigraph that likens the university cadets to “crusaders of old” and honors those who “fought their heritage to save.”   

This three-day symposium asks participants to explore the ways in which the South’s relationship to the middle ages and to medievalism has shaped the history of American race relations. Furthermore, this symposium asks participants to consider how the architecture, site plans, and decorative arts at American universities--especially Southern ones--not only contribute to this history but also play a role in shaping the often racially-charged perception of the middle ages in American universities and in popular culture.  

We invite the submission of 250-word abstracts for papers that explore any aspect of 19th, 20th, or 21st-century American medievalism and welcome papers that explore a wide range of approaches to the topic, from the methodological to the pedagogical. We are especially interested in papers that are attuned to the role of medievalism in the U.S. South, Southern universities, and Southern arts, architecture, and museum studies. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to: 

• The South and medievalism 
• Old English, the medieval, and Hip Hop as portrayed, for example, in the work of Atlanta rapper Young Thug and Houston rapper Travis Scott 
• Medieval literature and its American afterlives 
• Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars 
• Medievalism in the New Negro Movement, WEB Dubois, Nella Larson, and Jessie Fauset  
• The Lost Cause and the middle ages 
• Monuments and Southern Chivalry 
• Gothic revivalism 
• Toni Morrison and Beowulf 
• Alice Walker and medieval myth-making in Meridian of Saxon College 
• Memorials and medieval archives 
• Architectural aesthetics, museum studies, and the politics of conservation 
• Anglo-Saxony and the myth of racial purity 
• Medievalism in the work of Black visual artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Wilmer Wilson IV, and Spike Lee 

The deadline to submit your 250-word abstract is February 28, 2022. Please send abstracts and/or inquiries to symposium organizers with the subject line: Middle Ages and Afterlives 

Alex Cook, acook@ua.edu 

University of Alabama 

Donna Beth Ellard, donna.ellard@du.edu 

University of Denver 

Cassander L. Smith, clsmith17@ua.edu  

University of Alabama 

 

CFP Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages (Spec. Issue of Speculum) (1/31/2022)

 Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages

deadline for submissions: January 31, 2022

full name / name of organization: Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

contact email: cord.whitaker@wellesley.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/11/16/race-race-thinking-and-identity-in-the-global-middle-ages

Speculum Themed Issue: "Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages" Call for Papers

Editors:

François-Xavier Fauvelle, Collège de France

Nahir Otaño Gracia, University of New Mexico

Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College

 

For far too long, scholarly consensus held that race and racism were mainly Enlightenment innovations, datable to no earlier than the seventeenth century. As long ago as the early twentieth century, some scholars pushed race's origins to the sixteenth or even fifteenth centuries, but these scholars were few and far between. The Middle Ages and, with them, medieval studies were set off as a time and discipline innocent of race and racism. This remained generally true until the advent of critical medieval race studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Now, in 2021, special issues in major journals and no less than six full-length scholarly monographs have treated imbrications of race with medieval art, literature, religion, and even the periodizing concept of the Middle Ages itself. Many more studies in medieval literature, history, art, religion, and culture have been conceptually informed by race, as have many studies in the modern preceptions and deployments of the Middle Ages. Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies calls for proposals for a themed issue, to be published as one of Speculum's four quarterly issues, to recognize the intellectual value of the study of race to a comprehensive understanding of the Middle Ages.

We invite proposals for full-length essays (8,000-11,000 words) that interrogate race, race-thinking, and identity in the Middle Ages. For example, essays might consider the roles of race-making and racialization in the Islamic world; how race and identity, together with religion, was negotiated and navigated in border regions such as al-Andalus, Sicily or the Levant (between Latin Christendom and Islam), the Sahara and the Sahel region (between the Islamic world and Subsaharan Africa); how the dynamics of race-thinking informed relations between Latin and Greek Christendom and Islam or the Mongol Empire, or between the Muslim/Islamicate world and the Christian, Jewish, Hinduist, and traditional religious societies within it or beyond its reaches; how race intersected with the dynamics of trade and connectivity, religious affiliation and conversion, slavery and emancipation, peace and war. Essays may also take on the roles of race, race-thinking and identity in the geography and periodization of the Middle Ages: Are historical moments that are quintessential to the history of race also relevant to medieval-and-modern periodizations? Essays may also consider how and why race, race-thinking, and identity have shaped modern concepts, uses, and scholarship of the Middle Ages.

The editors are open to essays that interrogate race, race-thinking, and identity in the Middle Ages by asking these and other deeply probing questions. Additionally, we are especially interested in essays that consider the globality of the medieval world: those that examine the networked interrelations and interdependences of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. In addition to the scholarship in history and literature, we invite proposals using the tools and methods of anthropology, archaeology, art history, book history, historical linguistics, religious studies, sociology, and other fields germane to the studies of race, identity, and the Middle Ages.

The themed issue on race, race-thinking, and identity and the articles selected for it will be in keeping with Speculum's purview as stated in the Guidelines for Submission: "preference is ordinarily given to articles of interest to readers in more than one discipline and beyond the specialty in question. Articles taking a more global approach to medieval studies are also welcomed, particularly when the topic engages with one or more core areas of study outlined above. Submissions with appeal to a broad cross-section of medievalists are highly encouraged."

Proposals should be no more than 500 words in length and should be submitted by email to cord.whitaker@wellesley.edu with SPECULUM PROPOSALin the subject line by 31 January 2022. The authors of selected proposals will be notified by 28 February 2022. Completed essays will be expected by 1 December 2022. 

Last updated November 17, 2021