Disputing the Cisgender Body in A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes

ABSTRACT

Whether in its medieval or modern instantiations, flesh conjures to mind the various material forms and networks that constitute the body. Historically, medieval theologies on the body tend to gender fleshiness and carnality as feminine, while the mind and the spirit are gendered as masculine. One surprising and understudied example that dramatizes these debates on the gender between the body and the soul is A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes, a mid-fifteenth century Carthusian body/soul debate poem. Despite its conventional didactic theme, Disputation has provoked a lot of interest among scholars, primarily regarding the gender of the soul and the body. By bringing together medieval trans, feminist, and queer studies, my argument will consider how Disputation centers on the flesh as a thinkable node of matter that can become haunted, transformed, and even defiant in how it inscribes and assigns an identity to the body. In this way, Disputation presents a body that verbalizes a felt sense of gender identity while actively undoing — or rather disputing — the material signifiers of sex as conferring a legibly gendered subject, creating a trans plurality of voices and bodies within the poem that ultimately dissolves fleshy and textual boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• queer theory
• trans studies
• medieval theologies of the body
• body/soul debate poetry
• transmogrification
• transitional bodies
• medieval bodies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. There are many people I would like to thank for their vitally important feedback, advice, and support in helping me prepare this article, including Gregory J. Tolliver, Kortney Stern, Megan Vinson, Caitlin Mahaffy, Savannah Pratt, Shannon Gayk, Joey McMullen, and Karma Lochrie. I would also like to thank Stephanie Batkie and Matthew Irvin, the organizers of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium at Sewanee, the University of the South, and the 2019 audience who heard a version of this article entitled “Grotesquely Orgasmic: Necrotic Gazing, Claustrophilia, and Queer Afterlives in the Middle Ages.” The generative and lively questions and discussions at the conference helped further shape this article and the ideas within, for which I am extremely grateful. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous readers for their enthusiastic and generous feedback to this article.

^2. As Butler (2011) argues, fleshy matter is not a passive surface awaiting inscription but is a material process that stabilizes over time. For Butler, the body’s materiality is culturally variable, meaning that instead of representing material sex and socially constructed gender identities as universally distinct, there is no clear boundary between material embodiment and cultural expressions of gender. Other feminist theorists such as Barad (2003), have examined how matter itself is not a singular substance but generates meanings in its own inter- and intra-actions along with discursive and social practices. Rather than materializing as a stable notion of materiality, Barad’s focus is on the performativity of materiality which links all bodies to a process of ongoing and dynamic becoming.

^3. This dualism of representing women with the body and men with spirit in medieval theology and its implications for considering medieval perspectives on gender is a critical strand of thought in medieval feminist scholarship. Raskolnikov (2009) helpfully terms this corpus as “body studies,” which describes a broad field of scholarly inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s that focused on the body as a cultural and historical construction (8). In medieval studies, Bynum’s oeuvre (1988, 1991, 1995, 2007) is considered foundational in establishing how medieval women understood the body in theology and devotional practices. For how feminist oriented critique can illuminate the body in a variety of medieval texts, see Lomperis and Stanbury (1993). For a more interdisciplinary discussions of the body in medieval culture, history and literature, see Kay and Rubin (1994), Cohen and Weiss (2003), Hanawalt and Wallace (1996), and Elliott (1999) as starting points. For queer oriented approaches to medieval theological discourses on the body, see Dinshaw (1999) and Farina (2006) as well as others cited in this article. For medical and scientific approaches to the body and how it intersects with cultural, scientific, and theological attitudes toward gender, see Cadden (1993), Lochrie (2005), Karras (2005), Bildhauer (2006), Tasioulas (2014), and Orlemanski (2019). For how religious and scientific discourse around the body impacts gender in other forms of literature, particularly romance, see Burns (1993) and McCracken (2003). For how medieval trans studies views medieval theological discourses around the body, see Gutt (2019), DeVun (2021), and Spencer-Hall and Gutt (2021).

^4. For a thorough overview of how medieval theologians thought about gender before the Fall and after the Resurrection, see Leah DeVun’s important work on this subject (2021). In her chapter on theological debates in antiquity and the Middle Ages, DeVun notes how Adam was represented as “sexually undifferentiated” from Eve in paradise, leading some religious thinkers to assert nonbinary or agender forms of embodiment as humanity’s natural state (2021, 17–22). The Resurrection, too, prompted medieval theologians to question if the material body would function and signify the same in heaven (37). However, as DeVun reminds us, while some thinkers relied on notions of the dissolution of sexual difference in heaven, this did not extend to human nonbinary bodies, which were thought to be “corrected” and forcibly gendered during the Resurrection (38–9). See also Bynum (1995), Lochrie (1991, 2005), and Robertson (2013) for further discussions of how medieval theologians thought about gender before the Fall and after the Resurrection and also how some bodies were forcibly gendered through surgery.

^5. Of course, there are other examples of debate poetry that do not fit these conventions and offer queer potentialities. See Raskolnikov’s (2009) reading of “Als I Lay,” which features a body of knight disputing with his soul. Rather than the body being allegorized as feminine, the knight’s body retains its gender, which gives voice to a masculine body and a masculine soul’s mutual love for each other even as it results in their damnation to Hell.

^6. Examples of Body/Soul debate poetry exists in both Old and Middle English. The Old English corpus consists of “Soul and Body I” from the Vercelli Book and “Soul and Body II” in the Exeter Book. For a full list of Middle English Body/Soul debate poems see Conlee’s 1991 anthology which collects all the disparate versions considered to comprise the Middle English canon of Body/Soul debate poetry.

^7. All Middle English quotations come from Conlee’s 1991 anthology.

^8. For example, Matlock (2013) suggests that the body’s femininity is necessary to the poem’s debate to depict the body as corruptible and spiritually ignorant. She goes on to argue that while the body’s spiritual failures are gendered as feminine, her condition and the lesson she imparts are supposed to mirror the reader’s need for moral and spiritual guidance (269–71). Similarly, for Robertson (2013), the body’s femininity is central to the poem’s meta-discourse on the inevitable fragility and corruption of human endeavors, specifically artistic pursuits, achieved through the decaying female body’s simultaneous repulsiveness and attractiveness (148–9). Lastly, Steel sees the female body as an appropriate metaphor to invoke disgust and self-loathing within the male reader. In this way, the female body serves to comfort a male reader, who watches a beautiful woman putrefy and also be humiliated by the worms that eat her flesh, while suggesting the possibility he will also be humiliated by the same forces in death (84).

^9. This also accords with Lochrie’s (1991) point that feminine fleshiness offered a form of “mobility” within religious discourse because the flesh is “always straying, heterogenous, and dangerous” (44). For Lochrie, the porosity of the flesh allows the mystic’s feminine body to circulate and produce new forms of discourse and embodiment outside institutional and social boundaries. The mystic then continually threatens to transgress religious prohibitions and the enclosed body by embracing her position within discourse as a fleshy feminine disruption to the masculine/spirit binary (27). While Lochrie equates this with the feminine, she notes that the flesh is heterogenous, which relates to Bychowski’s (2018) point that the flesh does not guarantee a coherent subject. Both these arguments emphasize a later assertion I make along with Colebrook (2015), that the trans body threatens to dissolve ontological differences that allow for individuated subjectivity. Similar to the mystic and the virgin in Lochrie and Bychowski’s respective examination of medieval fleshiness, the body in Disputation becomes a disruption to the image of an enclosed body and its ability to constitute a singular subject position outside of the flux of the feminine, the queer, and other materialities that compose the body beyond strict binary differences.

^10. See DeVun (2021) and Campbell (2021) for how the non-binary body became linked to medieval racialized logic to reinforce boundaries between spatial, species, religious, and racial categories. For how flesh operates in black feminist theories, particularly the relationship between the human, gender, and chattel slavery, see Spillers (1987), Weheliye (2014), and Snorton (2017).

^11. See Everhart (2022) on the dangers of projecting universalized notions of subjectivity onto the past and using the past to shore up the legitimacy of trans identity. She argues that the logics of legitimacy relies on history and science’s ability to give subjectivity to some people and take it away from others (607).

^12. While Halberstam (2018) uses trans* with an asterisk, I have chosen to simply use trans. In his argument, Halberstam suggests that the asterisk adjusts the meaning of transitivity to accommodate a variety of forms, shapes, and configurations of desire and identity (4). However, as Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt (2021) note, both the use of the asterisk and the dash to modify trans is a polemical debate within trans studies and is not universally accepted, particularly in reference to individuals (317). I have chosen to use trans, even though I acknowledge that some of the ways I am using trans here refer to broader cultural aspects of trans expression and identity rather than an individual. Still, I find trans is already an inclusive and flexible enough term to accommodate the flux of identities and desires that manifest within the poem. Also, for further discussion of the capriciousness of trans as a rubric to think about identity, literary production, temporality, and historicity in premodernity see Traub et al. (2020, 15–18.

^13. I use “they” for the dreamer rather than “he” used in previous scholarship. As Halberstam argues (2018), they as a pronoun is “nonnormative and full of possibility,” reinforcing a view of “the many over the individual” (11). This feels appropriate to me, particularly as the poem seems to dissolve the dreamer’s voice and sense of self and intermingle them with the other voices in the poem. It should be noted that other than an image at the beginning of the poem, which depicts a hooded layman with long hair and a beard, neither the poem itself nor the dreamer express or describe a gender identity in any definitive way. For these reasons, I use “they” to represent the dreamer’s mystical ravishment later in the poem and the alternate gendered possibilities that are afforded to the dreamer within the dreamscape. Also, it should be noted that Stern (2021) points out that the body is referred to with the medieval pronoun “hyr,” which can refer to both masculine and feminine genders, objects, abstractions, or even the soul (66). I still retain the use of “she” to describe the body since this aligns with her felt sense of gender identity and expression. However, I take Stern’s point as an invitation to read the body as transfeminine.

^14. Stern (2021) links this moment specifically to the poem’s didactic aims. She suggests that the worms echo the body’s affirmation that her gender is one of many earthly concepts that will no longer exist in death. In this way, Stern associates the body’s teaching with other mystical figures such as Julian of Norwich and the Pearl Maiden, as the body draws from scripture to consolidate her authority and invites the reader to consider the impermanence of their own gender and body (69).

^15. As Steel argues, the main issue within the poem is not exactly between body and soul or between the self and other, but rather it is between “the matter that we claim as our own and the selfsame material processes that bring together other bodies into being” (95). In other words, the body is in dispute with her own materiality and its generative possibilities. Rather than signifying as a singular, stable subject, the body’s flesh becomes open to a host of multitudes that originate from within her material body and suggest its entanglement within a dynamic process of becoming with other bodies and voices in the poem.

^16. It is important to note Bynum’s gender essentialism and heteronormative correction of sexuality in her scholarship. Lochrie (1997) notes that despite Bynum cautioning the application of modern conceptions to medieval understandings of gender and sexuality, she tends to erase queer possibilities between mystics and Christ. Coman (2019) expands on this critique by noting how Bynum only recuperates one side of a binary patriarchal structure, firmly rooting femininity to maternity and conception (8).

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Zachary Engledow

Zachary Engledow is a PhD candidate in English at the Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests include queer studies, trans studies, and their intersection with medieval romance. He is currently working on a dissertation tentatively entitled: “Unnatural Alliances: Becoming Queer, Becoming Trans with Medieval Romance.”