Transcription of the panel discussion at the event "Queer Perspectives on the Middle Ages" 24th of October 2022, at Babelstuen, Arts and Humanities Library, University of Bergen.
Panelists: Aidan Conti, moderator (professor, UiB), David Carrillo-Rangel (PhD, UiB), Michelle Sauer (professor, UND, De Gruyter), Kate Maxwell (professor, UiT) and Bjørn Bandlien (professor, USN).
Aidan Conti
Good day and welcome to Queer Perspectives on the Middle Ages, a panel discussion held at the University Library, University of Bergen, and part of the University’s annual Medieval Week. My name is Aidan Conti and I’ll be facilitating the conversation. Every October, Medieval Week, coordinated by the Medieval Research Cluster at the Faculty of Humanities, offers events both within and outside the University. This year, 2022, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the legalization of sex between men in Norway and has been designated Queer Culture Year.
Consequently, the Special Collections of the University Library, which houses both our collection of medieval manuscripts and the National Queer Archive, has invited five researchers to address the role that queer perspectives play in opening up the study of the Middle Ages to new methods and audiences.
So without further ado, our speakers are (in order of speaking): Michelle Sauer, Michelle is the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and the University of North Dakota; Will Rogers, Will is assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe; Bjørn Bandlien, Bjørn is professor of Viking Age and Medieval history at the University of Southern Norway; David Carrillo-Rangel, David is a PhD-fellow at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen; and Kate Maxwell, Kate is professor of music history, theory and analysis at Norway’s Artic University, the University of Tromsø. All of our guests have written and spoken widely on this and related topics. And it is a great pleasure to have them for this discussion.
So, my introductory question, and then this puts you Michelle at front and center immediately:
How do you describe, and define I guess, queer perspectives on historical sources and how does your work promote these perspectives to and among a broader public?
Michelle Sauer
Actually, the way we talked about it, Will would be better to go first, but let me start with … let me start by saying hello to everyone and then … I'll start with our book series and then Will can like fill in a little bit about that.
So, we are co-editing a book series that Will had originally conceived the idea … and it's called “New Queer Medievalisms”. The title is a little bit of a misnomer. It isn't just medievalisms, it isn't just a forward focus on reinterpretations of the Middle Ages, but it covers medieval literature and culture, as well as later interpretations, and I think the title of the series actually helps with some of that description of queer perspectives on historical sources, because one of the arguments we get a lot is that it's anachronistic. Which is not true, of course, there were all kinds of queer people and situations in the premodern world. It's just not … an identity as cogently or cohesively formed as we might think of it today. And so, it gets subsumed into a broader schema.
I like to think that my own work, which has been more on same sex relationships between women in premodern world as … somewhat groundbreaking, but that sounds really full of myself, so I don't mean it that way, but there's not a whole lot, or at least there wasn't at one point, a lot of work on female-female sexual interaction, at least when I started.
Then I would say Diane Watt and Lisa Weston were probably two of the earliest people, and then I started my work in the late 90s and then forward. Now there's more.
One of the things that I see as broadening perspective, not just going forward into the idea of modern intersections or modern medievalisms, is also looking at other ways to queer the Middle Ages or … or pre-modern material.
So, we … if we think about it as an offshoot of otherness, we can look at things like queering lineages.
Take like Melusine for an example. She's obviously a fairy and her children are … uhm … mixed and hybrid, but that's also queering the entire lineages of that noble … that noble family.
Or queering manuscripts themselves, thinking of them as fragmented portions of bodies.
Forward like that.
Queering genres like understudied genres, pastuorelles, bordeurellos.
You know those sorts of things.
So, I … I think that there's a lot of stuff that we can do. A lot of people have anxieties about labeling things in the pre-modern world and I think maybe that would be a good segue for Will to pick up with.
Will Rogers
Great, thanks Michelle. So, I … I guess I would talk about two different things and … and the … the first is I … I think I would say that thinking about history in terms of how we might queer it gets to this other sort of truth for me.
That is, you know, like Michelle is obviously … obviously a mentor for me, but you know other folks as well, like Caroline Dinshaw and her notion of the touch across time and these sort of affective – with an A – relationships that we create when we sort of read against the grain in these historical sources and see how queerness might be articulated.
And I'm reminded, too, of how Heather Love in Feeling Backward picks up on the … the notion of loss and … and erasure, and she has this really great line, I might get it tattooed on my arm because I think it's one of the best sentences I've ever read and I won't quote it directly, but it's something like, you know, “History is always hard, but telling the story of a conquered race – right? – basically, telling the story of people who have been erased, this is really difficult, almost impossible, but that won't stop us, right?”
And there's almost this desire to tell that. And I think what that gets across is that I think every time we're looking at history, even if it's not queer, even if it's not about historically excluded people, there's a certain kind of desire there, and I think thinking about queer history gets to this thing that people have been able to deny about saying: Oh well, this is just, you know, a study of Chaucer or whoever – right? – and I'm not personally invested, but you are – right? – it’s just your personal investment doesn't get read as personal investment because it's not about finding like racial identity or queer identity or female identity in the past, right?
So that's one thing I would say the other thing I would say is that, you know, I teach in the American South and a particularly conservative part of the American South, and I'm teaching a LGBTQ studies class right now, uhm, and some of the similar dynamics that I think about in terms of medieval history are not gone for areas like this.
So, I'm teaching a memoir about a queer figure who's living in northern Louisiana, which is, you know, one of the poorest regions in the United States. It's also one of the most religiously and politically conservative. And so, like the tools that we might use to think about medieval history and how we might queer it are useful for other areas. And so, I think that's the … this sort of thing I might get to.
Bjørn Bandlien
Yes, thank you Will. Michelle, it's an honor to be in the panel with you all.
Uhm, well I'm an historian who…. who started studying history as a student in the 90s. Uh, and I remember … like we … all we students, we all learned what was really important in medieval history of Norway, of Europe, is politics, is kings, church and property.
And then someone started to have this course on women’s history like social history, women history, litigation, like court cases, and stuff like that.
And those of us who took that course we started to … to look at the sources differently … and to kind of see things in the sources that we had kind of read, when we can learn about politics and church, and kind of Marxist … approaches to property. And to … to see something else in the same sources. Uh, and different people came to life, and different perspective on those peoples. I think that's an important experience even for my students today and other students that come into the field of history, medieval studies, premodern studies or whatever. To … to have to … to be challenged on their perspective on how to read, how to look beyond kind of what you learned in … in school.
And also, to kind of be critical to, well, concepts, kind of identities, to put things on shelves and in boxes, and just to have their idea, to kind of challenge their heteronormativity, and to look for other identities. It's so kind of mind opening and been really important for me in the development as me … as a scholar, and kind of my approach to the sources and that's mainly thanks to scholars like Michelle and Will and others in the panel here that makes us … makes us see things we wouldn't have seen without these kind of approaches.
So that's my starting point.
Aidan Conti
Good! Excellent! David?
David Carrillo-Rangel
Ok! Oops… So, I began to … I was trained as a book historian.
I have background in filmmaking, that was what … where I started in the 90s.
So, I was a social scientist before I became a humanist.
So, I guess that explains a lot of how I approach things and how I see things.
And for me the turning point was a workshop with Mieke Ball, who was here a month ago – two months ago? – opening the exhibition “Decriminalizing History”.
And the way she approaches the past and looks at the past in what she calls “preposterous history”.
Which is like she does not really care if she sounds anachronistic, and she made very brave comparisons with doing abstract art and Caravaggio, for example, and using a very charged radical approach.
And from that one should ... I was challenged to compare two things that are very different.
It's the banner that opens the exhibition here, which is the banner that shows two men sharing a dildo with the revelations of Saint Birgitta, and I think I did that quite … what at least sounds convincing when I published it.
And my approach is not so much looking for queer people in the past, queer understood as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, asexual, two-spirit, intersexual or demi- … demi-romantic, and my approach is more concerned with things that sound and feel strange.
And I'm working on a dissertation, uhm, about Brigitte of Sweden, uhm, and she's very famous, I don't think she needs some introduction in this context, but if not, entering the questions, I can deal more into that.
Birgitta has been approached from a feminist perspective, for many scholars, but I felt that I was missing some queer approach, and that's what I'm doing in my dissertation, and that's the ... that's the challenge I'm … I'm facing.
And me and Kate, we are both editing a book which is called “Queer Textures of the Past” to be available soon in Michele’s and Will’s series. And it's a collection of essays based on a couple of sessions and a roundtable on Leeds, three years ago already, I think.
So … that's what I'm working at the moment, one of the many things, and other than that, well, my approach to queerness is a bit atypical because I don't look for queer people in the past, I look into strange situations in which queerness can be bringing and inform things.
For example, there's a prayer book from Vadstena Abbey – we were talking about this before, so for the ones who were there, sorry, I'm repeating myself – in which there are a lot of initials from one nun to another nun, when the nun that described the book that wrote the book to the nun that was going to use it.
And there are hers and initials, and “please pray with me”, “remember me”, “I will miss you”, and I was thinking, OK, I cannot frame these two nuns as lesbians clearly. Or I could! But it would be in a way I would be implying something that is not in the … in the book.
What I can say is that there was an affective relationship between these two women, and that's important to our knowledge and to explore.
And I think I will shut up for now and you can go.
Kate Maxwell
It is a bit hard to … to come last if you excuse the terrible pun there.
I think that's the … the word that I haven't heard but is one of the most important words for me, if anyone asked me to define a queer approach is the word “encounter”. And I'm being open to a different encounter, or perhaps a new encounter, or indeed a queer encounter, but it doesn't have to be queer.
And there's a certain humility that I try and put forward in that approach that says, you know, we … if we are open … if we … if we are humble, if we come at whatever it is that we are looking at, an artifact or whatever, and we can see things in a different way. And I give a very concrete example of this: As I was sitting on the plane just now, I was proofing, proofreading proofs for an article that's about to come out. And Michelle has got one of the wonderful images behind her there.
Because in … in that article, one of the things that I … I do as sort of an aside with the coauthors, we … we take … it’s … it's about flow … it's about flow and hip hop. We take Megan Thee Stallion’s Thot Shit video in which at the very end, sorry to spoil the story if you haven't seen it, but the very end Megan and the hotties through … through their own story, they take a labia and they paste it on the lips of a senator who at the very beginning of the video posted a racist, sexist comment on … on Megan's … on Megan's thing and … and … and then they, before masturbating to the video, and then Megan and the hotties, they … they chase him through the … through the town.
Anyway. And so … but if you're coming at that particular idea of the pasting of the labia onto a racist, sexist white senator’s face, and take it out from a medieval gaze, then of course you see … you see the Christ side wound there.
And in medieval times you can read that as a balm for body in pain, and the Megan video, it's a punishment for hypocritical white and political stance that tries to sexualize everything at the same time as saying “we don't do this. This is conservative”.
So, encounter, I think this is the word we're looking for.
And in terms of an approach, and in the work, it's … it's almost in everything, because once you … once you see it, you can't unsee it.
I think that's a very important point, so I would too shut up there.
Aidan Conti
OK, I've … I've … I've heard already a lot of common themes and common vocabulary.
I'm wondering about the play, and how each of you feels about the play with the word queer.
Because I can imagine that one might have a reaction that if you are seeing queer as a questioning perspective, what role does sexuality play there? Or is it a necessary part?
Because I ... yeah, I'm not sure how much we've talked about the sexuality aspect of it.
Kate Maxwell
And I think the answer is yes, we can take the sexuality away, but why would we want to?
So, one of the … one of the things I thought of when I was sort of trying to … to think of an example there was some friends of mine who are Roman Catholic nuns in Tromsø asked me about my work and so when you when you're sitting in the room, I was actually with my teenager at my side trying to explain some of the things I work on … and I work on quite a lot on porn and the erotic, as well to … to that particular audience. So … So … two … two quite young Catholic nuns, one from no, let's just say nuns of color, and plus my daughter, and so the example I came up with is from the project I've got going at the moment on, which is called “the pornographic spectrum”, which will hopefully be a book once I've written it, but quite a lot of the research is on children’s music – that is music performed by children today, and one way that I came up with in that moment to try and explain my work to two nuns and a teenager was the fact that … that the sexualization of children starts very young and it is there in our culture, and if we take … I didn't and I can't remember whether in this particular encounter I used the word queer, but if we take a look at … at ... at the sexualization of children in popular music, once you've seen that you can't unsee it, so it's just going back to that idea there and … and if we don't stand up and say “Michael Jackson”, “Shirley Bassey”, “MGP Junior”, for the Norwegians, is playing on tropes that are also in pornography, that are part of this long line, then how do we … how do we, if we don't acknowledge that it's there, how do we do anything about it? So, trying to stay reasonably … reasonably neutral, 'cause I don't want to use, I'm trying not to use the word “fight”, but I'm assuming that pedophilia is wrong … in the minds of most people listening in or sitting here, but it is part of queerness. So, I don't know but I think again, that's probably time to pass over to that.
David Carrillo-Rangel
I will follow the order then, so, I will go.
I … I talk a lot in my research about infrastructure. What is infrastructure?
What we use as our research is, is a structure to produce knowledge and how that knowledge is distributed, and it's received. And for me, sexuality is part of that infrastructure; is what informs the present with the past, what links it, in a sense that many queer people who have not been visible in the past. They were condemned to have their relationships inside their homes and nowhere else, and so the only way to look at that into the past is to this concept of strangeness.
But then when you are, I think when you are marginalized by your structural limitation, race, religion, disability, gender identity, which is not the same as sexual orientation, obviously you have something that makes … that not the most common average repeated item--not to use the word ‘normal’, but so we understand each other ‘normal’—and so the sexuality is the factor that informs everything else.
Will Rogers
I think we can do queer things without sex, but I actually think, rather than to say “let's move away” maybe, and have queerness without sex, maybe we should really expand what we mean by sex, right?
So, one of the things that I … I sort of struggle with, and this is why Michelle - Michelle is my mentor, by the way – that one of the things that I really came to see through her work is how when folks are generally talking about sex, they are generally talking about sex between men, right? Queer sex, right? and you know certain kinds of like dominant kinds of non-dominant sex between men, right? So, I do think one of the things to really stress is I think it's too premature ... It's too premature to take sex away because we haven't actually discussed all the different kinds of sex and the fact that like not talking about sex also means that like we're not talking about asexuality either, or other sort of queer forms of sexual existence, which might not actually be read as sex to us today.
Michelle Sauer
Well, Will thank you, but Will is right that does lead into sort of what I was going to say.
My … my specialty as far as material goes, as religious literature, devotional literature, Christian, devotional literature, and so I've spent my career … queering Jesus and queering Saints, mostly, so, Kate mentioned the … the image I have behind me, which is so you don't see the hotel room in London that I'm … I'm in, but … but, it's also from the Luxembourg Hours and it's a close up of the side wound of Christ.
In one of my articles, I talk about … you know, medieval nuns who kiss images in these books, and I call it divine cunnilingus because this is Christ’s vagina.
So, I mean, when you spend your career talking about Christ, vagina and people having sex with Christ. I mean, I guess it is … yeah, and it ... it is a different sort of thing, even if it's constructed as physical sex, it obviously isn't necessarily physical, so I don't think it's … it's possible to remove sex from … from equations entirely. And Will is right and Kate is right, you wouldn't want to, I mean ... it … there's no reason to. Asexuality is a … is a … a field that is just starting to, I think, really open up and pre modern studies again as a … a Christian religious scholar, I think, or a scholar of like medieval Christianity, I guess it … it … it makes a little sense, because for a long time, my subset of the field has struggled with how do you define chastity? How do you define virginity? And in fact, they struggled with it in the premodern world as well. So, I mean, that's even when you're not talking about sex, you're talking about sex.
And I think probably what he was alluding to is the … the … my next monograph, after I finished up the projects I'm working on this, I'm on sabbatical this year after I finish off these projects, the next monograph I'm working on is on masturbation, so, premodern masturbation, which is not something I guess that we talk about very often. So, uhm, yeah. Even if you're even ... if you're not thinking of it, I don't know whatever traditionally would be, it's there, all the time.
Bjørn Bandlien
It's interesting to hear the discussion here.
Yeah, I was just remembering when I was, well, maybe 20 years ago when I started to … to work on sexuality, I'd written an article about Viking queer things. And this was picked up by a magazine, a woman's magazine, and they wanted to have kind of a questionnaire for not sexologists; they would have sex advice from people you wouldn't expect sex advice from, for instance historians. And at that time, I was, you know, really into Foucault, and, you know, the history of sexuality and all that. My advice was to kind of be pure like sex, just sex, and not any power, kind of make it as, kind of isolated as possible, not bring in social identities or … or property economics into the … into the sex, try to have that separate. And a friend of mine after he read this, he said that, well, that sounds boring. And in hindsight, I would say that it's … it's very difficult to kind of both … to kind of separate sex from all other … uh, kind of feels in culture as the … in the broader sense. And vice versa. So, in one way or another, it's got to be somewhere in there, I think.
Aidan Conti
I mean, I very much appreciate all 5 perspectives there on that, and …
So, I guess, how do you handle or really deal with what I imagine is … is not an atypical question, and … and say, you know, but the sources are the sources, they say what they say. OK, how do you queer a medieval diploma? You guys are talking about, you know, some material that's lending itself to particular perspectives.
The audience here is looking at the screen and the ... the screen is looking … OK … David … Yeah.
David Carrillo-Rangel
I can go because there is a diploma … diploma in the exhibition. Yeah I can.
Aidan Conti
That's a very good ...
David Carrillo-Rangel
I can …. I can use that as an example and perhaps will be easier.
I use the diploma because of the seal in the diploma. In the diploma somebody wears a seal, or they contain a seal, and as a sign of authority.
And the exhibition is divided in different sections which I define as moments, modern sections, and one of them is called “fuck the polite”; in “polite” making a play-word with “police”, “politi” in Norwegian.
And so, I compared this diploma … this medieval diploma with a cartoon, I’d say ...
in a magazine in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, in which they were making fun of the new Prussian emperor who was said was supposed to have had sexual homosexual relationship with someone, and they make a new coat of arms and, and well, I frame this as in this in this…I don't know what to say … conflictive … productive … a strange, queer relationship with authority. And also used to not get lost in everything because queer is not exactly the same as “skeiv”, we mentioned that earlier before, so, queer can mean different things: Queer as queer studies, which is perhaps what we are talking here about; queer as a sexual identity of some people who define themselves as non-binary, they are normally known as gender-queer and it's a non-binary from … it is part of the non-binary umbrella; and queer as an insult who was taken back by the community as an identity sign. So, there are these three main meanings. And so, we don't get lost in the … in the … in the word (?)...
Aidan Conti
Yeah, I … I mean … I guess I would ask the … the participants … the panel, do you feel that there is particular material that is ripe for queering and some that is less kind of productive from that perspective?
It's kind of a dangerous ...
Kate Maxwell
… but is it not that parchment is asking to be touched?
And if it's on parchment, then it's come from a body, yeah, and it's got an inside and outside. And then we can go with the idea of you … you've got your hand on the inside of what was once an animal. If you're on the on the flesh side of the page, you know we can … we can have such fun.
And … and I think … I think also, I was thinking about music as well, and you know, as a … as a … as a music history person, music as itself isn't inherently queer, and the Middle Ages is like a gift because it's almost all sung at least all the sources that we have for the Middle Ages are song sources. And that's because there was no need to write down music for instruments for quite a long time, or the instruments would just play from whatever was written down.
I mean, the whole idea of music notation, I could spend hours talking about.
But the minute you have singing … and of course the mouth is one of the ways into the body … and the whole idea of singing is itself extremely sensual and can be indeed queered if we're thinking, for example, about a single sex religious community. Then you've got all of these people singing at each other with one of the ways into their bodies they're producing fluid, they're producing bodily fluids and like; you know it's a gift; and then as if there wasn't enough and people go,
“Oh, yes, but that's just you. You bring in your model interpretation 'cause you think about sex all the time, Kate.”
And then just … I just say “Augustine” and leave it at that. Because you know, Saint Augustine in his writings—Saint Augustine, if you don't know, early church father—writes an awful lot about sex actually, and also about music. And for him music was very much … it was potentially a site of sin and the sort of should we … should we have singing in church, or should we not have singing in services? Question went back and forth and for Augustine he sort of said yes, no, yes, he came back to the yes, but there was a but! Because there's … there's an inherent danger in music and that’s it can move you too much. And if it moves you in the wrong way without you realizing it, then you sin without realizing it. But as long as it's moving you towards God and towards something else, so, whatever it is you're aiming for, then it's a positive thing.
So, I think that some things are very easy to queer.
We spent a very funny day in Paris, at the Cluny Museum, trying to find Adam’s bottom and failing to, because we were looking for this … this particular sculpture of Adam and what it might be like to—and this is from the book—to sculpt Adam’s backside as a … as a closeted, erm, closeted religious.
David Carrillo-Rangel
It was not on display.
Kate Maxwell
But it wasn't on display, so, we actually … and then again, you've even got the sort of the absence there … is that you know, we … we were looking for Adam's bum but we couldn't find it!
So, that kind of … that kind of model, that kind of artifact that you can go up to, and perhaps not touch 'cause it's a museum and you’re not allowed to do that, but at least look at, and think about touch, as opposed to something that is perhaps purely… purely sonic or purely, well, textual, for want of a word ... I hate to say the word monomodal, but nothing … 'cause nothing is monomodal, there's always something you can find if you … if you're open to it. Yeah, but you might not want to be open to it, and there we come to issues of consent, which is another … another word at all, because there's also the option of saying no, I… I don't want to do that. Which might not be a standpoint that I personally use myself, but I have to accept that other people, for example students, have the right to say “no”, we don't want to make that connection, thanks, we draw the line here.
Will Rogers
I think too, I … I like what Kate just said, and I … I want to follow up with and … and I don't yet have an answer for you, I'm thinking about this, but I do want to highlight, I think, two underlying assumptions in this sort of critique of queer history here.
That is that there's any sort of timeless or natural relationship to these sources, right?
Like modern historians are doing something really weird too, by just like looking at history erm … and I think about this as like, you know, a first-generation college student who … who, like, would be hated by all of this study, all of the sources that I, like, look at. Right? This sort of queer working-class kid who's, like, reading this, and the other thing is, like, if there's no sort of, and then, that by the converse of that, that there's something unnatural in trying to, like, queer things, or find the sort of queerness. And you know, maybe there are some sources that can't be queered. I'm not sure about that. I haven't met them yet. But I honestly … and I … I guess I would answer in this … also, this sort of, like, very specific place and time that I'm living in right now, right? I … I live in a very … very conservative place that seeks everywhere, I think, to sort of tamp down queerness and the … the result of that is that things are just very, very queer. As a result, right?
Like, and so, I think I do, like, want to challenge that sort of assumption, not saying that y'all are saying this, but the … the assumption that there's some sort of natural relationship to these sources. They say what they say. Sure, they say what they say across a span of time. We can't recover the situation of reading those in that contemporary time. There's already that distance.
There's … lots of there's … there's no full and complete history or historical records, so we're already, even if we're working on charters and trying to say, like, super, quote-unquote, ‘objective things,’ we're still working from a position of trying to recreate and recapture, which to me, is one of the things that my queer historical method does.
Kate Maxwell
I would just want to say that … that that resonates a lot with one of my favorite definitions of history that I use often with my students, which comes from again, a musician … a music historian called Judith Peraino, who's at Cornell University and … and she says there are three … there are three versions of history:
There's the history that happened that we will never know because we weren't there.
And then there's our current best guess.
And then there's the history of our current best guess. You know the history of the history, and it's that one that is perhaps the most fascinating, I think.
Will is sort of getting it that there is that … why our … our present understanding of history is that – because of what exactly?
And there I think we have a lot to say.
Bjørn Bandlien
Yeah, from my part I'm working with Old Norse mythology, skaldic poetry, sagas. And they are great stuff. And so, I'm not sure if I have managed to queer all kind of sources.
Queering a diploma? Well, that depends on the diploma perhaps.
But of course, narrative sources like romance lists, but also hagiography. I guess all this kind of, uh, well, sagas are great for especially … for students to kind of get into the thing. There are so many episodes that you can kind of halt your reading of a saga, of a source. And then discuss what ... what is this? Why is this woman dressing up in trousers when she is doing a killing, and undress back afterwards and pretend to do … have done nothing?
And … and all these kinds of episodes are going on and on, so there are very kind of grateful to use for students to kind of get into the line of thinking at least and train them to be better than me.
Will Rogers
Can I also just add … and this is … I mean this is productive for me, right? The … I think after the … or we're still in the pandemic, I think right? But even though we want to say we're not, I … I also want to … want to suggest to that, like, these questions about history, sometimes assume that we're not ourselves beings in history, right? Like we're not speaking to this sort of historical record from outside of it, right?
So, and I'm, Kate, I'm glad you mentioned Judith. I mean like one of the … one of the reasons I answered the way I did is … I did my PhD at Cornell and she said this to me 10 years ago, right?
Which is why I think that way about queer history, right? So, I … I do want to ... I do want to call attention to the fact that, yeah, we are beings in history too, right? So, it's … I guess I'm trying to say there's no right objective place to do any of this work, right?
And it's always, even when we say it's not about desire, it is a little bit about desire when you're doing history why else are you doing it? I mean, that's at least part of it.
Michelle Sauer
Well. Well, Will and I are on a similar wavelength, like usual.
I was thinking, and this is not necessarily about the texts themselves, but this is made to be more about a motivation and a lie.
I mean, I think it's absolutely crucial at the time when the … the study of the Middle Ages is under attack, uhm, all over, not just the United States. I mean, I'm American, but I can say obviously it's happening in Europe too that medieval studies departments are shrinking and disappearing and … and perspectives on the Middle Ages are getting tainted by this, this trend towards, uhm, let's just call it authoritarian governments across the world, and they're getting associated with things like, you know, white supremacy, or at least conservativism, or, you know, some sort of return to true values and that … and that sort of thing, and that, I mean, that's true in France and Brazil and … and Russia, as well as in the United States and Britain.
So, I think it's really important, say for an example, in a world where, uhm, trans people are being hunted down and … and … and, you know, killed as well, or, you know, prosecuted or, you know, exposed, or whatever it might be with … ever … whatever extreme it might be.
So, this is just an example: To talk about how there were trans individuals in the ... in the premodern world. It's … it's crucial that we do make these … these stories relevant, And I think that … that sort of relates to one of the questions that we had gotten on our list and …. I'll just go for it, uh…
So, one of the things that you [the moderator] asked about, was impact on today's world. And I think that this, like talking about what materials we look at is a pretty good transition into that.
Uhm, so for an example I can say that every year I have taught at the … at the higher education level, every semester actually, I've had at least one student come out to me in one form or another, like any … all across the LGBTQ spectrum, and then there's other, like, incidents like I, I gave a ... a lecture at another university on Trans Saints and I had a whole … and this was a … a conservative university in the South, uhm, unlike Will’s, it was a private … a church affiliated one, so, it was even more conservative, and at least we had the benefit of being public university, and I had a number of students come up to me afterwards and they were … were shocked, they were like “Oh, I didn't realize that people like me or people that, you know whatever, existed” and … and so, fairly openly, and … and I talked about medieval Saints being used, these people and that was even badder for conservative Christians, right? Like, they were, like, oh, this is a new experience.
And I'm also in the “Medievalists of color”. And … and that … and that organization was founded on the principle of … of ... bringing the … the … the study of the Middle Ages, you know, up to speed, so sort of, and exposing what kind of principles that had been founded on and … and ... this I think we're doing really important work in overturning a lot of those, uhm, fundamental problems from the foundations of the … of the discipline as a whole.
So, I … I … I mean, I just think it's really important whether you're looking at the texts or the materials themselves, the chronicles, literature, you know, even objects, and I think none of us mentioned that we that … that objects themselves can be very … can be queered.
Let's think for a minute about, like, reliquaries of saints, they are often like fragmented body parts or body parts like put together, like, there might be a male head, a male saint’s head on a female saint’s torso with, like, a random, you know, rock crystal addition, right?
And so, I mean if we think about everything like this in … in … in just fragmented queered terms, like, it should help us a lot.
Aidan Conti
Of course, we are often asked about our research impact. We are generally not asked about how our research impacts individual lives … lives, but rather, like you know how many lines, can you put on your CV as a way of you disseminating your research, but I … I … I think, yeah, I'd … I'd like to hear, kind of, along the lines of what Michelle was saying, about how your research and your work has actually affected other people's lives.
Will Rogers
Well, I guess I'll go.
I mean … I will say … I'm teaching … I'm at a public university in northern Louisiana, right? The American South, right? Very conservative, politically religiously, and … and I, I mean because of my research, uhm, I have added to the English curriculum LGBTQ+ studies class, right? Which we offered the first time this semester … and it’s since … not … not at my doing … been written up in the student newspaper and … and primarily the thing that I think I've been able to – and I don't think I've done this, I think I've just thought cleared the way for people to see that they're not the only weird person in northern Louisiana, right? The sort of one of the home bases of the Pentecostal church, right? – that this super, you know, politically and religious conservative place that queerness is actually everywhere, but until you get to see yourself both in a classroom with other people – and I'm out on campus – to see that, like, you get to read about yourself and to sort of see yourself in history. And it's not quote-unquote ‘me-search,’ but it's like real academic research. I think that's … that's been helpful for folks, to say, you know, yes, I can actually do history and … but it can also, like, matter in this other way because I get to see this sort of ‘affective touch across time,’ quote Dinshaw, right?
Aidan Conti
Yeah, and that fits very well with the desire that you all have been talking about, yeah?
Bjørn had also a comment along those lines.
Bjørn Bandlien
I, yeah, the impact is, uh, well when I'm teaching my students, I do Viking history also, and that's the most popular courses I can assure you, and we have some international program for Viking Old Norse, uh, stuff, and it's really popular. I'm kind of thinking about the importance of those kind of courses, you know, who are attracted to those courses? And, uh, well, next step, uh, many of them will be teachers in a ground level or middle school or maybe high school even, and I think it's uh, for my part at least it's important to have like a normal if I could say course in Viking culture, Viking history and to challenge this kind of white supremacist ideas about Vikings, because Vikings, yeah, it is problematic, because they are so used and misused, and well, kind of shaped in the minds or … or kind of, yeah, minds of people and for their own purposes.
So I think that's one of my kind of challenges, but also, one of the most important tasks I have as a ...
as a teacher at the university, to kind of bring in perspectives in those kind of introductory courses to certain subjects. And I wonder ... I … I heard about something like this about … about 1619 in America. It was a fierce, uh, kind of opposition for the introduction, to kind of have an anniversary or kind of, uh, bring this into the school, and I think these questions these problems, these chances are kind of related to each other.
I don't know if you agree with me but well ...
Will Rogers
Can I just pop in really quick after that?
I … 'cause I'm … I'm sorry I … I promise my students every time I'm not going to talk too much, and I do.
Uhm, so, one of the things, you know, thinking about 1619, and I'll just briefly say, right? Like the … the … the … the inverse of how does our research help? How stopping or research hurt, right?
One of the things – and again this is an American perspective, but for that I'm sorry, right?
The … the new bill that was introduced to the basically don't say gay national bill, right?
That would stop teachers from talking about gender or gayness or anything else, actually like the … the ... the similar thing is stopping people from talking about American enslavement and chattel slavery hurts everybody. It doesn't just hurt the marginalized people.
So, like without this sort of research – I think Kate mentioned earlier, right? That like this sort of queerness is everywhere, right? – and not actually talking about it hurts not just queer people wanting to read this research, and not just queer subjects, but every … you know, everyone is affected by this. So, the other way to think about that question is how would our research, the … the lack of our research – this feels like a queer question – how would this actually hurt people? And I … I mean, there's real measurable harm, right? If we can't talk about gender, then suddenly, like what else can't we talk about, right? People wouldn't be able to talk about all sorts of things that aren't quote-unquote queer in relation to gender.
David Carrillo-Rangel
But there's a lot of things to think about here.
But I put … I just … I don't know how I impact individual lives, I don't think I want to know. And I think it's good, it's nice that it happens, but I'm … I'm just being myself, I don't try to impact any individual … individual lives. And I do ... I have an understanding of, uh, scholarship that is pretty much aligned with a sentence by Tony Morrison.
As she said at some point, that if you get to a place of privilege, you need to allow other people to get to that privilege, and so I really work very hard to make my research available to everyone.
This exhibition project is one thing, but I am coordinating a LGDPI reading club in … for the City Council Libraries in Barcelona, for which I travel, or I do it online from here.
I … make myself available for any events like this one and … in the reading class, for example, I'm really working with people who have never … who are very curious about all this gender trouble, as Judith Butler would say, and they are 60, 65, 70 years old and they have never-never questioned their gender identity. And they came to these reading clubs and … and that is a way, because I bring my academic knowledge there and it's a challenge to put that academic knowledge in a way that they will understand it and … and they will engage with it. And so far, we have six editions of this reading club for example, so I think it's … it's going well in that sense. And for me, that is part of my work. I cannot understand my work as researcher as sitting all day in an office, writing papers and giving class. If that is my role as a researcher, I don't want to be a researcher. I want to be something else. That is my way of understanding this. I've been accused of activist because of that. I don't think that is the right word. Or perhaps we can discuss it.
And coming back to what Will was talking about in terms of white supremacy. I was … I presented a couple of years ago to Kalamazoo a paper about Joan of Arc as a trans person. The paper … the session which represented the paper was not successful [that is, the session was not accepted by the conference], and then it [the paper proposal, was] transferred to the general session [selection process] and it was, uhm, it was not selected, because it didn't align thematically and coherently with any … with any sessions in that … in that space. I tweet about that because I'm very … I'm very outspoken about things that concern discrimination, and I will … I will go more into that later perhaps. I … I was approached by Hyperallergic – it’s an art journal online – to be interviewed about this and about Joan of Arc as a trans character, and in that piece Billy Anania who was the writer from Hyperallergic did a wonderful work showing how Joan of Arc is both a claim now for … by white supremacy in France, and Marine Le Pen followers especially, and by trans people elsewhere, so, it's a ... it's an example of the kind of why what we do is important, because if someone just read the Joan of Arc that these people in France are construing, they are missing something. And … and it's important that we put that, but I … I know it sounds very anachronistic and everything that, say, that Joan of Arc was a trans person, but when we put it like this, we at least outweigh those views. And these views is not … this is something else than homophobic views. They're also racist views and they represent our mode of ... It's really scary what is happening in Europe. What is happening in Italy and what is happening everywhere. So, I think we need to be aware of that. It's a very important point.
Kate Maxwell
I think one thing that hasn't yet been mentioned in this particular end is the idea of a ripple effect, and for this I have great faith in the students, and I'm almost ashamed to say that I've been in Tromsø long enough now that I'm seeing some of my students from my early days out in the world.
And, you know, when I first came to Tromsø, my Norwegian wasn't very good 'cause I'd been in Sweden, so … so, even my Swedish hadn't been very good. So, I was speaking blandinavisk and bad blandinavisk at that. And it was sort of: “What are you talking about? These are not problems in Norway”. And to which I would have straight back: “OK. You go and count, go down to Tromsø's Jazz club and … and count how many women of color are there on their program, for example, and so to use Tromsø … Tromsø’s jazz club as an example. It's a former student now who is the coordinator of Tromsø Jazz Club, and he makes … he has a huge …. he really makes an effort to get much better diversity into the Jazz club program and has done great work, and an example from this semester though is I remember sort of standing in front of a poster display because although he does great work, he had four concerts in a row by white men and there's only room for four posters to be displayed, so the next four concerts were all white men and it was … bang … back to the bad old days, but … but I do know that overall if you take the … the half year as a whole, it doesn't look like that, so that was another learning curve, say OK, so now you've got to try and space them out a bit better, so that we don't end up with this world of white men again in the Jazz club.
So … so, that's one example that is a sort of from the past, and another example I can think of an individual this year.
I said it relates to what … what Michelle was saying about students coming out and sort of individually and this … this is sort of almost a coming out story, so I'll try and be fairly neutral about who … who the student identifies as.
So, so, we … again I teach music history of everything, so not just medieval and we were looking at ... books, the role of a certain English … breaches … breaches roles, so crossdressing roles in opera and the student had sort of got wind of a Norwegian, uhm, a Sami Norwegian trans opera singer who sings mezzo soprano, but identifies as a man and he is a trans man and he is from Tromsø and he came to Tromsø and entered this student’s shop where she works part time on a Saturday. And this student went totally, sort of “ah, ah, ah” fan club. And yeah, I get, I think I can give the opera singer’s name, and so there was a lovely … a lovely moment to me when the student emailed me on Saturday night, absolutely beside themselves with delight because they've met Adrian Angelico who had been a … a subject in … in class though, yeah.
The individual, like, there's this little effect that goes on, because these students, then they … they I don't say “grow up”, but they … they leave the university and they go into the real world and hopefully take some of that thinking methods with them into lives … So ...
Aidan Conti
Yeah, the ripple effect is real and it’s … it also brings us great, I don't know, joy! So, I think it's ...
Kate Maxwell
It … it’s real, it brings us joy, but it's … it's almost impossible to measure. This is one of the problems we're saying, like you know, and when you know the powers that be say show us, show us…
Aidan Conti
Yeah yeah, yeah.
Kate Maxwell
… so, it’s just anecdotal. How do we actually measure that? I've got thoughts on that, but I'm … not now … not sitting here, 'cause ...
Aidan Conti
Yeah, I ...
Much as we can't take sexuality out of queerness and wouldn't want to, I don't think we can take politics out of what we've been talking about.
One thing that really strikes me as I look at the wonderful “Vikings are gay” flyer across from me – which you can't see on the screen, but I want you to know it's there – Is that one of the foundations of scientific inquiry—If I can use that—is criticizing, is kind of questioning foundations? And so, it's nonsensical to me to imagine people arguing for scientific objective inquiry not to see the questioning element of queering things.
But that leads me kind off to this: What has been presented as a dichotomy and that is objective inquiry into the past and activism. And how activism in … in a way is being used as a charge against objectivity, and many of you have mentioned this, so I'm not treading on new ground here, but if … I guess the simple way to ask it is ‘how do you respond to the charge of activism?’
Will Rogers
Is anyone not an activist when they're … when they're, I mean? You know, so I … I think I come to this from a, uh, from a perspective where I am from the American South, have lived here for years, returned after my PhD, uhm, you know, and I … I wonder … to … so, let me answer this, unfortunately, in terms of the American Civil War, right? To sort of say that there's … that ... people who are researching the civil war no matter what they're doing, they have, I think, a point of view that is, in some ways, an activist, right? I … I don't know that there's a way to discuss major historical events in a way that doesn't carry some hint of activism, right? To want people to know the truth is in fact a sort of perspective that is activist, right? So, I'm not … and I … the question is a good one. I'm not ... I'm not answering this way to be flippant, but I ... I … I do think this is another … this is another question that I often encounter in my day-to-day existence here, and the thing I would say is, uhm, to deny folks the right to be these sort of scholar-activists in terms of queer women’s history, people of color from the past, is in fact sort of … sort of being an activist … you know … for the … for erasure, I mean, like, I … I … I just don't think there's objectivity in terms of studying this because there's not objectivity … or always, in some ways, being activists for a certain kind of perspective.
And I don't know if that's a great answer, but that's the answer I have.
Aidan Conti
David had also ...
David Carrillo-Rangel
I think there are two aspects on this and … activism, perhaps that, first, I don't think that is a … that is an accusation of anything, I wouldn't feel blame if I was called that, and second, perhaps we should say activisms, in plural, because there are many ways of doing activism.
And … for instance, Sarah Ahmed, which resonates with what Will was telling right now in Living a Feminist Life, claims for an everyday life activism, in which the actions of daily life, reflect on your … on your political ideas or your position in … the ideological position sounds better than political ideas.
And that's one thing.
And then there is the activist that is consisting … consisting in breaking the space – I was talking with someone about this the other day – which is, like, really it means to change things now and making them happen fast, which is another kind of activism.
And in a conversation with Fina Birulès, she's a philosopher in the University of Barcelona, she told me something that is very … it's very, very, very intelligent. She said there is a moment for activism and there is a moment for other scholars to come in and collect those … that activism.
And you can be an activist and you can be a researcher – I think I am both. But for instance, when I try to do these “break the space” actions it’s … it's more radical actions. I edit a fanzine, there is one in the exhibition, but I've made two more and I distribute them in sex clubs, in saunas, in places … and particularly about the fanzine that I made about bottoms being marginalized in dating apps, for example. And that's another different action and that does not really affect my … my work as a researcher, there are different kind of things, but! In my work as a researcher I can be … I can live a queerist’s life, I would guess … I would say, instead of a feminist life, but that's ...
Kate Maxwell
I think that the very idea of accusations of activism … activism and using that as a weapon is itself an act of activism and oppression, from a different side. I'm recalling, uhm, sort of a few years ago realizing just how far apart the poles were, when, uhm, a conference on … a conference on something totally different, it was in a sort of question-and-answer session, the person sort of sitting next to me looked at me and said: “But what kind of research produces results that aren't reproducible?” I was like: “Hmmm, anything in the arts and humanities? Just about? Almost? OK, maybe apart from linguistics?”, but certainly artistic research, and that's sort of ... “wait, you don't know that?” was a … was a bit of an eye opener for me.
So, this idea of … it’s almost a tool of oppression because it says your kind of way of working is not valid unless you turn it into our way of working and then we can validate it and … I am sure that there are people on, let's call it the humanities side that perhaps do the same thing, but I have met far fewer of them if I didn't think I've met any of them, but I probably have without realizing it.
So, yeah, the act … the acu… like the accusation of activism is itself an activist and act of activism, but from a different side, and I suspect a subconscious one.
There are also lots of them, dead French philosopher quotes, that can … can be used in that battle.
Anyone want some Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari?
You know the idea of the research changes the research?
I mean, that's one of those sort of stand … sort of foundational points of modern anthropology is that you … you … you … you are in in what you're doing.
Yeah. So ...
David Carrillo-Rangel
I was told once that I don't do research, in a round table, that I do propaganda which is like the best thing that I have prepared the best compliment.
Kate Maxwell
It's a compliment.
Michelle Sauer
Well, I mean, I think it's important to keep in mind that we're activist or labeled such just merely by inhabiting space. Right? And existing. And I think that that's … that's the … the basic point.
Will Rogers
And I'll follow up on that point, I'm sorry, right? But I think I want to defend Michelle here too, right?
Like, the … the medievalists of color simply by existing and being medievalists are often labeled activists, right? They could do the most traditional historical inquiry you can imagine, but just because there's a non-white body doing it, they're labeled activists.
Kate Maxwell
Or they're accused of doing it for the clout that they supposedly have. That’s not…
Michelle Sauer
Yeah, probably that's why I got a little twitchy about the question, sorry.
Kate Maxwell
There was … there was al ... there was also a direct quote from Sarah Ahmed, again there, with Michelle.
I'm saying like you know, by existing, by … existence is activism, because that's by naming the problem you become the problem. So you put the problem.
Aidan Conti
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have the problem, we’re facing the problem now.
Michelle Sauer
I mean … when the Medievalists of color” … when we were writing our Constitution, we have a whole section on it on activism. No other scholarly organization I'm part of in medieval studies had to do that. To just tell you what it is.
Aidan Conti
I would like everybody and say thank you to all 5 panelists and the round of applause and to the audience, yes, thank you very much for coming.
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