Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 7940
  • Author(s)/Creator(s): Walker , Jonathan A.
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Trans-Discursiveness and Transvestite Sainthood: Or, How to Make the Gendered Form Fit the Generic Function
  • Source: Gender and Conflict in the Middle Ages. Gender and Medieval Studies Conference, York, January 5-7 2001.. 2001.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Conference Paper Abstract
  • Subject (See Also): Cross Dressing in Literature Hagiography Women in Literature
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  • Abstract: Transvestite saints' lives would seem to present a fundamentally religious discourse in which women escape the gender prejudices that dominate them in their cultures. But these texts in fact arrogate discourses as diverse as those in classical novels, gynecological treatises, scripture, scriptural commentaries, early sectarian writings, hagiography itself, and a more general cultural narrative that interprets women exclusively as "bodily matter." In demonstrating how hagiographers discourse across generic boundaries, I claim that the cross-dressing of the women saints, as liberatory as this act initially appears, helps to consolidate a more inflexible gender hierarchy, one that is reinforced by the various discursive elements constituting the genre. [Reproduced by permission of Gender and Medieval Studies Conference organizers].
  • Related Resources:
  • Author's Affiliation: University of Illinois
  • Conference Info: - , -
  • Year of Publication: 2001.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: Not Available