Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Series Q)

Carolyn Dinshaw, a Chaucer scholar and cofounding editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, reveals exceptional erudition and playful good sense in her study of the contradictory medieval discourse on same-sex relations, with special attention to the 14th-century Lollard reform movement in England. At the crossroads between medieval studies and cultural studies, she both honors and argues with the groundbreaking historical projects of Michel Foucault, John Boswell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Homi K. Bhabha. In addition to looking into Chaucer's The Cook's Tale, the Lollards' Twelve Conclusions, and other conventional fare, she flexes her poststructural muscles in weird but lively excursions into Robert Gluck's 1994 novel Margery Kempe and Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction. Ultimately, her aim is to suggest new ways of analyzing medieval sexual discourse, with its "indeterminacies, contradictions, slippages," and of making relations across time with those distant discourses, people, places, and things "in their very indeterminateness." --Regina Marler