The Mad Turn to Medieval Disability @ #NCS14

"What exactly does a medieval disability studies investigate?"

@EileenAJoy

_________________________

The following is a transcript of "Crip Christianity"

from the Reorienting Medieval Disability Seminar

at the Nineteenth Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society

in Reykjavik, Iceland 16 July 2014 - 20 July 2014

_________________________

Many Happy Returns

In this paper, I respond to the pre-circulated papers for Reorienting Medieval Disability Seminar (including my own: Mad for Margery), a collection of shared readings, and attempt to provide comments and questions that might help articulate what this burgeoning field has been and what it might become. In the process, I will contextualize my own participation as a medievalist in the trans-historical work of crip theory, trans studies, and liberation theology.

After the transcript, I have included a Storify of Tweets from the NCS Congress (#NCS14) that concentrated on the Seminar (#7D) or on themes of #Disability in general. Note: Don't forget to press "Read Next Page" in order to get the whole story. Please feel invited to read through the conversations as they unfolded and to investigate on your own by using the hash-tags for the conference and sessions.

Special thanks should be given to Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski for organizing and moderating the seminar. Praise should be given to all the participants and their papers, including: Brantley Bryant ("Wild Words: Disability and Truth Telling in Late Medieval England"), Leah Pope ("Spiritual Prosthesis: Bodily Aberrance in Medieval Hagiographical Narrative"), John P Sexton ("By Any Other Name: Negotiating Difference in Medieval Disability Studies"), and Haylie Swenson ("Attending to the 'Beasts Irrational' in Gower's Vox Clamantis"). Also, as Twitter and the Storify will attest, the seminar would not have been such a success without the invested interest and critical contributions of its many attendants.

_________________________

_________________________

Return to Madness

The disability turn in medieval studies does not signal the creation of an entirely new creation (ex nihilo), but a return to who we are and what we have been doing for a long time. The critical difference is that by bringing the insights of disability studies to bear on our work, we discover madness where we never thought to look for it and mad houses where we never thought of making them. By attending to bodies and contexts (wholly or partially) damned to be locked away and forgotten, we discover the potential for better relations, greater creativity, and wider liberation. 

Let’s return to two women in a madhouse. The first woman may once have worn a white dress. The year is perhaps 1938. Diverse doctors would call her a "schizophrenic," a "narcissist," a "psychopath," a "hermaphrodite," a mad woman, a string of disorders that have come to be classified by the term: transsexual ("Pyschopathia Transexualis," David O Cauldwell, 1949; "Transvestism and Trans-sexualism," John B Randel, 1959; "The Transsexual Phenomenon," Harry Benjamin, 1966). While trans* identities have since tried to put some critical distance between the gender identity and the psychological diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" (DSM 5, 2013) as a form of madness, there remains critical slippage. Historically and politically, transgender remains a part of the long history of madness.

Let’s return again. The second woman once wore a white dress. The year is perhaps 1438, or then again, perhaps it is 1938. Diverse authorities would call her a "schizophrenic," a "narcissist," a "psychopath," a "mad woman," a string of disorders that one doctor classified by the term "transvestite" (Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, pg 148, 1999). We do not know the name of the first woman, she is lost to us, but we all may know the name of the second. While few scholars have taken up Margery Kempe as trans or celebrated her madness, these two marginalizing terms resonate with a critical appropriation in present scholarship and with an intermeshed history of inconstant, dysphoric, and artificial bodies. To return to return to the madness of Margery Kempe is to open up critical space for a turn to trans studies in the medieval period. Together, this crip-trans alliance allows for a new investment in our co-extensive, co-creative, co-liberation. 

_________________________

_________________________

Return to Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe returned to the modern world amidst a eugenic war on madness. Within a couple years of the re-discovery and re-publication of the Book of Margery Kempe in the early 1930’s, the creature of the text immediately begins to be defined in contemporary terms of disability and madness. 

In 1934, in a letter to the Times, medievalist and feminist scholar Hope Emily Allen described the newly rediscovered Margery Kempe “neurotic” and subject to an “unconscious humour” (Quoted in "Reading and Re-Reading the Book of Margery Kempe," Barry Windeatt, pg. 2, 2004). The early 20th century was a period of intense eugenic interest in science, government, and the burgeoning fields of psychoanalytic and psychiatric studies. By knowing what makes a thing and what things are mad, eugenics promised to sort of the higher men from the "feeble-minded" (Eugenics and Other Evils, GK Chesterton, 1917). There is then an ominous subtext describing Margery in the terms of disorders being used in the 1930s and 40s to identify, collect, sterilize, and exterminate thousands of lives across Europe and America with the same technologies that were being adapted in German extermination camps (Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon L Synder and David T Mitchell, pg.100-129, 2006). 

Having just been resurrected, Margery finds herself at risk of imprisonment and death yet again. While she never met our first woman, the transsexual and transvestite find each other sharing the dwelling space of the madhouse. Granted these dangers, it may be little surprise that scholarship on the Book of Margery Kempe by feminists and queer academics has since tried to shed claims of madness and disability. Yet despite the flight away from the mad body, the ground seems to ever move beneath us, revealing the crippling contingencies, dependencies, and inconstancies of bodies that refuse to become immaterial signifiers. The material making and remaking of the body, the monster that is disability discourse, continually returns.

_________________________

_________________________

Return to Medieval Disability

The disability turn in medieval studies is thus in many respects a return to disability, but on and with new terms. In some respects, this move follows a script.

Following in the wake of late 1980s and 90s gender studies (Example Questions: Can we talk about medieval gender? Where are women in medieval literature? What defines a woman? What does gender do?), then the late 1990s and 2000s queer entre into medieval studies (Example Questions: Can we talk about medieval sexuality? Where are the queers in medieval literature? What does queer mean? What does it do?), disability studies in the last few years is working out the process of identifying who and what can be thought of in terms of disability and how the terminology of impairment, disability, as well as specific diagnostics or sciences can or cannot be adapted, analogized, or historicized.

Margery Kempe has been a part of this movement already, such in Tory Vandeventer Pearman’s book on Women and Disability in the Middle Ages, where the creature’s inconstant body works with established models of gender in the period that took women as the defect to men’s perfection. 

In this mode, Margery becomes a site for what Tobin Seibers in Disability Aesthetics calls the threefold contribution of disability studies: (1) critiquing the norm’s naturalness, (2) critiquing the marginalization of disability, and (3) looking for alternative structures that disability offers up. This identity based methodology remains for many a model that medieval disability studies can embrace, where formerly stigmatized categories are contextualized and embraced. The hope is that disabled bodies, like mad women and lepers, may be freed from mad houses even as they remain defined by them.

_________________________

_________________________

Return to Christian Liberation

In Mad for Margery, I begin by examining the Book of Margery Kempe by working the diagnostic offered by Kempe when she calls herself a “mad woman, crying and roryng” and the framing mechanism of the Lazar House, what Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization) and Lynne Huffer (Mad for Foucault) identify as a foundational marker of the genesis of madness and "the Great Confinement," by taking the marginalized figures and putting them in the center of our thought. In other words, Huffer writes, madness reveals “thought thinking itself.” (103)

When Margery prays to see the Imago Dei, in response Christ “drow hys creatur unto hys lofe and to mynde of hys passyon that sche myth not duryn to beheldyn a lazer er an other seke man, specialy yyf he had any wowndys aperyng on hym. So sche cryid and so sche wept as yyf sche had sen owr Lord Jhesu Crist wyth hys wowndys bledyng” (Staley, 74.4178-4182). She asks to see the image of God and is shown the faces of lepers and the sick, she begins a ministry that turns her world’s value system inside out, seeing Christ in the poor and marginalized. Receiving her revelation, Margery “went to a place wher seke women dwellyd whech wer ryth ful of the sekenes and fel down on hir kneys beforn hem” (Staley, 74.4292-4193). This initial move in the paper historicizes the term “mad” as an active hermeneutic of social discipline and potential resistance in the 15th century, thus speaking to the medieval disability studies project of identity formation for subjects within the period and for scholars within a newly developing field. 

The "Mad" of Margery and for us in this sense functions as an adjective (“uncontrolled by reason” or “carried away by or filled with enthusiasm or desire; wildly excited” OED), qualifying the persons they describe and allowing for generative, alternative, liberating associations and slippages to be drawn: between past and present, between man and woman, between God and human.

When these intersections take a more active turn, moving from the ontology or epistemology of terms like impairment or disability to critical transformations, suddenly an unexpected agency and actancy begins to reveal itself in our medieval relics. That is the point that I argue in stressing the more pervasive meaning of “mad” for Margery: the act of making. With 135 instances, the creative use of the “mad” is the primary way the word is used in the Book. The story of “the creature” is a story of creation, with a litany of things “mad” for Margery or “mad” by her.

While disability comes from terminology from the 20th century that tacitly finished the statement: able- or disable- with the imperative “to work,” madness in Margery engages the pun, the double-meaning, the resonance between madness as unreasoning and madness as creative to suggest that in the Imago Dei we see a creator bound up in creation with a diversity of results that exceeds reason’s ability to predict and madness’s disability from limiting. 

Mad (like Crip or Queer) becomes a verb (participating in the act of creation, i.e. being “made,” OED), an imperative to make with a creativity exemplified by Margery’s vision that adds Christian Genesis back into our texts on madness, but disturbs Christianity for medieval and contemporary liberation theologians. Margery articulates a vision of the Imago Dei proposed by Thomas Reynolds’s Vulnerable Communion: “To be created in the image of God means to be created for contributing to the world” (177). The Book is a mad machine, “thought thinking itself” but one that gestures beyond the image of a “mad woman,” through devotional acts mad for the Imago Dei (Huffer 103). The Book, draws us to glimpse God’s “madness” making itself.

_________________________

_________________________

The Turn to Transgender

Let’s begin again in the mad house. Disability shall always return if ever we try to shut the case or close the book, a recursive act that always turns away from the expected, resisting logics desire to close the loop of widening gyre with a center that could not possibly hold, where things do not simply fall apart but where things transform. Madness turns back on itself but always includes more than it had. The encounter of these differences fundamentally breaks open new possibilities for co-creation, how things are mad and what they may make. In this way, madness extends creative opportunities through co-liberation. 

At this point of inconstancy and trans formation, unreasonableness and making, I call for a turn towards the history and creativity of madness in the middle ages that offers possibilities for trans lives and politics. Carolyn Dinshaw called Margery as "transvestite," desiring to change into the clothes of a virgin body society insisted she could not have, but we might see in her madness the makings of a transsexual with the lepers falling apart body, or the hermaphrodites mystical co-extension across body genres or genders (Dinshaw, Getting Medieval). 

Margery challenges the exclusionary logic of the Lazar House by crossing its threshold with a gesture of community. Seeing madness from the inside, Margery offers no rational answer to the woman’s ills, but remains with her, “Comfortyn hir ” (74 . 4204 ). We all might make such a move by identifying madness not as a repressed internal defect or a deviant body to be excluded, but to see Creation as a mad house. Margery points us to see one another (even God) as co-creators in an unreasonable process of becoming where everything becomes implicated in the makings of everything else. Comfort heartens madness as community making that defies the limits of reason. “Creative power,” writes Reynolds “is essentially a relational power.” (180). 

Yet before we lay down the prayer mat in the mad house, a critical difference exists between our two women. Margery enters the Lazar House, prays there, finds comfort and leaves. In this instance the unnamed transsexual will never leave. In this year, this mad was a gas chamber, where the German government had accelerated the extermination of disabled, mad, and trans bodies. The mad house is at once a church and a hell hole, interiority and exclusion, a hospital and prison from which the only escape may be death. My question then as we turn to a mad Christian alliance for medieval trans bodies: when is it enough to identify and sit with disabled bodies, a liberation of the spirit and when do we need to change our systems of incarnation so as to liberate the body? 

_________________________

Follow the conversation on Twitter
Don't forget to click "Read Next Page"
_________________________

*************************************

Get with My Friends: Extra-Personal Erogenous Zones

"If you wanna be my lover, 
you've gotta get with my friends"

Wannabe

The Spice Girls

*************************************

The Scene

You sit across the table from Posh Spice and Ginger Spice in a window-side booth of a neighborhood Chicago diner. Posh and you have been going out for a few weeks now (depending on when you count from) but this is the first time you've met one of her really good friends.

The conversation lags in the beginning as your shyness competes with Ginger's strangeness and Post's inexplicable reticence. Then Posh offers that Ginger and you both hate the Packers and things pick up; via a shared interest in teasing Posh on her clumsy social skills. From there, Posh watches and smiles over her food until the conversation turns to how you and her met, then it becomes a duet of storytelling with each partner sharing the many little details that the other drops out, now from an established stock of previous tellings, while Ginger takes her turn as the bemused audience.

Then suddenly you are alone as Posh and Ginger both got up and went to the bathroom together. You absentmindedly eat some more of your fries and stare at a text from a friend asking if you think things are going well.

*************************************

*************************************

I. The Extra Personal Body

"What does it mean to love somebody?  It is always to seize that person in a mass,  extract him or her from a group... then to find that person's own packs,  the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself  which may be of an entirely different nature.  To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 

A Thousand Plateaus

An integral concept in the trans / inter-personal body is that its composition is molecular, ecological and ever changing.A body is molecular, made up of diverse bodies, identifying as a single (molar) thing but with these constituting bodies working together, wandering loosely and conflicting. Likewise this body which is identifying as a molar thing, itself is identifying with other various bodies to constitute another body, often different ones at the same time (such as siblings in a family or in a work place; water molecules in a saline solution active in the veins or as blood). 

A body is also ecological, not a closed circuit but a form of network through identification into which bodies enter and exit, or vibrate between such states likewise ecologies are  necessarily  over-lapping,  forming larger ecologies or split at times as different sub-bodies or co-ecologies share the same things which move between several networks, at times returning to some but not all (such as money in a bank, in a business, in a consumers hands and in the stock-market).

A body is ever-changing, made up not only of static things which simply combine and move around but which change in qualities, no longer identifying as the same thing it was previously, or as a new version. Likewise as bodies change, so does the make-up of the molecules and ecologies of which they are constituted and which they constitute. A key act in (trans)forming bodies is then identification and dis-identification (which I will from here on call "alienation") which occur constantly, maintain queer perimeters and queer tensions.

Queer Perimeters occur where bodies come together or move apart, or as what is being regarded shifts, the outline of what is considered the body moves but can never be considered set (for molecular, ecological and ever-changing reasons). These perimeters are often multiple. Speaking in terms of "human" community, a person can be at the same time your lover, friend, and family member but not always in the same way at all times and along with a changing set of definitions of those bodies; and likewise who they identify with under those categories may add or distort your identified perimeters. 

Queer Tension is then the force of the shifting perimeters as a result of, along with and bringing about the effects of its status as molecule, ecology and changing things. Thus in the scene above we have the bodies (always already molecular, ecological and changing) of Posh, Ginger and You. Importantly this is also a meeting of different bodies, considering these persons together internally and externally.

Internally, Posh and Ginger identify as "close" friends which function together as single thing; as noted before they may come together, wander loosely together or even conflict but none the less at times function as a unit which interacts with the "outer" world as one entity. Posh and You identify as romantic partners, lovers, prospective lovers, friends or other imaginable bodies in regards to Ginger and the "outer" world which is alienated in respect to you. Thus PS&GS and PS&Y constitute two bodies meeting, while at the same time somehow hybrid or molecular (this happens more times than not in different points whenever meetings occur). Ginger and You identify as strangers and can be considered such a unit in a way which alienates Posh from the body due to her over-familiarity with both parties. She cannot participate in the experience of the queer tension of their meeting, although she might empathize or react to it.

Externally, Posh, Ginger and You identify as a body, perhaps to the interrupting stranger (another body we could consider) via the tacit or explicit statement (" 'WE' are having a private conversation here"). You and your friend on text constitute another body which is identifying together but which perhaps is momentarily existing with a greater degree of queer tension (alienation) until the free moment in which it may be engaged upon and brought into a heightened stated of activity and identification.

Throughout all these illustrations the number of listed bodies (or potential bodies) are mapped in a limited way to illustrate a point, but are none the less present and actively transforming. 

*************************************

*************************************

II. Calling on Others 
to Be Our Erogenous Zones

"The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which is always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places"

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 

A Thousand Plateaus

The activation of erogenous zones on a body may require looking at each component tentatively as thing to itself (although all are admittedly queered and transformed together).

The Act: The body or bodies networking on the body which will experience the pleasure, arousal, intensification, transformation; noting that this act will have a nonreciprocating act through the contact but which may not be of the same force or kind. These effects are often hard to expect, qualify or quantify, such as in speech acts.

The Erogenous Zone: the body which is identified with, as or constituted by the body which is experiencing the pleasure; the erogenous zone may have connections or bodily perimeters which may extend beyond the body which experience the pleasure, and may be "a body which experiences pleasure" of its own; the transferring, connecting of the act to the body may or may not be transformed or changed in substance at this point.

The Body: the body which experiences the pleasure and intensification but as it is constituted as a molecule, ecology of changing bodies this sensation itself is made cognizable for the body via a network of reactions between internal bodies (which may also change the composition of these internal and the body experiencing the pleasure in regards to the other bodies; i.e. the erogenous zone or the act(or), or beyond such as in the case of a voyeur).

Here these things were regarded as separate (alien) but as mentioned may be identifying together in the forms of partners participating in a swingers group, two lovers exchanging touches, a single person pleasuring themselves, etc. What is important is that because of the bodies with(in) other bodies, these all occur the multiple no matter how molar we regard them. Thus even masturbation can be considered a kind of mass orgy.

Thus we are brought to consider how the above scene can function as an example of inter-personal erogenous zones. Looking at the scene in regards to Posh's pleasure we can see the break-down such as this:

The Act(or): You

Your interjection into AND reception of Posh's body of friends serves to excite through the various acts performed: the exchange of words, the visual cues of enjoyment or discomfort, the release of pheromones, the touch or shaking of bodies. For the purposes of this example we will in fact concentrate on these acts effects on Ginger, although they will no doubt provide their own direct pleasure on Posh's other erogenous zones.

The Erogenous Zone: Ginger Spice

Receiving, prompting, holding and changing the act and the effects of your acts Ginger emits her own visual, audio, aromatic (etc) cues to Posh who receives these signals via her moments of actively observing, passively noticing and her latent realizations or later messages from Ginger (such as in the escape to the bathroom together) that provide her with feed-back on the act(or); i.e. you. As noted, Ginger may likewise be considered a body that experiences pleasure independent or in connection with Posh; or be considered an act(or) on Posh in her own right.

The Body : Posh Spice

As pleasure is a difficult and complex concept in itself which go far beyond the scope of this argument, it may be enough to say now that having received a variety of signals from Ginger there may be a variety of pleasures and a variety of justifications, causes, associations on how this pleasure is produced. She may enjoy that Ginger and you are getting along and thus integrating as one body with Posh smoothly, she may enjoy the conflict, friction or anxiety both Ginger and you experiences, she may enjoy that Ginger is experiencing pleasure from you in her own right (as an alienated AND/OR identified body to hers), she may enjoy Ginger's injury (or lack of intensification) or the transmission of Your injury (or pacifying) during the others enjoyment.

Approaching the scene in this way illustrates it as a sexual intercourse in its own right and as part of the process of the shifting perimeters and tensions. Certainly when the scene is focused at Ginger, yourself or other bodies in particular the scene complicates further.

In some ways this terminology is metaphorical, insofar as it refers to erogenous zones which are normatively described as on / in the skin of the body, but as had been determined the molecularity, ecology and changing of the body forces ALL definitions to become queerly metaphoric (perhaps metonymic, as they always already refer to a whole field of signifiers).

Put another way, in regards to bodies which are understood as transforming, it is useful TO BROADEN, SHIFT, CHANGE, SURPRISE or in another word QUEER how we understand the body's erogenous zones. If we are to take seriously that a body consists of diverse organic, inorganic, personal, interpersonal, human, nonhuman bodies such as prosthetics, electronics, apparel, or our good friend Ginger, then we need to consider how they function like, with or as parts of the body as it has been traditionally conceived; and how it changes and undermines them.

We might also consider what happens when these connections fail, change, become extremely alienated or transform radically at the level of the erogenous zones which are then unable to transfer the act to the body to experience the pleasure (or not); which may be explored in another post.

*************************************

*************************************

More on Rhizomatic Ontology

*************************************

*************************************