Baylee Woodley, PhD(c)
Phone: +1 672 974 2606
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My project looks at representations of liminal and queer femininities to trace a long genealogy of sorts. By bringing manuscript illuminations from the moment when ‘femininity’ was coined in Middle English (14th-15th C.) into conversation with contemporary UK-based artists calling for non-binary, speculative approaches to femininities, I hope to show that binary associations of femininity with womanhood do not do justice to the complexities of historical uses of the term as well as to think about how both the medieval and the modern might be engaged in projects of imagining alternatives.
Title
Medieval Femmes: Exploring Queer Femininities in the Visual Culture of Late Medieval England and France
Thesis Abstract
This thesis explores queer femininities in the visual culture of late medieval England and France. It focuses on manuscript illuminations including those in Books of Hours and Apocalypse manuscripts, romances such as Le Roman de Silence and Le Roman de la Rose, and travel or pilgrimage narratives including The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. It also puts them in dialogue with representations in other media including misericords, wall paintings, and stained glass. Together, these case studies show complex medieval explorations and enrolments of queer femininities in representations of figures ranging from saints, serpents, and so-called Saracens to witches, whores, and wodewoses.
Analyses of the practices of contemporary, UK-based queer artists thinking through questions of femininity are also woven throughout. This thesis advocates that discourse from within contemporary queer communities can draw out a multiplicity of medieval femininities that are not done justice by contemporary binarizing language. It further argues that medieval visual culture can offer additional and expansive queer possibilities to those thinking about femininity in the present.
The theoretical framework driving this project and its use of ‘femme’ is femme theory, which aims to fill lacunae around femininity left by queer and feminist theory. Femme theory emphasizes being intersectional, taking femininity as a category of analysis distinct from womanhood or femaleness, speculating the possibilities of what femme can do rather than what femme is, and centring femininity in analyses of power structures. Bringing femme theory to bear on medieval art history, this thesis offers an analysis of the ways that femininity in the medieval and modern operates systemically at the intersections of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, classism, and ableism as well as the ways in which it can be a means of speculating queer alternatives.
Impact Statement
This thesis has been developed in community and with community in mind. As a researcher and educator, I have taken the opportunity of being a postgraduate student at the University College London to be involved in projects that advance the accessibility of History of Art and the teaching of queer art histories especially. I taught two “Queer Art History” summer courses as part of the Widening Participation programme run by the department of History of Art at UCL. In the second year of my PhD, I also worked as a research assistant on the “Supporting LGBT+ and Queer Histories in Secondary Schools” project led by Bob Mills (UCL History of Art) and Rebecca Jennings (UCL History). As a performer, I have woven this research into acts performed in public queer spaces to expand the discourse happening in academia into queer communities as well as to generate new energy for my academic projects.
Teaching, publishing research (through academic and more informal, accessible platforms), and performing will all be ways that I continue to disseminate and develop the work undertaken in this thesis. I hope that this research makes a contribution to the growing, invigorating discourses happening in queer and feminist medieval studies as well as offering a longer temporal perspective to work being done in femme theory and critical femininity studies. I also hope that the dissemination of this work through different channels might foster increased critical engagement with visual culture and ideological discourses. Understanding the enrolment of femininity in ideological projects as well as its potential for disruption seems increasingly pressing in the midst of the current contemporary surge in creating ‘others’ and justifying violence through hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and misinformation. By looking back into the medieval past, a long history of this rhetoric can offer insightful context. The medieval can also, though, help us to speculate ‘otherwise’ when looking ahead to the futures we want to build and the versions of history that we want to take with us.
Table of Contents
Thesis Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3
Impact Statement ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4
Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………9
Introduction: Feeling Femme……………………………………………………………………………………………..10
- Forsaken Femmes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………50
- Foundational Femmes…………………………………………………………………………………………………..96
- Masculine Martyrs and Femme Daddies……………………………………………………………………..145
- Double, double, toil and… get paid ……………………………………………………………………………..203
- Fangs, Furs, and Frivolities…………………………………………………………………………………………257
Conclusion: Glitter and Garters……………………………………………………………………………………….304
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………309
Dedication
This doctoral thesis is dedicated to Glenna Vivienne Paterson whose fierce love fills my earliest
memories and whose passion for art history constitutes my first taste of the field. I wish everyday
that she was still here to share her knowledge and to join me in unlearning the violent demands
of patriarchal femininity that she bore so heavily and navigated with so much dignity throughout
her incredible life. She would have been enormously chuffed to see me finish a PhD in History of
Art. If I could, I would tell her that this is for both of us and that she helped to make it possible.
