(Un)Familiar Pasts: Queer Uses of the Middle Ages in Fantasy Medievalisms
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This dissertation argues that fantasy medievalisms, which I articulate as both influenced by and already present in the Middle Ages, constitute queer temporal fusions of conservatively imagined pasts and hopeful speculative futures. Furthermore, I propose that this framing exposes within fantasy medievalism and queerness each concept’s complicit and resistant relationships to hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. Much scholarly work has established fantasy and medievalism’s affiliations with cisheteronormativity, racism, and misogyny; recent studies also highlight the potential for anticolonial and antiracist medievalisms to emerge from the blending of these two mediums. My project likewise investigates the friction between medievalism’s troubling legacies and fantasy’s transformative affordances, but I expand upon existing conversations by focusing on the less studied queer resonances of the genres’ confluence. To do so, I read medieval and contemporary fantastical texts alongside and through each other to demonstrate how their speculations of queerness have been regulated, and instrumentalized to regulate representations of other marginalized groups, throughout time. This project’s first chapter juxtaposes the mythological poem Þrymskviða and its adaptations by Marvel’s Thor comics and the Magnus Chase trilogy to show how modern hegemonic white masculinities link to Old Norse literature. Chapter 2 explores medievalism’s recurring tensions with genderqueerness through such cases as the Old Norse Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar and the high fantasy epics The Wheel of Time and Nimona. Chapter 3 then traces a pattern of enduring colonialist appropriations of Arthurian homoeroticism in the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, the television series Merlin, and recent cases of the Arthurian reincarnation motif. Finally, Chapter 4 locates utopian horizons in the 14th century Breton lay Sir Orfeo, Tolkien’s legend of Beren and Lúthien, and the web series Dungeons and Drag Queens—tales that convergently rewrite the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice to end happily and liberate queer bodies from discourses of death. Collectively, these transhistorical readings unearth variegated imaginings of medieval gender and sexuality that delegitimize conceptions of the premodern past as monolithically regressive and chart future pathways through which to ethically construct and engage the speculative Middle Ages.