Session VII: The Carnivalesque and Transgressive Expressions

Sylvia Mittler (University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto Canada): "When Change Necessitates Subversion: Carnivalesque Historiography, Popular Memory and Greek Humorist Nikos Tsiforos"

Almost forty years after his death, Tsiforos’ cultural and linguistic significance remains unnoted because of its “low-class” satirical resistance to a national cultural and literary canon long embedded in the “foundational complicities” of the Enlightenment and Philhellenism. Using a pithy raconteur’s tongue, his revisionist historiography questions the epistemiological bases of a Eurocentrically-cast modern Greek history and identity, re-siting the past to gird for a more globalized future. In an exploration of cultural memory ranging from idiosyncratic histories of England, France and the United States to the European incursions of the Crusades, Frankish medieval Greece and ultimately, ancient Greek mythology, Tsiforos counters the formalism of an unevenly-reproduced European state with the currency of communal relations handed down from the Byzantine and Ottoman imperial regimes. Pastiche, parody and satire propose a Greekness that not only validates the self-image of his readers, the newly urban middle classes of the 1960s, but grooms them for a post-Cold War world increasingly marked by international market penetration, popular culture and “popular” expression. The socially peripheral becomes symbolically central: Tsiforos channels history through the prism of the language and social relations of the manghes, early twentieth-century urban proles periodically suppressed as “vulgar” and “Oriental” by the Europeanizing upper classes. High/low dichotomies work didactically to invert nationalist/humanist/classicist discourses of representation, debunking outdated Eurocentric myths of Hellenic purity and continuity, even shimmering modernist visions – well before the circulation of terms such as postmodernism and postcolonialism.


Lori Newcomb (Wayne State College, Wayne NE): "My Favorite (Drag Queen) Teacher: Transgression and Salvation in The Birdcage"

In 1996 the Mike Nichols film The Birdcage was released. With drag as a central theme, the film inspired roars of laughter from audiences. The laugh meter has translated into high profit for Hollywood, but much more than one-liners and sight gags are going on in this culturally pivotal film. Using humor and irony, The Birdcage endeavors to indict and educate the very person who laughs at it: the respectable, mainstream American. I will attempt to navigate through the muddling between respectability and drag that occurs in The Birdcage, briefly dealing with the question of essentialism and its relationship with drag, then contextualizing the film in terms of its historical significance as a ground-breaking film of the mid-nineties. I will show how the eight major characters of the film (and even the house) are either putting on respectability or putting on drag, the latter of which works to educate the “respectable” character (and viewer) about his/her attitudes on sexuality and ethnicity. Ultimately, though, and ironically, drag works in The Birdcage to save respectability’s own fragile image. Finally I will argue that drag, even though it partners with respectability in saving it from itself, retains a transgressive nature by exposing the hegemonic codes of respectability. In doing so, drag serves a double role in relation to respectability: it is both respectability’s transgressor and its savior.

Christopher Lozensky (Independent Scholar, Minot ND): "Worlds Apart, yet ‘in Any Manere Age’: Re-Visioning the Erotopolitics of ‘Rape Fantasies,’ from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Contemporary “Gay” Pornography"

In her recent book Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (2006), Janet Halley quotes the following passage from anti-porn feminist Catherine MacKinnon: “Sex feeling good may mean that one is enjoying one’s subordination; it would not be the first time. Or it may mean that one has glimpsed freedom, a rare and valuable and contradictory event” (Feminism Unmodified, 218; qtd in Halley 378 n. 51). Though Halley concedes that this is a “wonderful passage,” it fails, she says, to “affirm the egalitarian possibilities of women’s heterosexual experience.” On the contrary, argues Halley, here MacKinnon “rigorously maintains her stance of not knowing the difference between rape and a good fuck” (Halley’s emphasis) (378 n. 51).

While the accuracy of this end notation to Halley’s book might be debatable as far as MacKinnon is concerned, my interest here has more to do with how impeccably Halley’s description might nevertheless apply to quite another figure: the so-called “Father” of British poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer. From both biographical and bibliographical details—from, that is, actually being accused (though neither convicted nor acquitted) of “raptus” by Cecilia Chaumpaigne in 1380 to infusing his writings with both direct and indirect representations and suggestions of rape and non-consensual sexual/textual violence—, Chaucer seems to be a prime candidate for classification as someone who does not know “the difference between rape and a good fuck.” Almost universally revered as a timeless masterpiece not only of British and Western literature, but of World literature, as well, Chaucer’s Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales maintains its timeliness in the ongoing (literary) history of sexuality—of less interest, however, has been the Wife’s Tale, itself. For example, in her provocative book Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence (2006), Marilyn Desmond offers a welcome and long-overdue synthesis of feminist and queer approaches in her discussion of the Wife of Bath and her Prologue, but makes no mention of her Tale. “If this literary figure,” says Desmond, “seems familiar, that familiarity suggests the extent to which modern heterosexualities are haunted by medieval discourses on sexuality, including medieval marital ideology. The modern reader’s recognition of the Wife of Bath initiates an ethical engagement with the representations of erotic violence in her text” (118-19). Shifting the discussion from one of ethics to one of “erotopolitics,” my paper addresses many of the same issues Desmond broaches, but from a different direction that reaches different conclusions.

First, my revisionist feminist analysis highlights not the “queer” but rather the problematically “unqueer” aspects of Chaucer’s most (in)famous work. Second, my argument suggests that the veneration of the Wife’s Prologue and the denigration to her Tale functions to aestheticize sexual violence in ways that underscore the potentially self-destructive and “daungerous” (to use one of the Wife’s words) aspects of sadomasochist relations, dominance/submission dynamics, and, ultimately, “rape fantasies.” Moreover, while Desmond’s work focuses on medieval precursors to modern heterosexualities, my argument recognizes a similar pattern of gendered, heterosexualized violence in contemporary “gay” male pornography.

Though produced worlds apart, Chaucer’s most canonical creation and seems, from my perspective, to share salient characteristics with the worst of what many critics would consider to be the most unworthy of all literary forms—porn. These similarities oblige me to think more carefully about the definition of “great” “world literature” and the erotopolitics of “rape fantasies” that such definitions seem to endorse “in any manere age.” In the specific terms of this World Literature conference, it might be said that my paper focuses on processes in which transgressions and trespasses—in this case, literary representations of erotic and sexual violence—reveal the limits of “queer” theorizations of gender and sexuality from an unapologetically feminist position. While sadomasochistic “rape fantasies” might still be sources of sexual “freedom” that “open [up] spaces that yield transformation,” both the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and several popular “gay” porn videos preclude these possibilities by reproducing the oppressions and repressions of a patriarchal culture that is at once misogynistic and homophobic. Reading the Wife of Bath and “gay” pornography through and against each other produces “a rare and valuable and contradictory event”—just how much sexual/textual empowerment and freedom such reading achieves, however, remains in question.