DISTURBING SEARCH REQUESTS: maleness and humanity

INSIDE OF A CATHOLIC, IT'S TOO DARK TO READ. Summer books recommendations... hey, I'm in this!

We should therefore be wary of any modern appeals to medieval traditions that oppose male to female or equate flesh with sexuality. We should also understand that there is little basis in late medieval art or devotion for treating body as entrapment rather than opportunity, suffering as evil to be eschewed rather than promise to be redeemed. My argument then is not titillating antiquarianism. It is rather a challenge to us to think more deeply about what our basic symbols mean. There may be warrant in the Christian tradition for equating the penis with maleness and maleness with humanity, but I would argue that medieval theology at least as explicitly equates the breast with femaleness and femaleness both with the humanity of Christ and with the humanity of us all. There may be warrant in the Christian tradition for seeing the resurrection as triumph over body, but I would suggest that medieval piety (at least in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) speaks far more urgently of life coming from death, of significance located in body, of pain and suffering as the opportunity--even the cause--of salvation. A better understanding of the medieval past might thus enable modern people to give to age-old symbols new meanings that would be in fact medieval. If we want to express the significance of Jesus in both male and female images, if we want to turn from seeing body as sexual to seeing body as generative, if we want to find symbols that give dignity and meaning to the suffering we cannot eliminate and yet fear so acutely, we can find support for doing so in the art and theology of the later Middle Ages.
--Caroline Walker Bynum, "The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg," in Fragmentation and Redemption (citations omitted)

ALIEN SHE: I'm loving Fragmentation and Redemption, but the first essay does have one premise I'd like to challenge a bit. Bynum writes, "If one looks with women rather than at women, women's lives are not liminal to women--but neither, except in a very partial way, are male roles or male experiences."

That might be entirely true of the medieval women's narratives she's discussing. I certainly don't know enough to challenge her there! But she does seem to be implying that it's true per se--women aren't liminal to women because we are women--and that I think is false.

One of the facts of women's lives in what you can call patriarchy (although I think that term's focus on fatherhood is misleading, both because women-as-mothers do an immense amount to shape and transmit culture and because you can have male domination of culture despite a severe diminution of fathers' status and presence--anyway, let's move on) is that women are alien to ourselves and "other" to ourselves.

There are obvious disadvantages to this fact of emotions. There are perhaps less-obvious spiritual advantages. Self-alienation can be a strong source of insight, self-questioning, and Christian submission. (This possibility is really important w/r/t Bynum's essay, because she's arguing that medieval women's religious narratives generally rested on continuity of identity rather than radical conversion of identity: Because they already identified with Christ-the-suffering or Christ-the-lowly, they could imitate Him without a radical transformation or "reversal" of identity.)

My own perspective on this stuff is really weird because of being lesbian--I talked about gay alienation as a precursor to Catholic conversion here and here, and alluded to it here. I don't know to what extent my personal focus on the benefits rather than the (real, obvious, and painful) drawbacks of self-alienation and viewing women as Other are related to my sexual orientation, and I'd be interested in any comments you all have there. But on the more basic point about women's self-alienation (and therefore, although I know these aren't synonymous terms, self-liminality), I've heard lots of straight women support my position.

Where this goes, I don't know. It does, at least, complicate Bynum's final call to "stand with" women when doing history; how do you "stand with" someone who doesn't entirely stand with herself? (Should we seek to "stand with" ourselves?)

The eucharist, albeit a recapitulation of Christ's execution, was not therefore a symbol of death but of life, birth and nursing. As I have argued elsewhere, it stood for Christ's humanness and therefore for ours. By eating it and, in that eating, fusing with Christ's hideous physical suffering, the Christian not so much escaped as became the human.
--Caroline Walker Bynum, "Women's Stories, Women's Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner's Theory of Liminality," in Fragmentation and Redemption

eta: Oops! "Hideious" was a typo, not a pun....

Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person, when it is the moral side that is concerned.
--Henri Bergson, "Laughter," quoted in (a footnote to) Caroline Walker Bynum, "In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode"--introduction to Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion

I already have two epigraphs for the novel-in-progress (working title: New Wineskins), and three seems pretentious... but if I need a spare, this one's pretty awesome. I'm so excited about this book.