Beyond Reproductive Time: Queer Temporalities in Duecento and Trecento Italian Literature

Abstract

This thesis explores intersections between the works of two lay women religious, Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena, and the poetry of Dante, shedding light on the thematic resonances between works not traditionally studied alongside one another due to their gendered and generic differences. Specifically, it analyses these various works through the lens of queer theoretical reflections on temporality. Queer theorists argue that the modern prioritisation of linear temporality is intertwined with the cultural primacy of heterosexual reproduction. Accordingly, they seek to develop both non-linear frameworks for conceptualising temporality and non-reproductive frameworks for conceptualising human relations. Across my primary texts, I argue that the primacy of reproductive temporalities and relations is similarly destabilised. The queer temporalities present in these medieval works are queer in relation to modern sexual and gendered ideologies, but also to hetero-patriarchal, reproductive cultural constructions internal to the period. The first two chapters explore how these three medieval authors, in troubling the temporal and ontological divide between life and death, simultaneously express queer gendered and sexual subjectivities, thereby troubling the unique prerogative that hetero-reproductive existence claims to the category of ‘life’. Chapter One analyses depictions of bodies marked as dead while still alive, arguing that these are frequently marked as non-reproductive or as liminal in gendered terms. Chapter Two examines representations of mourning, suggesting that performances of grief enable these authors to express queer gendered positionings and thereby challenge expected life narratives oriented around reproduction. The remaining chapters consider how the works of Angela, Catherine and Dante express a queer relational ontology that questions the primacy given to reproductive ties both in the Middle Ages and today. Chapter Three examines instances of kinship vocabulary utilised to describe non-biological bonds, arguing that these texts propose a fluid interplay between biological and spiritual or affective notions of kinship, and, in doing so, express modes of kinship that exceed linear, reproductive temporalities. Chapter Four examines discourses of friendship, arguing that these texts persistently express an overlap between friendship and other relational modes (kinship, but also erotic bonds), thus advancing a broader relational ontology rooted not in biology but in love. I focus particularly on friendship’s capacity to equalise generational hierarchies, thus disrupting the linear temporalities of reproductive parenthood. This thesis makes two key contributions. First, it demonstrates the ways in which modern queer theory and medieval literature might mutually enrich one another by being placed in dialogue. Second, it argues that queer articulations of temporality represent a concern shared between male-authored poetry and women’s religious writing, thus enabling us to bring these into productive dialogue despite the frequent exclusion of the latter from the category of literature and thus from the discipline of literary studies. As such, this thesis proposes a more fluid (indeed, queerer) view of medieval culture, highlighting how diverse medieval texts resonate with one another and thus resist the gendered and generic categorisations that modern scholars tend to impose.