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Show 268 Angela Parkinson "FOR ME THERE IS NO CROWN... WHEN THE THORN OF DESIRE IS GONE": UNSEXING HELOISE OF THE PARACLETE FOR QUEER THEORY Angela Parkinson (Margaret Toscano) Department of Languages and Literature University of Utah honors college spring 2012 In the 1980s and 1990s, feminists and psychoanalysists attempted to empower the figure of the twelfth-century abbess, Heloise of the Paraclete, by emphasizing the sexual element in her letters to Abelard, keeping in line with the post-Freudian tendency to equate any expression of desire as a sign of authenticity. Indeed, whereas medieval monasticism has traditionally employed sensual denial and insulation as tools to produce profound desires for the body of Christ to overwhelm worldly longings, these same conditions push the willful Heloise into rapturous expressions of desire for her former lover. As satisfying as it is to roll back contemporary labels from the vantage point of feminist theory to claim such a figure as proto-feminist, this presentation will instead propose a "queer-ly feminist" reading of the Heloisian canon, which includes the histori-cal Heloisian writings and the writings that have "stuck" to these Heloisian epistles in 900 years of existence. This paper seeks to shake loose the heteronormative links of causality between sex, gender, and desire, and chooses instead to map the figure of Heloise in Judith Butler's theory of performativity by recognizing the futility of efforts to attach a literal sex to a historical figure. This presentation will also examine what Michèle Le Doeuff coined the "Heloise complex," which is a manifestation of the tendency for a total subsumption of the identity the Heloisian figure, both the historical and literary woman, within and under the identity of Abelard in the practice of philosophy. With a vision of queer theory as seeking to break open and multiply the possible ways to in-terpret a text, this presentation will sift the figure of Heloise through a performative, Butlerian lens. Keeping in mind the limitations of rolling back modern sexual categories into history, what gender emerges from the lived interior sexuality of Heloise of the Paraclete? This reading prompts a re-examination of not only the Heloisian figure and its canon, but that of feminist literary theory itself and its limitations in making sense of desire as a continually-nego-tiated site of identity creation and recreation. The shift in paradigm hints at the possibility of an "un-sexed" and "un-gendered" body of Heloise, from which the dream of heteronormativity can be decoupled from desire. |