E(Race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power.
- Author/Editor
- Rajendran, Shyama.
- Title
- E(Race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power.
- Published
- Rajendran, Shyama. "E(Race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power." In Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 127-43.
- Review
- Rajendran's essay focuses on the "Constance Group" of medieval romances, including Gower's iteration of this tale in his "Confessio Amantis," and "The King of Tars." She argues that "reproductive futurity as it is imagined in these two narratives creates the crossroads that brings together monstrosity, race, and disability through their erasure" (128). Bodies that are non-white and non-Christian are presented as "illegible bodies" that must either be cured or eliminated. Rajendran suggests the "futures proposed by these narratives [are] the true monsters of the text, rather than the bodies that we are supposed to see as monstrous or 'different'" (130). The birthed children in both texts serve as symbols of the future. In "King of Tars," the princess uses the future child to convince the Sultan to convert, but what actually moves him to convert is "the power of Christianity, and the access to imperial power that it potentially offers him" (134). The "imagined future," in these texts, Rajendran claims, "creates a relationship between whiteness, Christianity, able-bodiedness, and imperial power" (134). Christianity is the only acceptable reproductive future, and thus Christian imperialism is acceptable imperialism. Constance, in both Gower's and Chaucer's tales, cannot be read only via her gender; rather, Rajendran asserts, we must acknowledge the "operations of imperial Christianity" (136). The mothers-in-law in this story must be depicted as monstrous to achieve the goals of imperial Christianity: "Because they resist the future that the narrative strives toward, the mothers-in-law must be made monstrous and eliminated. The language of monstrosity in the narrative is used as a prop to vilify characters that the narrative wants to destroy, and is used to heighten the emotional appeal of reading Constance as a victim" (137). Women's bodies, then, are simply fuel for the engine of imperialism in this tale, and to see Constance as the "other" distracts from the elimination of other identities in the imagined future of Christian imperialism. To conclude her essay, Rajendran cites Alison Kafer's discussion (from "Feminist, Queer, Crip") of the exclusion of queer and disabled kids from imagined futurity today to reflect on the same dynamic in the medieval texts she discusses: "to be part of the future [in these texts], one must be 'cured' of disability and blackness (as in "The King of Tars"), but the inability of women to be cured of their gender means that they must be eliminated once they have played their part in ensuring the continuity of the future (as in the death of Constance)" (142). [JGS. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations