This study started from engaging two equally assertive women in dialogue: Margery Kempe from six centuries ago, and Judith Butler of our own time. Butler describes how Discourse, through performativity, works its trick: gender norms are set up, nonconformity disciplined and the non-conformer reduced to silence or destroyed. Margery Kempe, with body and words, shows how performativity may backfire, undergirded by alternative discourses and producing non-conforming performances.
Indeed, performativity with its attendant slippages makes inevitable the constant negotiation between monologuing urges and alternative performances. Against popular perception and as Margery Kempe’s performances suggest, late medieval English culture, instead of a …show more content…
For those who have automatically labeled their non-normative desires as “bad” or “wrong,” or those who are forced to live double lives or in self exile, or with stigmas, they are as dead as the effeminate boy killed by his peers. To live a livable life, then, is for one to live out his/her desires to his/her desirable degree, without having to risk physical, social, or cultural erasure. Based on this, Butler’s inquiry, into “what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life, what minimizes the possibilities of unbearable life, or, indeed, social or literal death,” is at least partially answered by Margery Kempe (8). If performance art, and writings that explain his own art, finds Gomez-Pena a livable space to be himself without getting eliminated for being that self, both Margery the protagonist and Kempe the author have taken up the same equipments and savored the same compromised success. In one team they have searched far and wide for a livable life, and both seem to have found their solutions in performativity itself, shattering it while making full use of …show more content…
Margaret Hallissy’s verbal sketch of the Wife of bath, with some alterations, would fix Margery Kempe very well. Like the more famous Wife and with significant differences, Margery Kempe is prolix of speech, conspicuous of dress, unstable of place, mindless of husband and house, friend to women, buxom to God, bold to clergy--a compendium of undesirable Christian traits (Hallissy 163). Yet with all her nonconformity, what Margery or Kempe says is not intimidating at first glance. There is for sure explicit social critique, but Kempe never projects Margery as an anti-social virus, however unsociable she may get with some people. Rather, she is molded as a compassionate Christian, a staunch advocate of a faith that never objects to institutional Church as an important installment of religion and ever refrains from meddling with any of the church’s essential faith articles. Her desire for universal redemption upon personal merit, as discussed in length in Chapter 59, comes closer to traditional Church teachings than to Reformation thoughts; the latter resolutely denies redemption as personal achievements and thereby eradicates the need for the Church’s intercession. Her loyalty to the bigger world of Christendom rather than the rising nation of England also puts her somewhat in a track against the tide of local history and in favor of the Catholic
Indeed, performativity with its attendant slippages makes inevitable the constant negotiation between monologuing urges and alternative performances. Against popular perception and as Margery Kempe’s performances suggest, late medieval English culture, instead of a …show more content…
For those who have automatically labeled their non-normative desires as “bad” or “wrong,” or those who are forced to live double lives or in self exile, or with stigmas, they are as dead as the effeminate boy killed by his peers. To live a livable life, then, is for one to live out his/her desires to his/her desirable degree, without having to risk physical, social, or cultural erasure. Based on this, Butler’s inquiry, into “what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life, what minimizes the possibilities of unbearable life, or, indeed, social or literal death,” is at least partially answered by Margery Kempe (8). If performance art, and writings that explain his own art, finds Gomez-Pena a livable space to be himself without getting eliminated for being that self, both Margery the protagonist and Kempe the author have taken up the same equipments and savored the same compromised success. In one team they have searched far and wide for a livable life, and both seem to have found their solutions in performativity itself, shattering it while making full use of …show more content…
Margaret Hallissy’s verbal sketch of the Wife of bath, with some alterations, would fix Margery Kempe very well. Like the more famous Wife and with significant differences, Margery Kempe is prolix of speech, conspicuous of dress, unstable of place, mindless of husband and house, friend to women, buxom to God, bold to clergy--a compendium of undesirable Christian traits (Hallissy 163). Yet with all her nonconformity, what Margery or Kempe says is not intimidating at first glance. There is for sure explicit social critique, but Kempe never projects Margery as an anti-social virus, however unsociable she may get with some people. Rather, she is molded as a compassionate Christian, a staunch advocate of a faith that never objects to institutional Church as an important installment of religion and ever refrains from meddling with any of the church’s essential faith articles. Her desire for universal redemption upon personal merit, as discussed in length in Chapter 59, comes closer to traditional Church teachings than to Reformation thoughts; the latter resolutely denies redemption as personal achievements and thereby eradicates the need for the Church’s intercession. Her loyalty to the bigger world of Christendom rather than the rising nation of England also puts her somewhat in a track against the tide of local history and in favor of the Catholic