The most exciting moment when I visit a library or an archive is when the manuscript comes out. Everything is possible. The catalog description may need to be corrected or more precise in describing the object. For example, the binding might be original and astonishing. Or even stranger: the paper leaves for a printed book were ruled before printing; fragments of forgotten and thought lost text might have been used as binding material, an extra booklet was added much later with notes, sketches of planned and never finished illuminations might appear in the margins, the text does not match the normative one, and it has been neglected in the redaction of critical and scholarly initials, names claiming previous ownerships were left in the flyleaves and then removed and then recovered… It is a moment of encounter rather than re-encounter, even if, as good book historians, we have read and prepared in advance for that visit, sometimes even seen a digitalization of the book or the document. Occasionally I have sighted in disbelief when noticing the number of unexpected features that force me to change my plans, perhaps return later with more time, and more often skip meals and touristy things to do.
“Coming out” is also a familiar expression for queer people worldwide, as a critical moment in which the person does not follow or perform the normative script of social conventions and hegemonic masculinity productivity, linked to toxic discourses of success and capitalism. Coming out as queer is also a moment of encounter, in which things taken from you enter the realm of history again, like that book features that I or any historian can find in an old manuscript and note and link to it from that moment on. We all recently came out of lockdowns and restrictions in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, and besides so many promises to change our ways, it was also an encounter with a reality of rhythm, routines, and routes to work or travel that works so well in hiding and left unattended trouble. The fact that when encountering a problem, we say expressions like “move on”, “turn this page,” or “left this behind us” to express that we have resolved, or more likely, abandoned, trouble.
Coming out is not really about having made a decision, is not a closed action. It does not end at the moment the manuscript is left on your desk, you tell about your identity to your friends and family or the moment something changes. It is really about exploration, fluidity, of acceptance of multiple possibilities of being and becoming in the world. Or it should be. After covid, it seems we are back to where we were before, even if promises were made to revise issues like access to mental health or provide better care for the elderly. Many gay people install themselves in a sort of ivory tower from where they don’t see what is happening at the bottom: issues of social class, gender, race, and stigma. They think the job was done when they came out.
I had had many “coming out” in my life, not only as a queer person but also as a victim of sexual abuse as a child by a family member, which no one believed when I asked for help. Both are linked in many ways. Coming to terms with my sexuality after being forced several times to have the first experiences of it was and still is a constant struggle. When the pandemic hit, I was locked in the same house where I was abused. Every moment of those 100 days in which we could only leave our homes to go to the supermarket was an invitation to intoxication. I barely survived by looking at the pictures of past encounters with manuscripts. Seeing images of manuscripts is like doing a puzzle. I was putting myself together.
Now I am writing when the 21 days of isolation for monkeypox end. I have spent this lockdown in a place with no memories. I am not sure if I’ve made new ones. This time I hope to come out like the manuscript to the scholar: full of possibilities that orient themselves in time and do not end when the door is open or when the lights go off at the archive.
I introduce myself in a threefold way: a loser, a dis-oriented person, and a trouble maker. When people call me / us names these become a second skin or even a thin or thick layer of sweat that we can decide to wash, take off, or wear with pride. I wear with pride these three names; it is not in vain that until recently my hairstyle was a rainbow flag in the form of a punk crest.
Loser was a name that I got when I was in my first year of my PhD in Barcelona. It was given to me by an American tourist when I told him what I did for a living and how old I was. He said I should be tenured by then and have a permanent position. I was at that time 37 years old and did not have any funding for my PhD. And yet, being a loser, living an alternative life to that of toxic discourses of success, has situated me in a privileged position. I can watch people struggling to get prestige, publications, balance between personal and professional life, sacrificing their children in the benefit of… What exactly? Money? Prestige? A car? A dog? A house? There is no right, no wrong, there are not successful ways of living or unsuccessful ones. There are only the subjects fighting to be themselves while subjected to objectivations by the toxicity of capitalist goals that are set against the personal, the intimate, our real desire.
I am a dis-oriented person both in my sexual orientation and in the ways I define family and community. I owe to Sara Ahmed, and her Queer Phenomenology, this way of thinking, which along with The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam changed the way I am and I become. I like to get lost, it is only when deviating for the assigned – by whom exactly?- path that I am able to see and apprehend new perspectives, new ways of thinking, views of things that are unusual, perhaps because they are ugly- like some neighborhoods in Barcelona or London, perhaps because nobody really wants to go there, like a small town in the middle of nowhere in Iceland. I can get lost very easily when I skip planned research, and get lost looking for a reference, then a manuscript, then back to the original, the manuscript remains, informs me of temporalities and, specifically, of ways of staying with the trouble. I have learnt to live with these imperfections, and so I have learnt to live with other people’s ones. When I started reading Donna J. HarawayStaying with the TroubleI felt home. I felt I was doing good and not bad helping friends who are struggling with addictions, identities, money, or trying to fit into an emerging pattern of toxic masculinities in the gay community. Who is the most muscled? Who is the most beautiful? Who dresses better? Bullshit: Prince Charming is death and the queer activist cannot judge, be convinced by processes in which the Normative-Hegemonic Masculinity-Capitalism wants to assimilate and erase our true colors.
I am a trouble-maker. I have been accused of that by my ancientsupervisor, and my ancientcolleagues, by people who defined themselves as friends of mine but they were not able to send a message while I was very sick, being sexually harassed or more to the point, having troubles. You see, the trouble maker makes trouble as a response to trouble. That is what defines a queer activist whose voice is not an addition to the multitude of mechanically copied and humanly enhanced and performed behaviors that divide LGTBIQ+ communities. We might have our differences, but we might stick together.
In the 90s, I walked through Barcelona holding hands with my then-boyfriend. We were called names, had stones thrown at us, persecuted, told by a good number of servers not to show off: we were scaring customers away. I was being called queer all the time. Queer as in its original meaning of strange: Antonio’s son is queer, he has blue hair, he wears this and that… My understanding of queer is greatly indebted to these people, because I started to pay attention to every single use of queer. Three women living together were queer, a mother of a child who used to live in my same block was queer because his son had Downs syndrome and she – being alone and being a she – insisted in taking care of him instead of sending him away to an institution. Queer were the homeless people who gathered every night some blocks north to where I was living to sleep in the council shelter. Queer were the drug addicts in the parks. Queer was the hairdresser and the shop attendant in the bakery because they were trans, and they were married. What kind of man marries one of those things? Yes, the men were also queer. Queer was the child who did not play football, or the one who played with dolls, or the one who preferred to read that get involved in all the stupidity and normative and toxic myths that inform childhood. Everything other was and still is considered queer.All of this informs my understanding of queer studies, a theoretical frame I apply to Medieval Studies and Manuscript Studies.
I use the word ‘queer’ meaning ‘strange’ in order to free my argument from scripted identities, following thinkers and writers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Laurent Berlant, Judith Butler, and Carolyn Dinshaw among others.
The focus of my research is sex but understood as an ideological genre. I treat sex not as encounters between partners for the reasons of pleasure or desire, but as a manifestation of affect and as affective relations that creates different genres that ‘represent narrative patterns that solidify over time into a recognizable body of forms with shared features’, breaking free of frames of ‘historically specific cultural discourses an ideologies’ (Tyson Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres,2004:1). I understand gender, in this context, not as a categorization of sex differences in humans determined by biology or genetics, an approach that perpetuates binary models, for example the one-gender model proposed by Thomas W. Laqueur. Henceforth, I refer to genders rather than gender, adapting Donna J. Haraway’s assumption that we inhabit a world with a response-ability for problems posed by humans, which, as a word deriving from homo,perpetuates ‘masculinist universals and their politics of inclusion’ which creates unbalanced dichotomies in which the powerless, trouble-makers, queer, losers, different are othered (Haraway,Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016: 11-12) .The predominant modern categories of heterosexual and homosexual further create binary oppositions imposing a set of historically and politically charged ideologies that collapse when other narratives emerge, like that of the bisexual or asexual person. If these modern categories define an orientation (sexual, political or cultural), then the impulse guiding this positioning post is to re-orient conceptions of genres, genders, and discourse by positioning myself as queer.
If sex is an ideological genre, this can only be researched through affect and affective operations. There are no manifestations of sex in the past, at least none that have not been manipulated, biased, labelled, stereotyped, or condemned. I do research because I am convinced that is the only way forward, every affective resonance and echoes that point towards alternative ways of bonding and forming communities.
In fact, the obsession with taxonomies and way of structuring knowledge, of parcelling time-periods, the calls for not being anachronistic has created a form of chrononormativity which align with that of Elizabeth Freeman’s definition of “the use of time to organize individual human bodies towards maximum productivity (…) through particular orchestrations of time.
(…) Schedules, calendars, time zones” (Time Binds, 2010: 3). I am freeing myself of any anachronistic guilt and I do use the terms homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual in my research: not doing so further creates a veil of invisibility to a variety of ways of being and becoming that align with Hegemonic Masculinity. I do not care if the terms did not exist in the Middle Ages, as far as I know heterosexuality didn’t exist either and nobody questions its use.
The Middle Ages has been defined as “the age of the medium” (Hans Henrik Lohfert Jorgensen, The Saturated Sensorium, 2010:3) and I claim we need to involve queer theory, disability theory, transgender theory, intersectional theory in the study of this time period globally but without imposing western chronologies in other cultures and geographical areas. I aim to read and considerusefulall kinds of readings in my research even those that I don’t necessarily agree with. I do believe in having allies that are generous, do not invite themselves to exploit my knowledge, who do not play by the rules of academic toxic behaviors. There is plenty of that out there.
I am an activist and that informs and reinforces my research, which is as scientific as the one carried away by academics who do not want to position themselves politically or ideologically. I have taken many names before, and I am looking forward to wearing one thousand more; each of them helps me to get lost, to get anxiety, and I can take them all. Quoting Madonna’s “I rise”: I can’t break down now.
The Queer Unicorn 