We hope that you can join us for the 35th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium: Dissonance and Dysphoria on Saturday, February 2025. It will be held all day in the A.D. White House.
Keynote address at 3:30pm
Dr. Basil Arnould Price, Center for Early Global Studies at UCLA
"Broken Trans Masculinities: Old Norse Trans Studies and its Disappointments".
In the fourteenth-century Old Norse-Icelandic romance Bragða-Mágus saga, a handsome knight named Hirtingr charms women wherever he goes. However, en hvern tíma, er þær hugðu, at hann mundi þeirra fýst fremja, veik hann því af með kýmilegum keskilátum, því at hann vissi, at hann hafði eigi svo mætan grip at miðla þeim, sem þeirra hugur beiddi (every time that [the women] thought that he would do as they wished, he slipped away in a funny, cheerful manner because he knew that he did not have so a great thing to give them, as their minds longed for)(Mág. 17). Despite scant criticism on Bragða-Mágus saga, scholars (Jóhanna 2020, Lavender 2023) have endeavored to explain the humour of this episode, arguing that this is an instance of dramatic irony: the audience knows that Hirtingr is a princess in disguise and thus incapable of fulfilling the women’s desires. Such readings of the charming knight as only a narratively-convenient disguise – comical, temporary, and unconvincing – point towards the cisheteronormative criteria by which Old Norse-Icelandic studies defines and discusses transmasculinity.
Moving from Bragða-Mágus saga to other Old Norse-Icelandic accounts of meyarkonungar (maiden-kings) and karlkonur (masculine-women), this paper rectifies the relative neglect of medieval Scandinavia from the remit of premodern trans turn (see Bychowski 2021; Wingard 2024) and argues that these narratives imagine embodiments and identifications that expand our understanding what constitutes the proper affects and subjects of trans historical inquiry. By seeing in Old Norse-Icelandic narratives not redemptive visions of whole, unfractured transmasculinities but rather what I refer to as ‘broken transmasculinities’, this talk questions not just the sexological rubrics of medieval studies but also the recuperative and reparative aims of the premodern trans studies (see Kempe 2019; Maude 2023; Gordon 2024). Even if Old Norse representations of ‘broken transmasculinities’ leave us wanting, I draw upon the work of Awkward-Rich (2017) to position ‘disappointment’ as an interpretive, critical resource for a premodern trans studies that moves beyond either sexology or recuperation -- “even if it does not feel good” (829).
Program can be found in this Box folder.
Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) Mission Statement
The purpose of the Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC) is to showcase the ideas and research of the medievalist community at Cornell and the wider academic world and to strengthen connectivity between these medievalists. In doing so, MSSC aims to provide a platform for underrepresented groups and disciplines. MSSC hosts an annual one-day colloquium in the spring semester organized by the graduate students of the Medieval Studies Program and its affiliated programs at Cornell. Each year, MSSC is an opportunity for all interested in the Middle Ages at Cornell—as well as visitors from other institutions—to share papers in a relaxed and friendly environment. The MSSC aims to be as diverse as possible in terms of its content and the speakers and panelists it invites to speak at the event. This means that the keynote speakers who are invited to speak will represent different disciplines and backgrounds each year. This also means that the selection of each year’s theme is done with the aim of attracting speakers and panelists from a broad range of disciplines and that the MSSC committee will be diligent in their selection of speakers and panelists in order to ensure a diverse representation of disciplines and backgrounds and people.
