Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Richard H. Godden,Asa Simon Mittman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030254582
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of "disability" and "monstrosity" in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed "the extraordinary body" is labeled a "monster." This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.

Section IIIDis/Identifying the Other

© The Author(s) 2019

R. H. Godden, A. S. Mittman (eds.)Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern WorldThe New Middle Ageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_7

Begin Abstract

7. “Blob Child” Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars

Molly Lewis¹

(1)

George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

Molly Lewis

End Abstract

Introduction¹

In scholarly discussions surrounding medieval race, the fourteenth-century romance King of Tars is perhaps the field’s most regularly cited text. In it, a Saracen (an identifier that signifies both dark skin and Muslim identity) Sultan marries a white Christian Princess. While the Sultan is described in animalistic language as both a boar and hound, “blac and lothely” (King of Tars 922),² the Princess’s looks conform to European (and Christian) ideals, a beauty that draws the attention of the Sultan. Ultimately, the Sultan’s racial identity changes, from Muslim to Christian, and from black to white.

Before this transformation, the Sultan and Princess have a child, a baby born with “noiþer nose no eye,” “wiþouten blod & bon” (584, 582). Subsequently, the baby too is baptized and becomes a “wel-shapen” child (777). Clearly, the figures of the Sultan and baby are juxtaposed with the Princess in terms of both race and able-bodiedness. But while the Sultan’s corporeal transformation is carefully analyzed in medieval race scholarship, the child born with neither nose nor eye is often read reductively in terms of what it represents for the Sultan’s miscegenous marriage; scholars refer to the child with neither blood nor bone as “monstrous,” “a lump,” a “blob child,” or some combination of the three signifiers. The child is viewed solely as a physical embodiment, rather than as an embodiment of the intersection of medieval disability and medieval race studies. Siobhan Bly Calkin writes that “[w]ith no sex, no physical characteristics, and no defined features, this lump cannot be identified as anything except monstrous.”³ Likewise, in her introduction to the King of Tars entry in the online Crusades Project, Leila K. Norako describes the child as the product of an unnatural marriage: “The union between the unconverted Saracen and the incognito Christian in this romance produces a horrific blob-child – a startling exaggeration of the fears of mixed marriages that prompted the passing of anti-miscegenation laws.”⁴ John H. Chandler describes the baby as a “formless lump of flesh,” while Geraldine Heng writes that the baby is “a hideous lump of bodily matter” that is “insensate, inanimate, and with neither ‘blood’ nor ‘bone’ nor ‘limbs,’ a true monstrosity.”⁵

While these descriptions of the baby are accurate, presenting them without further critical analysis of the child’s corporeality only serve to reinscribe the hegemonic systems critical race scholarship seeks to dismantle. Coupled with discussions of racial identity, phrases like “blob-child” and “hideous lump” employ ableist rhetoric that undercut our deeper understanding of the medieval intersections of race and disability.⁶ Thus, I argue that the corporeality of the child should be read alongside the Sultan more thoughtfully, and consider what it means to read the text as a seminal work on racial representation without considering its representation of disabilities as well. In this way, I suggest that monster studies—which has already been taken up by disability scholars to examine cultural formations of identity—can also attend to the racial complexities of the child, the Sultan, and even the Princess by exploring their corporeal “otherness.” Rather than foreclosing potential points of intersectional analysis, I propose that monstrous readings of King of Tars allow for deeper analysis in both critical race and disability studies while also challenging the cultural framework that uses nonnormative corporeal difference to insure its supremacy.

Medieval Critical Race: A Brief Overview

Since the inception of medieval race scholarship, its legitimacy has been questioned.⁷ In response to attacks on the validity of the field, scholars of medieval race including Geraldine Heng, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and more recently Cord Whitaker have written defenses of the seemingly anachronistic study of medieval race, as well as the political implications of disavowing its existence.⁸ As Heng writes in “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I”:

the term “race” continues to bear witness to important strategic, epistemological, and political commitments not adequately served by the invocation of categories of greater generality (such as “otherness” or “difference”) or greater benignity in our understanding of human culture and society. Not to use the term race would be to sustain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently. Studies of “otherness” and “difference” in the Middle Ages—which are now increasingly frequent—must then continue to dance around words they dare not use … Or, to put it another way: the refusal of race de-stigmatizes the impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices, and institutions in the medieval period, so that we cannot name them for what they are, nor can we bear adequate witness to the full meaning of the manifestations and phenomena they install.⁹

To disavow the existence of various racial identities during the medieval period is to evacuate meaning from the specific types of embodied difference to which Heng alludes. The consequences of racial categories are specific and unique to their practices, and to not attend to them with such specificity does a disservice to medieval scholarship. Without the methods, tools, and terminology of critical race studies, Heng argues—and I agree—that readings of marginalized medieval figures are diminished of their proper weight, ultimately erasing histories of racial violence. While some critical race scholars studying later time periods are deeply invested in marking the beginnings of race with Columbus’ conquest, the Atlantic Slave Trade, or scientific racism, to limit racial phenomenon to a specific time period or place only serves to limit the breadth of critical understandings of racial identity.

In response to enduring skepticism over medieval race’s existence, it is perhaps unsurprising that King of Tars has been and continues to be a popular text for medieval race scholars. The tale contains one of the clearest examples of racial representation in medieval literature, with a Sultan whose black skin turns white, a legible example congruent to modern understandings of race as based on skin color.¹⁰ However, King of Tars is a narrative about disability as well. In reading King of Tars, it is clear that the baby can be read as merely a narrative plot device, with its rehabilitation inspiring the Sultan’s eventual conversion and transformation. But perhaps what is more damaging are readings by medieval race scholars that reinscribe the systems that enable the obfuscation of racial identity. Using reductive descriptors of the King of Tars baby without unpacking its embodiment through the language of disability studies implies a kind of hierarchical system of corporeal privilege counterproductive to the study of racial difference.

(Un)Extraordinary Bodies

Though medieval race studies and disability studies argue that bodies do not have biologically implicit meaning, categorical distinctions between bodies are often established through cultural systems of power. In order to determine such distinctions, disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson suggests that a “normate” identity “usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings.”¹¹ Normate identities then establish an ideal that other bodies are judged by, suggesting that there are appropriate lived e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Section I. Introduction
• Section II. Discourses of Bodily Difference
• Section III. Dis/Identifying the Other
• Section IV. Queer Couplings
• Section V. Coda
• Back Matter