This course introduces key concepts and methods for the study of women, gender, and sexuality, including the fields of gender, feminist, and LGBTQ+ studies. Throughout this term, you will become acquainted with central debates and discussions within the interdisciplinary field of Women and Gender Studies from a variety of methodological perspectives and theoretical orientations – with a particular focus on how feminist scholars have theorized the complex ways in which gender intersects with class, race, ethnicity, sexuality within contemporary society. Our readings and seminars will center on different theoretical perspectives and critical interventions in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, beginning with a discussion of why we study ‘theory’ and why we ‘theorise’, with an aim of illustrating the relationship between theory and activism. Through a series of writing assignments, you will be encouraged to apply your understanding of these theoretical and critical perspectives to cultural texts and to the world around you. By successfully completing this course, you will not only be prepared for advanced coursework in the discipline, but you will also have the theoretical and critical tools necessary for thoughtful engagement in ongoing conversations about what gender and sexuality mean in contemporary society. Moreover, this course aims to help you, as the feminist theorist Sara Ahmed describes, ‘bring feminist theory home’: “to make feminism work in the places we live, the places we work.”

Old Norse was a language spoken and written throughout the 'Viking diaspora'. Ancestor to all modern Scandinavian languages, Old Norse is particularly similar to modern Icelandic, to the extent that it is possible for a modern Icelander to read Old Norse texts that were composed some 800 years ago with little effort. In premodern texts, Old Norse was known collectively by the general term dönsk tunga, (Danish tongue), and later as norræna (Norse), though these terms also encompass dialect variation. Old Norse was originally written on stone and wood using runes, but the Roman alphabet was adopted after Christianisation for the writing of manuscripts.

Because of the extensive quantity and variety of surviving texts, our seminar focuses on texts that were composed in Iceland in a dialect called Old West Norse, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. However, as will become clear, it is difficult to consider these texts -- and their language -- in isolation. For this reason, we will also consider the relationship between these texts and vernacular composition elsewhere, especially the cultural metropole of Norway, as well as the Old East Norse speaking areas of Denmark and Sweden. Compared to the language of Iceland and Norway, Old East Norse was heavily Latinised very early in its history and lacked a wealth of vernacular literature until the late medieval and early modern periods. Throughout our seminar, we will consider how Old Norse language and literature travels across different generic, geographic, and linguistic borders, by carefully considering its relationship not just within the 'Viking diaspora' and continental Europe, but also with the Indigenous people of Sápmi, the Sámi.

This course is designed to be a thorough introduction to the key grammatical features of Old Norse and to sketch some of the literary traditions of medieval Scandinavia. No prior knowledge of Old Norse is required or assumed. By successfully completing this course, should be able to confidently read and translate any Old Norse text – with the help of the dictionary.

Full syllabus available HERE. (Plain text version HERE.)

In the late fourteenth-century Old Norse-Icelandic Króka-Refs saga, a man reports that he knew somebody who was ekki í æði sem aðrir karlar –  heldr var hann kona ina níundu hverju nótt ok þurfti þá karlmanns (not in nature like other men – rather he was a woman every ninth night and he needed a man). This anecdote immediately raises questions about identity, embodiment, and desire in medieval Scandinavia. What makes this person different from other men? What does it mean for him to become a woman every ninth night? How does this transformation relate to the expression of desire – his need for a man? And perhaps most importantly – how should we read this text? Is Króka-Refs saga fundamentally phobic, seeking to proscribe and police the boundaries of the possible? Or can we understand this narrative as archiving plural and flexible ideas of gender and sexuality? Although medieval Scandinavia is often imagined as exclusively cis-heteronormative and homogeneous, this episode suggests that gender and sexuality were conceptualized in far more complex and contradictory ways in the Scandinavian Middle Ages.

In this seminar, we will examine the myriad ways in which gender and sexuality were conceived of in medieval Scandinavia, by examining their representations in vernacular literature, particularly in the vibrant literary culture of premodern Iceland. To interrogate how gendered and sexual identities were constructed and contested in this period, we will read a variety of sources in translation, including mythological and skaldic poetry, laws and legal texts, and a variety of prose genres, such as Íslendingasögur (family sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and þættir (tales). Our understanding of these texts with be furthered by situating these texts in their sociohistorical context, interrogating the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between literary portrayals of gender and sexuality and lived reality in the Middle Ages. We will therefore engage with secondary criticism from a range of a disciplinary subject positions and disciplinary perspectives, including folkloristics, social history, cultural and literary history, and queer and trans theory. No knowledge of Old Norse or the Middle Ages is required or expected.

This is a seminar-style course and, although I will provide guidance and commentary, our discussions will be guided by your critical questions and comments related to the readings under consideration. Each week will center on a central concept –such as ‘marriage and consent’ or ‘monsters and racialization’ – and we will discuss how this idea is presented or problematized in one or more primary texts, with the assigned secondary criticism providing helpful context for our conversation. As we read, think, talk, and write together, we will learn not just about gender and sexuality in the Scandinavia Middle Ages, but also develop strategies for analyzing unfamiliar cultural texts, undertaking original research, and presenting our ideas effectively.

In her 2016 essay ‘Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies,’ Dorothy Kim championed intersectionality as a method for studies of the Middle Ages, declaring that medievalists should approach our work thinking, ‘my medieval studies will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’, paraphrasing Falvia Dzodan’s oft-quoted proclamation. Along with Kim, medievalists – such as Roland Betancourt, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Jonathan Hsy, Kathy Lavezzo, and Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh –  have demonstrated how examining the intertwined history of race, gender, and sexuality draws our attention to the translation and transmission of ideas across the Global Middle Ages as well as offers fresh insight into the construction and maintenance of medieval identities.

How would an intersectional examination of Old Norse texts nuance our understandings of the cultures and societies of the premodern North Atlantic? In what ways can examining concepts of gender, race, and sexuality in medieval Scandinavia help us better understand what intersectionality means in the modern day? By reading chronicles, histories, myths, poetry, and sagas in translation alongside secondary scholarship from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and subject positions, this course will explore how these texts bear witness to the diversity of the medieval North Atlantic and the ways in which medieval Scandinavians thought of themselves as participants within a wider and interconnected medieval world.