Hi :)

[ineptshieldmaid]

Greetings! You can call me Inept, which is a perfectly accurate description. If you call me Shieldmaid, which is most inaccurate, I will be immensely flattered and probably giggle a bit.

This journal is now locked down - head over to My Dreamwidth account for current unlocked posts.

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

*I* read it! And loved it! And have now friended that comm. I try to keep the number of actual people journals on this flist as low as I can.

Arthuriana is mad and wonderful

BAHAHAHA. How could they NOT notice? I'm siding with the people who think the author was female. Medieval slash fan!

One day, I'm going to write a paper about the role of Lady B. There's a lot queer theory about the barely-subtext, and a lot of feminist theory about her apparently active role in the Gawain/Lady scenes, which is ultimately subverted at the end when we find out Bertilak was in charge. But what no one has talked about is the fact that, until the very end, we see Lady B as a sexually active, dominant female who is initiating a homosexual exchange between two men. A fellow, David someone-or-other, who taught MY teacher, wrote a great queer theory paper in which he talked about the female as exchange between two men, substituting het for homosexual. But that's not actually what we see for most of the poem. What we see is Bertilak making a strange agreement with Gawain, and the Lady apparently exploiting that. She was there, she knew the terms of the agreement, she knew what Gawain would have to give to Bertilak, and it's only at the very end that we find out she was acting on Bertilak's orders.

Ahem. That's my rant for today! (I wrote Morgan/Lady SGGK fic a while back, if you're interested. Not explicit, but playing with the voyeurism and power dynamic in the poem.)

[anachronisma]

Oh that's really interesting, about Lady B and that whole exchange theory, which I'm vaguely familiar with. I find it all so interesting particularly in relation to another one of my interests, medieval Faerie, and the medieval concept of Other. What Lady B and Lord B are doing to Gawain is downright nasty, in a sense, they're pretending the rules of their court are like human rules, like Camelot's rules, and they're obviously not. It's a mean game, no wonder Gawain doesn't laugh at the end.

I think I read your Morgan/Lady fic and recced it to my medievalist friends.

Speaking of unusual pairings, I just attempted a Lucy/Kirke drabble (set in Aslan's Country, I'm not that sick, and totally non-explicit and not even sexual, that would be wrong for my interpretation of the characters) and the professor is massively influenced by the one you wrote for Lady of the House. Would you like to see it?

[ineptshieldmaid]

*looks dubious*

er... yes? That's, um, a pairing I would never have thought of... But now that you've said it i'm morbidly curious.

[anachronisma]

Don't judge me too harshly. It was a request from a friend and then I got caught up in the possibilities of crossing genres.