Linguistic Agency and the Lesbian Erotic in Hadewijch van Antwerpen’s Strophische Gedichte

Résumé 0

When working to reclaim queer narratives, a key question to address is that of subjectivity and objectivity: who is speaking, and towards whom do they orient their desire--how and with what degree of specificity is the object of desire in these texts explicited? For the 13th century female mystic Hadewijch van Antwerpen, the object of her affection in her Strophische Geditchte (strophic devotional poems) appears as a grammatical feminine addressed by a feminine speaker. The use of middle Dutch minne (f.) to designate the divine in her poetry demands revisitation through a queer lens in order to determine the degree to which we can consider Hadewijch’s desire for the divine a “lesbian” desire--that is, the desire of a woman for another woman--rather than the desire of a woman for a neutral or masculine object which is merely gendered feminine grammatically. I propose a linguistic analysis of the terms by which Hadewijch chose to address the object of her devotions accompanied by an analysis of the eroticism in the direct discourse between subject and object. Can we understand the object (minne) as an actual feminine entity, thus rendering language itself a site of “lesbian” agency? This paper will point out the ways in which language, through offering female mystics the possibility for emotional and sensual self-expression, becomes the locus of “lesbian” potential in the text. It bridges the gap between the ineffable (or, the unspeakable--that sexuality of which we must not speak) and the bodily (the physical erotic inclinations which are silenced), creating a space for discursive expressions and representations of a “lesbian” erotic.