Gripla - 20.12.2016, Page 310

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colleague thomas Laqueur, a historian of science, and we realized we were
working on related issues – I on the things I just mentioned, he on a his-
tory of theories of sexual difference as articulated in medical treatises from
the Greeks to the twentieth century. We traded work and ideas. from
him I learned that the idea of opposite sexes did not emerge in the medi-
cal literature until the late 1700s with the discovery of the human egg, the
ovum; and that before then, male and female sex organs were thought of
as outside and inside versions of the same apparatus – which under certain
conditions could slide back and forth. Laqueur called this the “one-sex” or
“one-flesh” model, as opposed to the later “two-sex” or opposite-sex model.
(this work came out as Making Sex in 1990.) The Norse materials seemed
to me to reflect the one-sex model of the early world – hardly surprising.
Likewise the exploitation horror I was looking at – for it became clear to
me, as it is clear to others, that “low” culture continues to play the one-sex
or one-flesh game right down to the present day. It’s as though trash cul-
ture never got the news about the sexes being opposite.
So it was that I found myself working on two books at the same time:
one medieval and one on film, and both inspired by the same basic idea. So
for the next eight years I interlaced medieval and modern manifestations
of this complex, seeing some 200 movies and publishing three articles on
the norse side and one article and one book on the film side.
and what became of the book on medieval gender? therein lies a tale
that bears directly on my assignment today, and I’ll tell it by way of an
ending.
The film book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, came out in 1992. a couple of months after it appeared, I
was contacted by nancy Partner, a medievalist at McGill university, who
said that she’d been asked by the Medieval academy of america to put
together a special issue of the journal Speculum on women in the Middle
ages. for it, she wanted something by me. It sounded crazy, she said, but
she wanted me to rewrite, in norse terms, any chapter of Men, Women,
and Chainsaws. I started laughing (mainly because I couldn’t believe she’d
read the book), but she was serious. and I got what she meant, because
she also knew my essays on gender in the norse world and had put two
and two together.
Which is how I came to write, for that issue of Speculum, the article