punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift

Eileen Joy

Published on: Jan 08, 2020 Updated on: Jan 12, 2020 punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift

NOTE (added Jan 11, 2020): This CFP, like any punctum books pub, is open for annotation. After signing up for a PubPub account (upper right corner), select any text and an annotation window will appear. These annotations will represent a collective way of facing, working through, and hopefully repairing the kind of trauma that the field of early medieval studies has caused for so many years, and which this CFP has also triggered in our community of scholars and learners for whom we care deeply and with whom we want to model a better, more inclusive, and more generously capacious academic community-to-come. We want to model, further, a feminist critical practice in which the sorts of “argumentation” so prevalent in toxic masculine culture will not predominate. Eileen Joy, who wrote the CFP, will not “disappear” any of her words, and will be attentive, without interruption or pushback, to all annotations. No one at punctum will intervene to control, censor, or argue with any of the annotators. In the tradition of the medieval book, all annotations, along with the CFP, will stand as a public record of an academic community’s productively rowdy dissensus, and the page will be archived into perpetuity with no revisions whatsoever to anyone’s words: a cacophony, if you will, of a field in crisis, but in which everyone strives to really hear and respect each other’s feelings, experiences, trauma, and intellectual practices. The annotated page will become part of the permanent archive of punctum, always available for the scholars of the future, as opposed to disappearing into the ether of ephemeral social media owned by those who do not share our values nor care for us.

TRIGGER WARNING: Great care has been taken to remove language that some readers may find triggering (especially vis-à-vis metaphors of sexual assault); but please also be forewarned that this CFP has been designed to be as offensive as possible, and that I welcome all of the blame and repercussions that might result. To those who worry that parts of this CFP simply reinscribe forms of sexual violence against queers (and thanks to the generosity of more than several scholars, including a graduate student at Cambridge University, who reviewed the CFP and alerted me to how some of the language in original draft might be overly triggering, this CFP has been revised multiple times), please consider the very real sexual and other forms of material-psychic assault and abuse that have been perpetrated, for decades, by some of the most celebrated and “distinguished” scholars of the field of Old English+“Anglo-Saxon” studies, and the ways in which these fields have labored mightily to keep these facts “on the downlow.” I myself am one of the victims, as well as know and have counseled so many others who have also been victims of both sexual and psychic abuse within these fields. Please do not read this CFP, also, if you are triggered by images and/or language culled from the online world of neofascist, white supremacist ethno-separatists. This is my CFP, mine alone (although my co-directors at punctum books strongly support this project and how it is framed), and comes from a place of deep anger and rage, as well as a conviction that some of us—well, at least me—are not going to take this anymore. It is clear to me, after working as a scholar, editor, and publisher in these fields for about 25 years, that there will never be redress or repair for the bodily and psychic damage that has been inflicted on so many students and peer colleagues by so many of the most distinguished scholars, institutions of higher learning, and also learned societies, who care more about maintaining their image than they do

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about addressing and preventing harm. I have no interest at this point in professional politesse or diplomatic decorum, so read this at your peril, or conversely, enJOY/enjoin it.1

Jack Donovan, Waldgang, Oregon.

CFP: DEFENESTRATING FRANTZEN: A FISTSCHRIFT A volume of sexually-disciplinarily dissident essays to be published by punctum books in Autumn 2020, dedicated to the patrons and fearless sexual adventurers of the Catacombs in San Francisco, 1975–1981, and also to Janet Thormann (1940-2014) whom the field of Old English studies never gave proper due, while some in the field even stole and/or omitted her work on anti-Semitism in Old English literature, and she is the only scholar I knew of in the field who gave masterful Lacanian readings of Old English texts. She studied in the 1950s-60s at UC Berkeley with Alain Renoir, who founded the department of Comparative Literature there in 1966, and she taught at the College of Marin for her entire career, because she never wanted to leave San Francisco, where her husband, Graham Makintosh, ran White Rabbit Press, one of the most important avant-garde presses in American letters from 1968 to 1975, publishing such authors as Charles Bukowski and Nathaniel West, but even more importantly the “Berkeley

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Renaissance” circle of poets who were deeply invested in medieval poetry (such as “Beowulf ”): Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer. Because Janet taught at a community college, and never produced a monograph, her presence has almost been erased from the canon of scholarship in Old English studies and almost no one cites her work, which was brilliant. She was one of the first (and practically only) scholar to tackle anti-Semitism in early medieval English texts, and when she brought up the subject of anti-Semitism in religious writings of the 10th century during an NEH Summer Institute on “Anglo-Saxon England” at Trinity College, Cambridge, led by Paul Szarmach in 2004 (which is where I first met her), she was told it was a completely irrelevant subject since “there were no Jews” living in England prior to the Norman Conquest, and thus we were to cease all discussion on the topic (in 2004!). She told me often that she believed her scholarship (published primarily as journal articles and book chapters) was being ignored and also plagiarized and she suffered no so small amount of psychic pain as a result. She was one of the first (and practically) only scholar in the field (other than John Hermann, whom the field also treated like shit) to fully address the period’s anti-Semitism in real depth (prior to the publication in 2004 of Andrew Scheil’s The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England), a fact for which she pretty much never gets the credit she deserves.2 In short, the field treats its Others like complete trash, and it always has. punctum books will be publishing Janet’s posthumous monograph on the “comic medievalism” of Chaucer in 2020.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

~ Audre Lorde

Je m’imaginais arriver dans le dos d’un auteur, et lui faire un enfant, qui serait le sien et qui serait pourtant monstreux. [I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child which would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.]

~ Gilles Deleuze

The year 2020 will mark the 30-year anniversary of Allen J. Frantzen’s Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (1990), a book in which he cautioned scholars in Old English studies that if they continued to resist the insights of contemporary critical and cultural theories, they would risk irrelevance in the modern university. Now seems an apt time to keep Frantzen himself as

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relevant as possible, so that we can finally excavate and bring to light the traces of the homophobia, misogyny, and racism that inform so much of his work, as well as better reveal Frantzen’s ongoing (and lamentably hateful) nostalgia for a supposedly “lost world” of heroic (white) masculine culture in which women, effeminate fags, bull-dykes, drag queens,3 and other sexual dissidents need not apply, nor “figure.” The conjoined fields of Old English and “Anglo-Saxon”4 studies have worked mightily over the past thirty years (and more) to deny the essentially racist, homophobic, sexist, settler-colonialist, and white nationalist foundations of their fields of knowledge, and they have given Frantzen the lion’s share of all of their citations in their work on gender, sexuality, and the intellectual origins of early English studies, and with very little exploration of the deeper foundations of Frantzen’s own thought, even though he was pretty transparent in pretty much of all of his publications in showing his “hand.” So, for example, at the outset of Desire for Origins he wrote something that appears to admirably take up the cause of embracing critical theory in the field of Old English studies:

engagement with political controversy has always been a distinctive and indeed an essential motive for studying language origins and therefore for studying Anglo-Saxon. The corollary to my thesis is that disengagement from politics and an attempt to justify the study of linguistic origins for their own sake are innovations in the modern Anglo-Saxon scholarly tradition; these developments, I believe, explain why Anglo-Saxon subjects have failed to retain a place in the mainstream of modern intellectual and political life.5

At the same time, and in the same volume, Frantzen “outs” himself as a “traditionalist” and even disses the “left-leaning orthodoxy” that weakened the potentially valuable scholarship of Edward Said, for example, evidenced by “Said’s embarrassing willingness to oblige any aspect of the Palestinian cause, a prominent feature of his cultural criticism.” Frantzen also takes multiple digs at feminist and Marxist critique, and even praises Lynne W. Cheney, head of the National Endowment of the Humanities at the time of this book’s publication (1990). Cheney argued continuously in her position as head of the NEH that the humanities had become a refuge for “gloomy, politically-driven, blame-the- West-first revisionism” that derides and scorns “the best that is known and thought in the world.”6 She also presided over, and urged, a series of Congressional attempts to decimate the budget of the NEH, which were ultimately successful in 1996 when the agency’s budget was cut by 36%, from a high of $172 million to roughly $110 million. Even with the changes in administrations over the past 20+ years, the agency has still not fully recovered.7 For Frantzen, as for Cheney, and other white supremacist “traditionalist” scholars such as Allan Bloom (who we might recall fought against the inclusion of the work of Franz Fanon in the curriculum at Stanford), the “function of scholarship” is “celebrating, upholding, and continuing culture, rather than criticizing it.”8 If this was, and is, indeed Frantzen’s viewpoint, why is his work cited more than anyone else in these fields in scholarship on gender and sexuality (and only in a minority of cases, with negative critique, usually leveled by female-identified and queer scholars), even in the work of the earliest and mid-career scholars who should know (and

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read) better? Part of the problem, of course, is that no matter what anyone thought, and still thinks, of Frantzen’s work on gender and sexuality, he is almost uniformly praised for his supposedly erudite and deeply learned “historicism,” which is pretty much anything but. Scholars of “Old English” and “Anglo- Saxon” studies are thus either terrible close readers or complete cowards.

It should be noted that there has been important pushback (more and less subtle, and otherwise) against Frantzen’s work on gender and sexuality from feminist+queer scholars in Old English studies, such as Jane Chance, Mary Dockray-Miller, Sharon Farmer, Clare Lees, Gillian Overing, Carol Braun Pasternack (one of my own mentors, whose work in Old English studies is simply not cited enough), Helene Scheck, Diane Watt, and Lisa Weston, among others. Nevertheless, for reasons that continue to mystify me, their critiques have simply not had the effect of lessening the often neutral and/or approving citations of Frantzen’s work within the field, and we are still waiting for the scholar who would be willing to suggest that Frantzen and his work should essentially be thrown out the window, which is exactly what I propose with this volume of essays. The work of decolonialty is not about “diversifying” one’s syllabus or hiring “tokenized” scholars of color who are asked to do more work than anyone else to make students of color feel more “safe,” and the like: decolonial practice requires the actual dismantling of academic structures, including learned societies, such as the organization formerly known as the “International Society of Anglo-Saxonists” (see note 3 below), and entire academic units, such as the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge, which has represented some of the most conservative work in the field, as well as the medieval studies program at Oxford University, the faculty of which have decided that harboring and celebrating one of the worst sexual predators in the field of Old English studies, Andy Orchard, is more important than actually listening to their students and colleagues who have been assaulted by him, and is more important than doing something definitive about it.

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Jack Donovan and his local chapter of the Wolves of Vinland, Waldgang, Oregon.

The approach of “masculinities” studies is to emasculate men and empower women by undermining the masculine/feminine polarity to the extent that no hierarchy of masculine—no scale of what is more or less masculine behavior or physicality—is conceivable to males and females indoctrinated with this ideology. From this dubious and unconvincing perspective, there is no “more” or “less” masculine behavior. Anyone who calls anything they do “masculine” must be accepted as having “one of many masculinities”—from a woman on testosterone with a short haircut who seeks status and affirmation by claiming to be the first man to give birth, to a mincing drag queen who claims that his “masculinity” is hierarchically equal to the masculinity of a combat veteran. There are strange and rare exceptions— like transsexual combat veterans—but the tendency to redefine words and general rules by the exceptions and outliers is itself a feminine-empathic characteristic. The eternal polarities of masculine and feminine don’t need to be redefined by outliers and anomalies unless you live in constant fear of hurting someone’s feelings or failing to sufficiently affirm their delusions. The masculine mind is comfortable with treating exceptions as exceptions, because men are solar in nature and appreciate order. The feminine urge wants everything to be equal and the same as it hugs the world back into an amniotic void of comfort and darkness.

~ Jack Donovan, “The APA is a Feminist, Partisan Organization”

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Before we defenestrate Frantzen, I think it is important to have as many scholars as possible, working together, to demonstrate the specious misogyny, homophobia, and racism of Frantzen’s oeuvre, which should be reason enough to de-canonize him. For example, the savvy reader of Frantzen’s work on gender, especially on masculinity, both in early medieval England and in our own time, will note immediately the resonances between Donovan’s thinking about the “eternal polarities” of the “masculine” and the “feminine” (see quotation above) and Frantzen’s own belief, supposedly evidenced (in his opinion) in early English texts, that gender studies work best “when it enables comparisons of men to men and women to women. Then gender can reveal information about men as men and women as women that conflicts between the sexes cannot reveal.”9

Let his work remain as a relic of a field whose structural misogyny, homo/transphobia, ableism, and racism literally made room for him, and even celebrated him while making jokes behind his back— more specifically, in the case of senior and well-respected male scholars, who were clearly discomfited by Frantzen’s homosexuality (I overhead many damning comments at conferences in the mid- to late 1990s that were breathtaking in their homophobia), while they also sought to praise his work, or at least his “historicism” more publicly.10 Indeed, one could argue that the reception of Frantzen’s work on gender and sexuality is both “weird” and “hollow.” This reception is “weird” in the sense that so much scholarship cites him without ever really engaging the problems of his scholarship, and especially his so-called “historicism,” for which he receives a lot of praise, even from female-identified scholars who are nevertheless also discomfited by his sexism as well his stances on contemporary queer theory, which he pretty much rejects as being too obsessed with sex and sex practices. And this reception history is also “hollow” because you will search long and wide to find his work cited by scholars working in later periods, such as early modern studies, or in contemporary queer studies, whereas queer medievalist scholars such as Glenn Burger, Bill Burgwinkle, Carolyn Dinshaw, Aranye Fradenburg, Simon Gaunt, Anna Klosowska, Steven Kruger, and Karma Lochrie, just to same some representative examples, have had a much wider impact on contemporary queer theory, such as in the work of Elizabeth Freeman and Heather Love.

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Ultimately, Frantzen’s “historicism” is colored by his desire to see something in the past that will affirm for him what he wants to believe: that there is continuity between same-sex relations in the early

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some valiant attempts, as stated above, but nothing dislodged Frantzen as a highly respected, and even feared, member of the not-so-polite “society” of “Anglo-Saxonists” (which is more like a wolves’ den than a tea party). There is no doubt in my mind that many of the more conservative (homophobic) “fathers” of our field were likely discomfited by Frantzen’s homosexuality and secretly wished he would be taken to task, critically, by others both within and outside of the field. But if Frantzen were not writing for these “fathers,” working so diligently, as he did in all of his scholarship, to claim the titles of both theoretical “innovator” and traditionally trained “historicist” for himself, while shoving to the outer margins anyone else in his field, or in queer studies more largely, working in similar territory, because of their supposedly polymorphously “erogenous” and “liberatory” ahistoricism (whether it was John Boswell, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Carolyn Dinshaw, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Terry Castle, etc.), while always claiming his own work had more historicist authority,12 then who was he writing for?

Jack Donovan, Master of His Own Destiny, Location Unknown.

I see all of this propaganda online telling me what is NOT OK, and how I am supposed to feel about strangers and other groups of people. If they get me to agree that I care about these strangers and their unhappiness, I’m supposed to accept responsibility for that unhappiness and do whatever I can to alleviate it….Some kid in Africa probably got his head sawed off with a butter knife while some chick named Shoshana experienced the nightmare of catcalling in New York City. No one cared, because they weren’t told to care. Given their perceivable social class and sex, the guys who were expressing their admiration for Shoshana have probably experienced far more brutality than being propositioned for

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sex. And no one cared when it happened. Shoshana is just the squeaky wheel who wants to be lubricated with your tears.

~ Jack Donovan, “I.Don’t.Care”

In his quest to invent a hard, heroic, asexualized, homo-butch masculinity, was Frantzen always perhaps on the Outside of “his” field, hiding in plain sight, or crouched, half visible, in the shades of his own scholarship? Perhaps the time for Frantzen’s truly dissident reader(s) is right now, from the fringes of anarchist-fascist, gender-separatist, white supremacist/racist organizations such as the Wolves of Vinland, one of the chief spokespersons for such, Jack Donovan, whom Frantzen deeply admires (more on which below), is wholly invested in the (self-invented) conjunctions between medieval works of literature such as the Poetic Edda and Beowulf, so-called “Germanic paganism,” and Waldgang, an “experimental, ritual space for men” that Donovan founded and built in the woods just outside of Portland, Oregon.13 As Slate reporter Donna Minkowicz explains, “Donovan embraces an idea the alt-right calls ‘pan-secessionism,’ under which, as Donovan says in his book A Sky without Eagles, ‘gangs’ of white men would form ‘autonomous zones’ for themselves and white women, where women ‘would not be permitted to rule or take part in […] political life.’ The gangs would enforce racial boundary lines, because, as Donovan puts it, whites have ‘radically different values [and] cultures’ than other people, and ‘loyalty requires preference. It requires discrimination’.”14 The name of Donovan’s compound was inspired by this passage from Ernst Jünger’s 1951 book, Der Waldgang (roughly translated as The Forest Passage):

A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self- affirmation from his own resources.15

We know that Frantzen reads and admires Donovan, but does Donovan even read Frantzen? In the absence of any answer to that question, let us be the “dissident” readers, and let’s give Frantzen the banishment and defenestration from the profession he deserves and (perhaps somewhat unconsciously) desires. Let’s give him a right spanking, served “straight up,” shaken and stirred, with a twist of the (defiant) fist, and then send him off to the “autonomous zone” of his own (spiritual, scholarly, and other) making. If he wants a boxer’s “kiss,” then we’ll give him one.16

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It’s worth expanding a bit on how Frantzen’s writings, both in Old English studies and in “modern masculinity” studies, reveal that he counts himself among those homosexuals who reject effeminate

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else’s blood”), the defiant “fist” he deserves; after all, it’s so butch. We’re speaking here, of course, of the oeuvre, and not the man.

The eternal polarities of masculine and feminine don’t need to be redefined by outliers and anomalies unless you live in constant fear of hurting someone’s feelings or failing to sufficiently affirm their delusions. The masculine mind is comfortable with treating exceptions as exceptions, because men are solar in nature and appreciate order. The feminine urge wants everything to be equal and the same as it hugs the world back into an amniotic void of comfort and darkness.

~ Jack Donovan, “The APA is a Feminist, Partisan Organization”

Defenestrating Frantzen is urgent critical work at this time in the Anglo-American university, not just in early medieval studies, but in English studies, and the Humanities more largely, where confronting, excavating, working through, and repairing the racial state-capitalist and settler-colonialist foundations of our knowledge disciplines and institutions of supposedly “higher” learning is a task (and dream) continually deferred, even as white scholars refuse to admit the ways in which they have benefited from and also work mightily to keep structural racism firmly in place, because otherwise they would have to acknowledge, work through, and repair the damage of their own complicity in structural racism. This is why Frantzen retains a singular and important position within the fields of Old English and “Anglo-Saxon” studies as an agent provocateur, both for his insistence that scholars are always “inventing” the past they think they are “discovering,” and thus the tools of both critical theory and cultural studies are necessary for excavating the political and other socially-embedded “origins” of the disciplines of Old English / English studies (Desire for Origins), and also for his supposedly groundbreaking work on gender and sexuality in early medieval England by way of his analysis of “Anglo-Saxon” laws and penitential manuals, with which he made the argument that the “closet” never existed for premodern queers, and did so with “evidence” that was supposedly “specific and straightforward rather than closeted and queer” (Before the Closet),19 as if that were a bad thing.

Sadly-tragically, or hysterically-laughably (take your pick), Frantzen offers the “shadow” and the “shade” as metaphorical substitutes for the “closet.” Both in the past and in our own time, this “shadow,” for queers (a term Frantzen eschewed as participating in an overly effeminized, de- masculated gay culture),

is more than a patch of darkness outlining a subject….A shadow is closely connected to the body whose shade it is, but it is also something else—something more—that belongs to the body but stands apart from it. Shadows shape our field of vision….I am quite happy with the shadow as a figure for same-sex love. Shadows cannot exist on their own, but nothing can be seen without them. Durable, adaptable, inescapable, they define. (p. 14)

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As is well-known, Frantzen concluded this book with an admittedly bravely confessional Afterword,20 “Me and My Shadows,” that nevertheless serves as a cautionary tale for self-loathing, misogynist homosexuals whose investment in toxic forms of an overly binarized, “heroic” (white, northern European) masculine culture ends up relapsing into homophobia, misogyny, and racism.

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This Call for Papers is ultimately for those who need it for reasons that are no one’s fucking business, and it is not for anyone who believes that professional decorum is more important than the truth, no matter how discomforting. This CFP is also for those who desire to hate with erudition, to burn the effigies of their idols with tapers lit by pages ripped from black-market bibliographies, and to cheer on the dying of the Wyte Light in the Western skies. This volume will be for those who understand, as Audre Lorde did, that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and that the personal will always be political.24 This CFP is for those who want, not to fuck with tradition, but to raise a defiant fist to/in it. And finally, this volume says to those who would argue that Frantzen’s “personal” beliefs and politics should not color our analysis or “appreciation” of his supposedly “neutral-historicist” knowledge of “Anglo-Saxon” history and culture: Fuck You.

I will serve as lead editor, but in addition to seeking contributors, I would also like to offer 1–2 co- editorships to anyone who might be fearless (or foolish) enough to do this with me, and to take responsibility (and all credit and/or blame) with me for the resulting publication. I am looking for contributions from scholars operating in the fields of “Anglo-Saxon” and Old English studies, medieval and early modern studies more largely, queer studies across disciplines and temporal periods, and anyone who feels called upon by this CFP to address the scholarship of Frantzen and the person behind it in light of his work’s thoroughly ahistorical “historicism,” misogyny, sexism, homophobia, and racism. Personal reflections are also welcome, if even anonymized, and there is no set word limit per potential contribution. Proposals and initial expression of interest are welcome until March 15, 2020 by email to [email protected].

This will be my last act as a Doctor of Philosophy within the fields of Old English and “Anglo-Saxon” studies (or, ASS, as Mary Rambaran-Olm put it so eloquently in her paper at the #RaceB4Race conference in Washington, DC this past September).25 Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and I will nevertheless always continue to welcome and foster radical work in premodern studies at punctum books. So, let’s get “medieval” and affectively-critically dissident on Frantzen’s ASS (Anglo-Saxon studies) and in the spirit of the tea dances26 of the 1960s to 1980s, FISTschrift ’till it’s 2021.

DESTROY your Origins. CUCKOLD the Comitatus. ENJOY your Symptoms. Footnotes 1. Although this CFP (and rage) is mine alone, I want to thank Aranye Fradenburg Joy for her incredibly insightful comments on an initial draft, and for helping me to see how, for lack of a better way of putting it, the reception of Frantzen’s work, both within and beyond Old English studies, has been both “weird” and also “hollow,” more on which below. Other people also helped but I won’t name them so they can keep their reputations intact. Aranye and I, on the other hand, frankly don’t

give a damn what anyone thinks. ↩

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2. To Allen Frantzen and John Niles’s credit, they included a chapter by Janet (“The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Poems and the Making of the English Nation”) in their edited volume, Anglo- Construction

of Social Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). ↩ 3. These terms — which are also slurs — are intentionally deployed here, partly to reclaim their fierce potential for disrupting the ways in which, since the 1980s, we have thoroughly defanged our more radically disruptive queer politics by seeking assimilation into an Instagram-perfect and sqeaky-clean heteronormative culture, of which Mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg, currently running for President, is a prime example: a real “low point” of sexual and identificatory conformity

in America. ↩ 4. Scare quotations marks — “Anglo-Saxon” — are intentional, because when you see these words, hyphenated like this, you should be scared and you should run like hell. For a small taste of the controversies that have been roiling early medieval English studies since at least 2016, see Allen J. Frantzen, “How to Fight Your Way Out of a Feminist Fog,” Allen J. Frantzen [website], January 22, 2016, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20160122163546/http://www.allenjfrantzen.com/Men/femfog.html; Rio Fernandez, “Prominent Medieval Scholar’s Blog on ‘Feminist Fog’ Sparks an Uproar,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Prominent- Medieval-Scholar-s/235014; Colleen Flaherty, “Whose Medieval Studies?” Inside Higher Ed, July 12, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/12/medieval-studies-groups-say-major- conference-trying-limit-diverse-voices-and-topics; Hannah Natasonson, “‘It’s all white people’: Allegations of White Supremacy Are Tearing Apart a Prestigious Medieval Studies Group,” The Washington Post, September 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/19/its- all-white-people-allegations-white-supremacy-are-tearing-apart-prestigious-medieval-studies- group/; Colleen Flaherty, “It’s About More Than a Name,” Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2019; and Mary Rambaran-Olm, “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies,” History Workshop, November 4, 2019, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/misnaming-the-medieval-

rejecting-anglo-saxon-studies/. ↩ 5. Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. xiii. ↩ 6. Lynne W. Cheney, quoted in “Scholarly Editions in Jeopardy’ [op-ed], The New York Times, October

21, 2000, A:14, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/21/opinion/scholarly-editions-in-jeopardy.html. ↩ 7. The current annual budget of the NEH is $155 million. See “NEH Appropriations History,” National

Endowment for the Humanities [website], https://www.neh.gov/neh-appropriations-history. ↩

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8. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 216. See also Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), which was widely viewed as one of the most loathsomely white- centered, antifeminist, racist tomes in higher education studies when I myself entered graduate

school, as an MFA student, in the late 1980s. ↩ 9. Allen J. Frantzen, Anglo-Saxon Keywords (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 117. Based on this passage alone, it is a travesty and disservice to the field, and especially to our students, that Frantzen was the scholar to take on (or be given) the task of authoring such a handbook of “keywords” for the field of “Anglo-Saxon” studies. I would suggest strongly that when Frantzen is

defenestrated, that this book should also be thrown out the window. ↩ 10. I want to thank Erik Wade here for generously sharing some of his work on Frantzen’s oeuvre with me, especially his thorough review of the reception history of Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Angels in America’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), where he has been able to demonstrate that “reviews of Frantzen’s Before the Closet are split between feminists sounding cautionary notes about Frantzen’s ‘old-fashioned and reactionary conservatism’ and male medieval scholars pleased about Frantzen’s ‘salutary critique of queer theory’ and queer theory’s ‘rather unhistorical approach,’ which they claim tries to ‘dictate’ methodology (unlike Frantzen, who ‘gets the methodology right’). The few negative reviews express discomfort with Frantzen’s personal digressions about his homosexuality; a review in The English Historical Review, although pleased that ‘gay liberationists’ will be angry at Frantzen’s book, ends by stating ‘it is a pity that, as so often in homosexual and other minority literature, bathos should spoil a thoughtful book’,” referring of course to the Afterword to Before the Closet, where Frantzen revealed his own “coming out” narrative via stories about growing up in rural Iowa and serving in Korea during the Vietnam War as a young man (and full disclosure: when I first read this book shortly after completing my own dissertation, I thought it was brave of Frantzen to do this). Reviews quoted in the excerpt from Wade’s work, in order, are Jane Chance, Michael W.Twomey, Renate Bauer, and Pierre J. Payer. Wade has been generous in sharing portions of both his dissertation, “Significant Others: Sexuality, Race, and National Identity in Early Medieval English Literature” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2018), as well as an article-in-progress, “Skeletons in the Closet: Scholarly Erasure of Queer and Trans Themes in Early Medieval English Texts.” Wade is also thankfully completing a book project based on his dissertation, and it is worth quoting in full, especially as he is pretty much the only scholar, in my opinion, who has been delineating the problems with Franzten’s oeuvre with real verve and intelligence, and also further illuminating those problems by way of Critical Race Theory: ”My book project explores how authors in the British Isles from approximately 500-1000 AD used sexual practices to signal membership in racial groups and to construct hierarchies that might effectively consolidate a ‘true English identity.’ By tracing early medieval writers’ depictions of race as an

17 punctum books CFP: Defenestrating Frantzen: A Fistschrift

essential (though not necessarily embodied or visible) marker of group difference, I reveal how race

and sexuality ultimately become categories inseparable from that of nation.” ↩

11. I am thankful to Aranye Fradenburg Joy for this insightful observation. ↩

12. See, especially, the preface, “Introduction: Straightforward,” in Before the Closet, 1–29. ↩ 13. Jack Donovan, “Waldgang,” Jack Donovan [website], https://www.jack-

donovan.com/sowilo/waldgang/. ↩ 14. Donna Minkowicz, “How the Alt-Right is Using Sex and Camp to Attract Gay Men to Fascism,” Slate, June 5, 2017, https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/06/how-alt-right-leaders-jack-donovan-

and-james-omeara-attract-gay-men-to-the-movement.html. ↩

15. Quoted in Donovan, “Waldgang.” ↩ 16. Since at least 2016, and by his own admission, Frantzen has been working on a new book entitled “The Boxer’s Kiss: Fighting to Find the Whole Man,” https://web.archive.org/web/20160117223055/http://www.allenjfrantzen.com:80/Men/FrantzenBo

xing.pdf. ↩ 17. Jack Malebranche [pseudonym for Jack Donovan], Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity: Reclaiming Masculinity (Baltimore: Scapegoat Publishing, 2007); republished and made available by Jack Donovan under his own name and press (Dissonant Hum) in 2013: https://issuu.com/lucasmessali/docs/androphilia_-_jack_donovan. In his original preface, included in the online 2013 edition, Malebranche [Donovan] wrote, “This book is about seceding from the gay community and rediscovering masculinity. It is a dare to leave the gay world completely behind and rejoin the brotherhood of men” (p. 9). The cover of all editions of the book is adorned with war helmets that look distinctly “ancient” or “medieval” in origin. See Jack Donovan’s collected writings, as well as links to his many published works, at his website: https://www.jack- donovan.com/sowilo/. For a prolegomenon to a longer work on the debts and entanglements, intellectual and otherwise, between Donovan’s and Frantzen’s (mutual) thinking on separatist, antifeminist, homo-butch masculinity, see Eileen A. Joy, “Building a Tribe Outside the System: Allen Frantzen, Jack Donovan, and the Neomedievalist Alt-Right,” keynote lecture, University of Richmond, March 27, 2018. An audiovisual recording of this lecture is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWt0xdhLoeU. ↩ 18. See Allen J. Frantzen, Modern Masculinity: A Guide for Men (2016) [self-published]. See also The Rational Male website, https://therationalmale.com/, and Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male:

Preventive Medicine (Nevada: Counterflow Media, 2015). ↩

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19. Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Angels in America’ (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 3. ↩ 20. Which Afterword more recently has been incisively critiqued for its critical ungenerosity, and the ways in which Frantzen’s own “coming-of-age” / “coming out” story (both in the rural Iowa of his childhood and in Korea where Frantzen was stationed as a young man during the Vietnam War) is “mapped onto a rural, agrarian, and militarized perception of Anglo-Saxon masculinity and homosexuality” that also refuses “to engage the logics of settler colonialism and postcolonialism,” and his own misogynist and racist participation in those logics, see Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo- Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2019), pp. 337–54, and Dorothy Kim, Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies, unpublished manuscript (with gratitude to

Prof. Kim for sharing a draft of this manuscript with me). ↩ 21. A more rousing (and more explicitly damning, yet less subtle) critique came from Jane Chance, in her review of the book for Arthuriana in 1999, where she referred to Frantzen as an “[i]mpossibly old-fashioned and reactionary” gay man who desires nothing more than assimilation: Jane Chance, “Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Angels in America’ by Allen J. Frantzen (review),” Arthuriana 9, no. 4 (1999): 125–28. It is unfortunate that in more recent years Jane Chance has spent an inordinate amount of time on social media publicly defending white supremacist, Islamophobic, racist professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, Rachel Fulton Brown, as well as Brown’s friendship with one of the most vile (and laughably, ineptly insincere) mouthpieces for the darkest corners of the digital alt-Right, Milo Yiannopoulis. On Brown’s delightfully (and depressingly) kinky-psychotic-obsessive relationship with Yiannopoulis, see Rachel Fulton Brown, The Milo Chronicles, published in 2019 by Yiannopoulis’s press Dangerous Books (608 pages!), where she writes that she “loves” Milo because he tells the “truth” that “America is the greatest country in the history of human civilization, but that it is ours only so long as we are willing to fight.” For important background to Chance’s foray into this hot mess of eroto-religious, campy mania and racism (Brown regularly compares Yiannopoulis to Christ and herself to the Virgin Mary, and has also dressed up, in full outrageous costume as the goddess of “Wisdom” to his “Neptune”), see Dorothy Kim, “Medieval Studies Since Charlottesville,” Inside Higher Ed, August 30, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/08/30/scholar-describes-being-conditionally-

accepted-medieval-studies-opinion. ↩ 22. Susan M. Kim, “Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Angels in America’ by Allen J.

Frantzen” (review), Modern Philology 100, no. 1 (2002): 60–63, at 61–62; my emphasis. ↩

23. See Allen J. Frantzen, “When Women Aren’t Enough,” Speculum 68, no. 2 (1993): 445–71. ↩

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24. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister/Outsider:

Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 110–13. ↩ 25. See “Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race™ Symposium,” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), Arizona State University [website], https://acmrs.asu.edu/public- events/symposia/race-and-periodization. For one of the most devastating critiques of the field formerly known as “Anglo-Saxon” studies, which is also a beautifully composed personal lament that unsettles the field’s vision of itself as non-racist and inclusive, see Mary Rambaran- Olm, “Anglo-Saxon Studies [Early English Studies], Academia and White Supremacy,” Medium, June 27, 2018, https://medium.com/@mrambaranolm/anglo- saxon-studies-academia-and-white- supremacy-17c87b360bf3.

↩ 26. See Will Kohler, “The Very Gay and Interesting History of the Almost Lost Tradition of the Sunday Tea Dance,” Back2Stonewall, May 26, 2019, http://www.back2stonewall.com/2019/05/gay- history-lost-tradition-sunday-tea-dance.html. There is no event more defining of my own coming of age in Washington, DC in the 1980s than the Sunday afternoon tea dances, especially at TRACKS, that raged on before and during the advent and devastation of AIDs. In the midst of great suffering and death and psychic destructions, and despite all of the very public stigmas that attached to being gay at that time, and despite the makeshift hospices in everyone’s apartments, and the suicides and other deaths, there was always dancing—there was a certain, decadent culture that, even in the midst of Reagan’s presidency and the rise of an unfettered and deregulated Wall Street, reigned supreme in southeast DC and gave many of us hope that there would be a life on the other side of AIDs, and even during it. See Lou Chibbaro, Jr., “Glory Days,” Washington Blade, April 25, 2013, https://www.washingtonblade.com/2013/04/25/glory-days-tracks-gay-nightlife-staple-of-80s-90s-

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remembered-fondly/. Regarding the eventual “mainstreaming” and decimation of the radical gay culture of 1980s Washington, DC, my hometown, see Harrison Smith, “What Happened to DC’s Lesbian Spaces?” Washingtonian, June 26, 2015,

https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/06/26/bonnie-morris-dc-lesbian-spaces-omega/. ↩

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