Louder than Words: Female Embodiment and Kinaesthetics in Middle English Texts

Abstract

“Louder than Words: Female Embodiment and Kinaesthetics in Middle English Texts” examines how women in late medieval imaginative literatures find creative, resilient ways to exercise agency through movement. Where literary and medieval studies adopt a strategy of (re)imbuing the female body with the capacity for speech to recuperate female subjectivity, I argue that attending to literal forms of movement in literature allows readers to understand agency without reliance on verbal contexts. I therefore draw on performance studies, feminist theories of embodiment, and my own dance experiences to develop an original method of reading with a “kinaesthetic sensitivity,” which turns to movements and their consequences as expressions of bodily agencies. I demonstrate how reading for physical movements that occur at the intimate scale of the body and bodily interactions recovers a nonverbal body’s potential to actively create meaning and shape communicative environments. While offering new insights into movement as a means for communicating and generating knowledge without language, “Louder than Words” theorizes kinaesthetic reading as an imaginative practice that re-envisions past and future relationships among marginalized bodies, gendered spaces, and power.

By taking a body’s inherent potential for action as a starting point, each of my core chapters develops an account of the female body as a communicative medium within—and despite—social, spatial, and narrative constraints, and performative movement as a nonverbal expression of agency. Although written in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, the Middle English texts I discuss offer new approaches to questions of agency currently under exploration across disciplines and periodized fields of study. Chapter 2 pulls its vocabularies from modern performance philosophy to articulate how the relationship between human and object agencies generates communicative environments and pushes against language-based modes of narrative creation in the romance Undo Your Door (c. 1520/1560). In Chapter 3, the performance and disability studies concept “speculative embodiment” illuminates the ethical stakes of imagining nonverbal actions as effective forms of communication and examining readers’ transmedial and transhistorical engagements with early dramas like the Towneley plays (c. 1556-59). Chapter 4 reflects on contemporary dance practices from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, like dance “scores” and improvisation, to theorize how relational scenarios structured by constraint can unexpectedly catalyze agentic movements in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1382-86). Chapter 5 draws on a logistics mobility model, which frequently pertains to modern trade and shipping industries, to track physical and ideological movements across global networks as embodied events in the romance The King of Tars (c. 1330).

Consequently, the link between a body’s potential for action and its physicality supports an understanding of subjecthood and agency as manifest not just in the natural world, but also within textual worlds. Through a kinaesthetic sensitivity, I show how readers can access the seemingly invisible capacities that make a female body always already a subject of action and bearer of meaning within a given text. Ultimately, I identify an ethical imperative embedded within a kinaesthetic sensitivity that is crucial not only to interdisciplinary discourses around gendered embodiment, but to our considerations of whose (or what) bodies we continue to (de)value in a world where the silenced or constrained still endure and creatively contest their precarity.