At queere den barnfri nonne

Hos Lauren Groff og Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen

Resumé

The nun is a figure who, due to her radical otherness, has been subjected to various and very contradictory cultural projections throughout history. She has been interpreted as an activist and a feminist ideal, but also as an oppressed or perverted female figure. In contemporary Western culture, she is everywhere. Through readings of the works Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff and Hildegard (2009) by Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen, the article explores how queer theory, and in particular Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of the temporal drag and Jack Halberstam’s concept of female masculinity, can help us understand and release the subversive potential of the nun in our contemporary moment. The article focuses on how queer reinterpretations of medieval nun figures offer new (re)interpretations of gender and kinship. The article argues that Groff’s and Marstrand-Jørgensen’s historical nun figures, by virtue of their role as temporal drags, revoke heteronormative gender dualism, primarily by depicting medieval nuns as women who embody what we have identified as both feminine and masculine gender characteristics throughout Western culture. The article further argues that the queerness of the nuns consists in their avoidance of procreation and motherhood, and thus in the reproduction of heteronormative marriage, and that their performance of child freedom potentially enables other forms of temporality and other ways of forming kinship.