#queering academia

[hypomanicsatanicpanic]

[mattymonethi]

The parts I painted in a group mural some friends and I have been working on

[brehaaorgana]

Today we assume that the sexual and spiritual are mutually exclusive, but this may not be the case. Like us, a fourteenth century viewer may not have been oblivious to the visually vaginal characteristics of the wound of Christ, particularly when it was consciously and specifically isolated from his side and reoriented to a vertical position, constructed in the same way as the vagina in medieval visual culture. The association of the wound of Christ with the female genitalia had a basis in theological thought, where fourteenth-century theologians and mystics described the bleeding, lactating, and birthing functions of the wound and the visualization of these characteristics was sanctioned. The interrelationship between blood, milk, and birth, between the universal and the feminine, was pervasive not only in theological sources but in secular ones as well, suggesting the wound of Christ was seen as a multivalent symbol ultimately representing the nourishment and redemption awarded to the faithful who properly adored it. [...] A vaginal wound of Christ helps underscore the ways in which Christ's body was viewed and described as feminine, and therefore could be described as an example of the female that is positive, in a tradition of scholarship that tends to view most aspects of the medieval female experience as negative constructions from a misogynist society.

Martha Easton, Excerpt from “The Wound of Christ, The Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female Anatomy in the Later Middle Ages.”