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Abduction And Feminine Expression In Sir Orfeo, Ruth Worgan

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This article provides a new, queer feminist reading of Sir Orfeo, in which Dame Heurodis facilitates her abduction by the Fairy King in order to destabilize the patriarchal possession of her body. Using Luce Irigaray’s work on the exchange of women between men, I discuss Heurodis’s value as a commodity and how she extricates herself from this position. Irigaray proposes that the primeval patriarchy created an exclusive between-men discourse within society, a consequence of which is the consuming masculine gaze. I consider how the silencing of the feminine is akin to the silence of the natural world, and how …