François·e Charmaille

François·e Charmaille

@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Research fellow, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. They/them. Transing grammar; transing the climate.

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François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

The Middle Ages are not essential -- and that is what makes them so helpful to us. Prior to the hegemony of racial capitalism, medieval cultures offer us a glimpse into other ways of thinking and being, revealing our own capacity to be otherwise. This is the topic of my essay in Speculum.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

I'm so happy that my piece about nonbeenary monks made it into this wonderful issue of postmedieval! Alongside some great pieces of ecotheory, gender theory, creative and imaginative figuration, links between Italy and Asia... This issue is a dazzling picture of boundary-pushing research.

postmedieval@postmedieval.bsky.social

while we are on the topic of our 2025 publications, take a look at our winter issue! what’s inside? pieces on idols and figuration, gender, ecocriticism, medievalisms, and whiteness on premodern and contemporary literatures spanning from west to east asia and from west to east europe!

François·e Charmaille reposted

postmedieval
@postmedieval.bsky.social

with our thanks to @onetricksyboy.bsky.social and @fcharmaille.bsky.social for publishing their work with us!

postmedieval@postmedieval.bsky.social

while we are on the topic of our 2025 publications, take a look at our winter issue! what’s inside? pieces on idols and figuration, gender, ecocriticism, medievalisms, and whiteness on premodern and contemporary literatures spanning from west to east asia and from west to east europe!

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Monks in the ninth–eleventh centuries identified with bees to make sense of their place in medieval society. In bees, they found an ideal of communal life, selfless virtue, and chastity. By living with bees and writing about them, these monks forged a distinct, nonbeenary gender.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

The Middle Ages are not essential -- and that is what makes them so helpful to us. Prior to the hegemony of racial capitalism, medieval cultures offer us a glimpse into other ways of thinking and being, revealing our own capacity to be otherwise. This is the topic of my essay in Speculum.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

It's an honour to contribute to the colloquium on "Psychoanalysis, Transgender Studies, and Medieval Studies" in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. I argue that Lacan's critique of metaphor allows us to join up a distinctly medieval concept of "gender" with present-day anxieties about toilets.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

This culminates in a trans/medieval critique of Lacan's transcendental sexual difference. This colloquium is generously edited by Ruth Evans and Jessica Rosenfeld, with brilliant contributions from A. E. Whitacre, Masha Raskolnikov, Zachary Engledow, and Grace Lavery.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Out today! Sodomy is "the sin against nature." But what is "nature"? "Heterosexuality" seems like the obvious answer, but such a term is anachronistic... Sodomy might be better understood as the disruption of the division between male and female.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Friday 2 May, 5pm, in Cambridge: I will be speaking at the ASNC Research Seminar, about The Contingent Middle Ages. The Middle Ages are generative, are worth engaging with, because they are inessential. I'm very excited to share this work. GR04 in the Faculty of English.

François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Writers over the course of the Middle Ages interpreted the classical myth of Tiresias's sex change as an allegory for the cycle of the seasons. This led to the emergence of a strange notion: that the seasons have genders, that the climate is trans. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

journals.uchicago.eduTrans Climates of the European Middle Ages, 500–1300 | Speculum: Vol 98, No 3Abstract This article gathers evidence of a distinct strand of writing in Western Europe from the sixth century onwards which concerns itself with the relation between the seasons and sexual differenc...
François·e Charmaille
@fcharmaille.bsky.social

Were there medieval medical theories of intersex? Was there a distinction between sex and gender? How were humors related to sex/gender? What does it do to a woman if she has too much greenness in her body? I wrote about it in Exemplaria, and it's Open Access. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.comIntersex Between Sex And Gender In Cause Et CureThis article argues that intersex is present in medieval medical texts outside of the medieval concept of hermaphroditism. The phlegmatic man, the phlegmatic woman, and the sanguine man, in the twe...

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