Diana and All Her Sect: Remembering Women Warriors, 25th International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 2–5, 2018

The trope of the warrior woman, whether literary construct or historical figure, has been harnessed throughout medieval culture as a technology of memory, that is, as a way of recuperating but also policing, female-coded historiographies in which women’s agency can be imagined and performed. Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, Diana, the goddess of the hunt, the biblical Judith, Zenobia and Semiramis, among many others, function as epistemological paradigms which recast not only roles traditionally assigned to women in political and military conflicts, but also conventional histories of warfare and cultural difference. The liminality of these warrior women, as women occupying a masculine space and often the labile confines between East and West, also translates into a reassessment of the geographical and cultural boundaries between civilisations, in particular between white Christianity as default dominant identity and the constructed alterity of other racial and religious subject position. Remembering and reappropriating women warriors allows therefore the performance of these boundaries, at times to reinforce them and at times to unsettle them.

We seek 15/20-minute papers which explore historical and fictional women warriors with a specific attention paid to how gender theories and global perspectives can help us unpack the cultural anxieties which these women embody.

Organizers
Sophie Harwood, University of Leeds
Roberta Magnani, Swansea University
Amy Louise Morgan, University of Surrey