Flesh Against Fur: Buttocks, Bodies, Beasts, and the (Un)Hidden Relations in the Queer Forest
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Abstract
This article explores the depictions of bare-buttocked human figures and beasts that inhabit the bas-de-page (the lower margins) of The Rutland Psalter (1260), an illuminated manuscript containing religious texts such as the Psalms. Read through the frameworks of queer theory and post-human theory, the study finds that the depictions of bare-buttocked human figures and animals articulate queer desire in seven distinct modes: (1) a desire for intimate bodily fusion that seeks to dissolve the boundary between agent and recipient; (2) profound desire among male knights; (3) a desire to inflict pain as a mechanism for producing emotional bonds; (4) shared desire among humans, plants, and animals; (5) a desire oriented toward the exploration and experimentation of alternative identities; (6) sexual desire not confined solely to the reproduction of lineage; and (7) a desire structured as ongoing becoming. The study argues that a queer reading of the depictions of bare-buttocked human figures confronting animals in The Rutland Psalter reveals forms of queer desire that are not confined to the human body or to contemporary sexual paradigms. Rather, these images provocatively and fluidly blur the boundaries between humans and animals, generating modes of desire that unsettle and destabilize medieval constructions of identity and sexual normativity.
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