Gay Signs, Transgressive Sexuality, And Homoeffective...

Margery Kempe’s Erotic Devious Escapades; Lesbian Signs, Transgressive Sexuality, and Homoeffective Bonding In The Book of Margery Kempe Imagine being forced to live a life that was untrue to who you were, having to conform to heteronormativity because it was your own life at stake. But what if there was a way out? This is exactly what Margery Kempe does, she finds a way out of her heteronormative lifestyle that she was thrown into in the early 1400s of medieval England. Kempe realizes that the only way for her to get out of this lifestyle is to become an image of God. Kempe transforms herself into a holy woman, even aiming to make herself seem saint like in an effort to cover up her lesbian tendencies. In The Book of Margery Kempe, Kempe utilizes the literary devices of lesbian signs, transgressive sexuality, and homoeffective bonding to depict her underlying homoerotic tendencies that cause her to purse a mystical marriage with Christ. Being queer in the 1400s was unacceptable and was actually considered sodomy which was punishable by death. Leon Jacobowitz Efron, explains in his texts the severity of what was going through a person’s head about homosexuality at this time in history, â€Å"Those, however, in whom sodomitical behavior is habitual rather than congenital, those in whom this behavior is driven solely by the pleasure†¦are all perceived by Pietro to be morally responsible for their reprehensible sexual conduct† (Efron). Now people are beginning to have