Subtheme:
Bad Taste & Guilty Pleasures

Organizers: Kamila Kaminska Palarczyk (Yale) and Arielle McKee (Wake Forest)

Guilt responds to some feeling of wrongdoing. Whether acknowledging transgressive behavior, indulgence in excess, or succumbing to forbidden desire, guilt is an intimate experience felt within faculties of the mind. Although felt in private, guilt is a learned psychological intervention that, in turn, polices “good” and condemns “bad” behaviors. Medieval didactic literature, religious treatises, and legal texts variously leverage the concept of guilt in order to habituate the individual into moral virtue. For example, Augustine mobilized guilt in the Confessions to champion conversion, while Dante, in his divine epic, tackled the moral difficulties of guilt when a soul fails to recognize committed sins. 

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Conversely, the unapologetic celebration of one’s pleasure—the refusal to feel guilt—can have liberating, radical effects. Pleasure—whether experienced individually, with a close group, or during a communal festival—also has a personal component; it is uniquely experienced and singularly embodied. However, culture can encourage individuals to feel only certain pleasures or to experience pleasures in particular ways at particular times. 

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One mechanism for thus regulating pleasure is the concept of “taste,” which can be used to discipline joy by suggesting that some pleasures are “guilty”: more foolish, shameful, prurient, or debased than others. The pleasures—sexual, artistic, emotional, sensory, and relational—that are not considered to be in good taste are to be hidden, kept to oneself, done in private, or, at the guiltiest end of the spectrum, pursued only when one’s identity is disguised—separated from the visible self. Taste, joined with guilt and community perception, can even be used to exclude certain texts, practices, and people.

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This thread foregrounds the ways in which guilt, pleasure, and taste negotiate relationships between medieval institutional powers, persons, and forms. We encourage submissions that embrace “pleasure” in all its capacities: pleasures found in sensation, movement, reading and reception, creation, consumption, community, solitude, and more. Intersectional, theoretical, and geographically expansive approaches are most welcome. Papers might explore:

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• Genre and pleasure reading;

• Private or semi-hidden communities of pleasure;

• Shameless pleasures / shamelessness and its effects;

• Ideologies of punishment (e.g. technologies against moral delinquency or the pleasures of punishment);

• Forbidden desires and bad taste;

• Legal histories of guilt, innocence, and pleasure;

• Legacies of guilt;

• Histories of pleasure;

• etc.