Subtheme:
Scandalous (Re)readings, Medieval
and Modern

Organizers: Jenny Adams (U Mass, Amherst)

and Anthony Perron (Loyola Marymount University)

In 1985, the self-described Washington Wives led a battle against the music industry. At the center of the controversy: the Filthy Fifteen, a set of songs so scandalous that they could provoke children into violent actions. Most today would groan at the idea that Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” might trigger a school shooting. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we have all had various revisionist relationships to the ways we understand texts. In this subtheme, we invite presenters to meditate on the idea of scandalous interpretations. What critical works from earlier years now seem tame or even dated? What rereadings and reinterpretations of modern scholarship have generated offense and why? How did medieval people reinterpret older texts or introduce new texts that scandalized received understandings? What might this tell us about the trajectory of critical thought? What is gained or lost by critical scandal? What is gained or lost by a frame that dampens it? What ways can readings across disciplines produce a kind of scandal? This subtheme is meant to be open and generative, and inclusive of medieval readings and texts that produced outrage or changed discourses in their own time.