Inherited Futures and Queer Privilege
This chapter considers John Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine within a queer genealogical framework in order to contribute to a queer historical archive. Procreative and generative language and detail early in the narrative explicitly open the vita to a reading that considers the text itself as offspring in a genealogical line of reproduced texts. Thus the chapter also understands this textual procreation as representative of a particularly genderqueer temporality. Finally, this chapter offers an intersectional consideration of Katherine’s characterization in order to assess how different social privileges and subjugations effect and enable her veneration, complicating essentialist notions of gendered social position and female sanctity.