Of course, I’ve deliberately stacked the deck there, partly because I don’t think the chivalry debate is actually a debate; it’s a way of obscuring the real issues behind a warm, old-timey phrase.

“Chivalry” tends to enter the conversation when it is suggested that women might be treated as equals in the public space, that they might not be subjected to sexualised commentary for simply walking down the street, or might be paid an equal salary to men.

Then “chivalry” suddenly arrives as the benign, patronising face of patriarchy. Don’t women want men to open doors for them, to buy drinks for them, to arrange for them to be unable to support themselves economically and thus be dependent on the contingent goodwill of another person for their livelihood? That’s just plain mean, and almost certainly emotionally manipulative.

The reason this gambit interests me is not how ridiculous it sounds when spelled out (though that too) but how much explanatory force is attributed to such a vague and nebulous ideology.

Even more than evopsych, another gender-wrangle bugbear, “chivalry” offers so little specific justification. Even the debased version of evolutionary psychology one meets in the arguments of MRAs and redditors who have stumbled furiously into the comments section of Feministe (in the manner of a partygoer in Cancun who reaches for that Hawaiian shirt in the wardrobe and finds himself amid the snows of Narnia) purports to present an argument and a set of historical (well, mythical) explanations.

That’s why “chivalry” is so often a distraction, a way of blowing warm, nostalgic smoke across the debate until its not clear what we’re even arguing against.

The other reason it seems odd is the diametrically opposed way we use “medieval”. Like sixteenth-century humanists, we rush to brand anything barbarous, vicious or ignorant as “medieval”. The actions of Boko Haram, for example, or the conditions in an inner-city crackhouse, or Creationism. Somehow “chivalry” expresses a comfortable reactionary vision of gender relations, in which women simper and accept being corralled into particular spheres of activity away from real power, whereas “medieval” is backward and dumb. The bad kind of backward and dumb.

Between them these terms manage a bait and switch on our engagement with the past and its bearing on gender politics. A necessary one, given the preponderance of “princess” vocabulary which saturates the images offered to girls and young women. Narratives about dating, dress and men’s attention are full of language which assumes that the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – all those castles, quests, damsels and princes – are the natural image of relations between genders.

At the same time, it’s necessary to decry the treatment of women in other countries as “medieval”, to maintain the fiction that women in our culture have nothing to trouble their heads about. The terminology carefully allots two meanings to the same collection of past events, and assigns our (rightly) divided feelings of shame, horror, belonging and heritage to whichever side is needed to keep gender norms in place.

The word “chivalry” has been particularly bothering me recently since I started rereading bits of Malory’s Morte Darthur. One of the most influential Arthurian works in the English language, this fifteenth-century version of the Camelot legends looms over almost all subsequent Arthurian works in some form or another, whether that be Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or the recent BBC TV Merlin.

An examination of this romance also gives a bit of a lie to the myth of “chivalry”. It’s not that it debunks the soft-focus pageantry with a brutal expose of fifteenth-century repression and sexual violence (though an account of its author might do something of the sort). Rather, it undermines the “princess” paradigm by offering a very different kind of female character.

As Helen Cooper notes in her edition of Morte Darthur, women are often the characters who incite action:

Most of them, moreover, are active agents, not mere passive damosels.

The book also seems quite at home with women’s romantic agency: to quote Cooper again, Malory “takes it as natural and unthreatening…that women have sexual desires” and act upon them.

One particular passage struck me as illuminating this issue: when Dame Lyonet realizes her sister Lyonesse is in love with the knight Sir Gareth. The section doesn’t need much more prologue:

Then was Sir Gareth more gladder than he was more. And then they troth-plight, other to love and never to fail while their life lasteth.

And so they burnt both in hot love that they were accorded to abate their lusts secretly. And there Dame Lyonesses counselled Sir Gareth to sleep in no other place but in the hall, and there she promised him to come to his bed a little before midnight.

Their counsel was not so privily kept but it was understood, for they were but young both, and tender of age, and had not used such craft before.

Wherefore the damosel Lyonet was a little displeased, and she thought her sister Dame Lyonesse was a little over-hasty, that she might not abide the time of her marriage; and for saving of her worship [reputation] she thought to abate their hot lusts.

And she let ordain by her subtle crafts that they had no their intents either with other as in their delights, until they were married.

Unfortunately I haven’t got space to continue copying out the episode, but the way she decides to use her “subtle crafts” to frustrate her sister’s insufficiently crafty crafts involves creating an enchanted knight who comes charging in whenever Gareth and Lyonesse manage some alone-time, causing Gareth to have to battle it.

He defeats it each time, in increasingly final ways (eventually swiping its head off, and carefully chopping the head into a hundred pieces and dropping it out of a window into the moat) but each time Lyonet puts it back together with magic ointment. Because who doesn’t have space in their life for a moment-ruining sorcerous cyborg created by their older sister?

This passage also exhibits some surprising gender politics. On first reading it’s simply another fabulous (in both senses) tale of magic and love, but the framing is strikingly modern.

Firstly, the narrator seems to find nothing either surprising or blameworthy about the two young people wanting to have sex before marriage: that use of “lust” is, in context, simply denoting a particular emotional and physical state. It’s not the “lust” of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s more like the lust of a Magnum advert or a Cosmo special issue.¹

Neither does Lyonet see anything wrong with her sister wanting to sleep with Sir Gareth – she simply realizes that everyone else knows what is going to happen, and that her own wish for her sister to be happy won’t stop people shaming Lyonesse. She creates the magical knight because she’s acutely aware of the gap between her own sympathetic understanding of her sister’s feelings and desires, and the hypocritical attitude of the society they have to live within.

Interesting that the word “craft” is used of both Lyonesse’s secrecy and Lyonet’s magic. I’m tempted to read this as suggesting they’re both sets of skills which the women have developed in order to survive in a difficult world – though Lyonesse’s is far less effective. The initiative Cooper identifies in Malory’s women is dramatically present here: Lyonesse instructs her lover where to be at night and comes to visit him, whilst her sister makes a counter-plan to foil her.

Sexual attraction is hardly an unusual motive for action in the fiction we see around us, but in this case it’s the young women who take action and negotiate their way between their feelings and the expectations of a broader community.

There’s also something meta-romance about Lyonet’s solution. I may be over-reading this brief passage, but Malory’s deliberately laconic style encourages us to interject motivations and connections to make sense of the narrative. So I think the form Lyonet’s obstruction takes – an enchanted bouncer – is also a symbol of her superior ability to understand heroic romance as a genre.

“Alright, little sister”, her choice of magical weapon seems to say, “You want to be the heroine of a chivalric romance? Because in all the romances I’ve read you don’t get the knight that easily…” She ironically goes along with Lyonet’s casting of herself as romantic damosel, and cranks up the volume, providing her sister with her very own enchanted nemesis to overcome before she can get what she wants.

If we wanted to translate this into a realist mode, this gestures towards the idea that love doesn’t end your story arc as a person, and that finding the person you want to spend “happily ever after with” doesn’t subsume your identity into a “game over” montage.

Lyonesse still has to deal with what Camelot will think of her, and she’ll do so whilst remaining Lyonesse and a member of her own society. The meta-romantic element, in which Lyonet goes to the spell-book to slow up her sister’s love life, seems to valorise young women who are symbolically and semantically competent, as well as active in the world.

Lyonet wins this episode because she is more capable than Lyonesse of taking the narratives which surround them in their culture, understanding and decoding them, and then redeploying those narratives to her own advantage, with a combination of critical analysis, sisterly compassion, and geeky in-joke wit.

So if nothing else, this chunk of Malory provides us with another reason to sneer at “chivalry” when used to argue that the world was better when women were (supposedly) passive, and to own up to our medieval heritage, whether it’s embarrassing, troubling or apparently irrelevant.

Because occasionally we may trip over moments like this, where Dame Lyonet is exercising her subtle crafts. Crafts which, as I read them over again, look more and more like medieval geek feminism.

• Images taken from Kate Beaton’s inspired ‘courtly love’ comics over at Hark! A Vagrant.
• Jem Bloomfield also blogs at Quite Irregular

1. Not that either of those are anything but problematic, but my point here is the modernity of the word’s implications.

CC picture by Gerard Stolk, 2011

“Great brands tell stories. They’re a mix of truth and symbols.” Brand strategist Alison Camps kicked off the (Re)Branding Feminism conference on 1st March with an introduction to the concept of branding, and some examples from her career. The one she selected as a case study with particular relevance for feminism was Skoda in the early 1990s: the “brand from hell.”

The conference was very firmly about considering representations of modern feminism and not making plans about how best to ‘sell’ feminism to the masses. I’m a persuader by trade, so I have a practical interest in how best to present feminism to an indifferent, sceptical or rabidly hostile audience. But I also love my gender theory, so a spot of academic inquiry made a nice change from activism, and I was sad I could only attend the first day.

Mothers and daughters and sisters, oh my!

My favourite paper was Jean Owen’s ‘Of feminism born’, which looked at the prevalence and problems of using familial metaphors in the feminist movement. The political concept of sisterhood began as a strategy of resistance to masculine structures of patriarchy and ‘brotherhood’. It is undeniably powerful, especially for women that have experienced the isolation of being the lone feminist voice in their community. But sisterhood has become a “universalising metaphor” that “implies an all-encompassing, somewhat stifling organisation”. And now that feminism is intergenerational, parental hierarchies have re-emerged – we are not only sisters but cultural mothers and daughters of feminism.

Through this way of talking about ourselves, Owen argued, we risk “pandering to fantasies of a matriarchy” and create a falsely cosy, sentimentalised idea of what is in reality a diverse and radical movement. In my experience, contemporary feminism already has tremendous respect for previous generations, but by formalising it in this way we undermine our own project of equality and put in place privileged feminist ‘bloodlines’. Owen advises that “we need to remove ourselves from the trap of family” and predicate our movement on a “more involved social model”.

I agree with all of this. In fact, my main problems with ‘sisterhood’ are that this language pretty definitively excludes men and reinforces the gender binary that I want to dismantle. That’s a long-term goal, by the way. Short-term is sorting out some of the urgent problems in the current system.

Selling feminism

Catherine Redfern (of Reclaiming the F Word, and, um, The F Word fame) spoke about the cyclical nature of calls to rebrand feminism, which can be measured in women’s magazine features. The call makes a couple of big assumptions: that feminism is in crisis and that applying marketing principles will help.

Redfern calmly exploded the first theory by referencing the research for her book with Kristin Aune which showed that feminism is a growing, thriving movement, and questioned the second. Mainstream representations of feminism are too narrow, and don’t reflect the pluralism of the movement. But the F Word survey showed that women became feminists when they learned about feminism, and not when it was packaged with a free lipgloss. Who is a feminist because it’s fashionable? Surely we are insulting young women somewhat by trying to package it as something ‘cool’.

The other papers were very interesting, and included a brief history of the stiletto heel, a smart analysis of those Suit Supply ads and the ‘desire of indifference’ and an introduction to the Brinkley Girl. But the only one which directly commented on the idea of ‘branding’ feminism was from Catherine Maffioletti, who made some good points about the tension between the “wild and divided” nature of feminism and the patriarchal (and capitalist) project of naming and fixing its meaning in a saleable product. As Maffioletti said, “branding difference is an impossible project”. Feminism is “emergent”, “a mobilising force”, something alive and oppositional that can’t be pinned down, boxed up and sold.

I’m not a marketer, but…

As the day went on I started to feel the burden of pragmatism weighing on my shoulders and spoiling the fun, as it often does. There’s a little voice inside me always wanting to know: what are we going to do about this? What’s the plan? That’s not what the conference was about, but I started wondering about practical applications.

I think a serious attempt to ‘rebrand’ feminism would be madness, because it is “wild and divided”; it’s plural and adaptable, and means too many different things to too many people, and I’m nearly ready to argue that’s one of its strengths. As Catherine Redfern pointed out, feminism is a leaderless grassroots movement; who would have the audacity to try and redefine it?

But I reckon that as individual feminists and as groups of feminists, we could do a lot more to broaden representations of feminism, to counter the negative stereotypes, to make the case more effectively without letting the end run away with the means.

You don’t have to call it marketing. It’s as simple as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, understanding their criticisms and concerns and addressing them, learning what they want, and showing them how you can help.

Or if that sounds too cuddly, you can call it propaganda.