ABSTRACT This article argues that an emphasis on gender has dampened the insights and energies of feminism in analyses of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Inquiries into gender as a social construction of power have long highlighted women’s dispossession, even erasure, in medieval representations. But such inquiries also have the potential to reinforce, or even naturalize, social conditions that privilege elite masculinity in those same medieval representations. I propose that we focus less on binarist notions of gender, and more on women’s vulnerability in Langland’s poem. As the shifting representation of “Mede the Mayde” affirms, women’s vulnerability is a constitutive social force in its own right: women’s lives were shaped by vulnerability, and the vulnerability of women’s lives critiqued social inequities. Langland’s emphasis on vulnerability, and his focus on modes of agency and expression traditionally associated with women — submission and compassion, for instance — shifts the grounds of ethics in this poem, thereby rendering an interventionist, feminist version of the human that is not defined by domination and governance, but by forbearance and endurance.

中文翻译：

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没有性别的女权主义：皮尔斯·普罗曼（Piers Plowman），“梅德·梅德（Mede the Mayde）”和中世纪后期的文学研究

摘要本文认为，在对威廉·兰兰德（William Langland）的《皮尔斯·普洛曼》（Piers Plowman）的分析中，对性别的强调削弱了女性主义的见识和能量。长期以来，对性别作为一种社会力量建设的研究一直突显出女性在中世纪代表中的迷恋，甚至消除。但是，这样的探究也有可能加强甚至使那些中世纪表现形式中的男性气质特权化的社会条件自然化。我建议，我们不应该将重点放在性别的二元主义概念上，而应更多地关注兰兰德诗歌中的妇女的脆弱性。正如“梅德·梅德”不断变化的代表所申明的那样，妇女的脆弱性本身就是一种构成性的社会力量：妇女的生活受到脆弱性的影响，妇女生活的脆弱性批评了社会不平等。