Alex Jarvis (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
alex.jarvis@kcl.ac.uk

Drag Knights and Wolf Kings: the queer orientations of knighthood and masculinity

My research considers the performance and performativity of knighthood within twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval French verse with reference to queer theory and drag performance. I work with reference to texts where the questing knights become disorientated within their quest; I frame this disorientation as ‘sideways quests,’ which is a reference to Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), where (queer) bodies deviate from the collective lines of convention in what she terms ‘sideways moments’. I explore the constructions of knighthood and masculinity via Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (2011 [1993]) and other works by modern queer and drag theorists.

Principal supervisor: Dr Alice Hazard