The t4t Gift Economy and Its Romance within the Middle English Lai Sir Launfal

Abstract: Contemporary discourse around t4t (trans for trans) relationships involves speculation about bodies in transition. What do such relationships signify toward the bodies of compulsory heterosexuality, not just today, but in the historical record? In the case of the Middle English lai tradition, a t4t framework assists a postmodern audience in uncovering instances not only of gendered affects relative to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but also of the affect economies that facilitate (or negate) gender affirmations. Romances such as Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal (a translation of a twelfth-century lai of Marie de France) exhibit romantic, platonic, and (the potentiality of) sexual relationships from which a semblance of t4t dynamics is constructively reassembled. Looking at some of the poem’s central characters and their relationships’ dynamics, both from Sir Launfal and from the larger “Lanval” tradition, provides a means from which t4t can be understood as a framework—one that measures not only affect between transgender individuals but also social systems like gift economies within the text that bear resemblance to contemporary mutual aid networks in transgender communities today. Instances of camp and parody within the romance genre historically are also observed in this paper. The gift economies in Sir Launfal and their gender affirmations propel the narrative’s resolution to demonstrate how they scaffold the genre of romance within the Middle English lai. This is an inquiry into exploring what focusing a distinctly trans lens can do when looking.