Introduction

The editors’ introduction situates Troubling Mobilities at the intersection of ongoing dialogues about gender and mobility in medieval studies. We begin by suggesting that, as a discipline, medieval studies has long conceived of gender as the space between two static points, building upon the foundational feminist scholarship of the late twentieth century. A brief historiography demonstrates that existing scholarship has neglected to fully explore the ways in which bodies, spaces, and movements are intertwined and gendered across the global Middle Ages. We then address how queer theory informs our approach to this question, and how engaging with theorists such as Sara Ahmed (2009) and Jack Halberstam (Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020) may offer new possibilities for approaching medieval gender as constantly (and kinetically) negotiated across bodies and spaces.