My Margery: Appropriative Impulse in the Queer Autofiction of Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe

Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe (1994) is an autofiction about the desires of its twin protagonists, Bob and Margery. As the authorial subject of this text, Glück’s strategic position is aimed at queer liberation under the shadow of the American AIDS crisis. As the historical woman for whom the text is titled, Margery Kempe’s (1371-1438) medieval life is only evidenced by the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe—often called the first autobiography in English. In Margery Kempe, she is repurposed for the needs of Glück and his queer community. As an issue of positionality in a transtemporal context, Glück’s appropriative impulse raises questions of authorial obligations to historical subjects like Margery Kempe and the conflicting privileges at play in contemporary interpretations of historical figures. Through a queer-feminist reading of the novel and related essays by Glück, I offer an analysis of Margery Kempe as an attempt to both remember a marginalized medieval woman and to find another voice for the man who resignifies her. Grappling with this tension between appreciation and appropriation, I turn to David Halperin’s (2012) consideration of gay male misogyny as ‘camp strategy’, reflecting on Glück’s representation of what his community lacks while demanding space for himself and his community through the mechanisms of the mainstream. What emerges is a complex matrix of identity which shifts between Glück’s expression of a gay, Jewish man’s desires and the elevation of himself and his community by re-enforcing delegitimizing interpretations of Margery—interpretations which have been historically weaponized by male scholars of medieval studies. This article highlights the ethical challenges of Glück’s appropriative impulse in his self-narrative, offering a critical case-study of Margery Kempe which reflects upon the obligations of authors like Glück in the creation of historical autofictions.