A bibliography by Ronald D. Patkus with commentary by the artist. Published on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Red Hen Press, to accompany exhibitions in the libraries of the following institutions:
Vassar College: Spring 2013
University of Vermont: Summer 2013
Smith College: Fall 2013
Swarthmore College: Fall 2013

Shirley Jones, printmaker, etcher, published poet, and self-taught letterpress printer, founded the Red Hen Press imprint in 1983, though she has been publishing artist's books to critical acclaim since 1975.

Under-earth exists to be a teaching resource, to feed the revolutionary, radical,
more-than-political consciousness. Concerned with the inner life of the word and the
possibilities it can offer us, the under-earth glossary uses language as material to
establish fertile ground for the abolitionist and decolonial world-building project.
Rejecting the notion that the individual should be the decisive voice of academic inquiry,
in favor of the multi-vocal chorus, under-earth is disperse and decentered, constituted
by a web-like network of knowing. In favor of the non-sense, the piece-meal, and the
ghost-song, under-earth falls apart to come together anew. You are invited to enter this
theoretical imaginary space through an aesthetic and epistemological practice of
decomposition. Above all, the under-earth glossary is seeking an actionable definition of
freedom: freedom transformed into practices, movements, tangible ways to be in the
world. To articulate this definition, the glossary weaves together numerous threads
borrowed from the living network that is the revolutionary archive.

My thesis investigates two versions of a popular literary legend of the Middle Ages, Ami and Amile, in the context of the growing clerical intolerance for homoeroticism (“sodomy”) in the twelfth century and afterward. The versions of Ami and Amile examined are both Old French (one belonging to the continent, the other to England and its Norman courts) and date close to the year 1200, a time by which intolerance of homoeroticism is well attested among a variety of clerical authors and, on occasion, secular ones. I argue that the continental version of Ami and Amile, which belongs to the genre of chansons de geste, depicts a masculine world that retains the traditional mores of male homosociality typical before this period; by contrast, the Anglo-Norman version closer matches the anti-homoerotic camp of clerical authorship. It downplays male-male intimacy and constructs, in its place, a heteronormative imperative: the two titular knights must maintain their noble lineages, and the text privileges their heteronormative romances in various ways, both diegetically and by employing the genre of courtly romance. By comparing these two versions of Ami and Amile, I underscore how their temporal and cultural proximity did not inhibit them from portraying starkly different social models for the male nobility. My analysis evokes not only a developing homophobia and heteronormativity on the part of the Anglo-Norman text but also the endurance—¬¬in at least one courtly context—of the continental version’s more traditional chanson masculinity.