In September of 2018, Alexandra Waterbury filed a lawsuit against three principal dancers of the New York City Ballet, former boyfriend Chase Findlay, Zachary Catazaro, and Amar Ramasar alleging that they, and patron Jared Longhitano, shared sexually explicit videos and photographs of her, and other dancers, without their consent. City Ballet acted swiftly firing the dancers. Public response was mixed, from approval to dismay. Dancers’ responses were equally mixed, many praising the company for their swift action, with others supported the fired dancers. Catazaro and Ramasar asked AGMA, the union representing the dancers to intervene; ultimately, the Union required that the two dancers be reinstated, although they had to take sexual harassment and sensitivity training. Catazaro resigned from the company, while Ramasar rejoined and was quietly returned to the roster in the Spring of 2019.
This story, particulary Amar Ramasar’s, surprisingly echoes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, in which a knight rapes a maiden, and instead of losing his head, is offered an educative quest by a court of women, and is redeemed by the Loathly Lady, who remarkably, turns young, beautiful, and faithful. If the parallels don’t at first seem obvious, they emerge in considering how both stories abandon the victim in favor of the sexual predator’s redemption. Both the maiden and Waterbury disappear from their narratives, sympathy for them replaced by sympathy for the perpetrators of the crimes against them—who are both ultimately redeemed through access to women—the young, beautiful lady for the knight, and the chance to dance again with beautiful, young ladies for Amar Ramasar. The complexities of these endings, and the public response, both show systematic operations of rape culture, showing how a medieval story can inform the present moment.
About the presenterAngela Jane Weisl
Angela Jane Weisl is professor of English at Seton Hall University. She is the author of The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave 2003) and Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance (D. S. Brewer 1999), and the co-author, with Tison Pugh, of Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (Routledge 2012). She has co-edited several volumes of work on medieval subjects and has published widely in collections on both medieval an medievalism topics.