oh dont get me started on the gender ambiguity of giant-adjacent people

in the middle english romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the titular green knight is described as somewhere between "a tall man and a small giant"

as jeffrey jerome cohen remarks in his classic study of giants, "the giant shares more with the feminine, and specifically with the maternal, than his excessively male form might suggest. An ontologically problematic relationship between gender and embodiment will characterize the medieval giant in all of his identity-giving appearances."

in the poem Cleanness, written by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the author lists a series of sexual sins, and chief among them is the procreation of women with demons before the Flood. what does this queer sexual activity engender? why, giants of course.

people such as the Green Knight, who *might be* giants, thus have an embiguous relationship to a figure which *explicitly symbolises* gender and sexual ambiguity