Exemplaria

Medieval, Early Modern, Theory

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Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches

Chaucer

Carolyn Dinshaw

To cite this article: Carolyn Dinshaw (1995) Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches
Chaucer, Exemplaria, 7:1, 75-92, DOI: 10.1179/exm.1995.7.1.75

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/exm.1995.7.1.75

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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 CbAuc~r's Qu~~r (oucb~s /
A Qu~~r (oucb~s CbAuc~rl
CAROLYN DINSHAW
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A two-page handout accompanied this talk at the UCLA conference,

xeroxes of the cover and an inside twrrpage spread from the August
1993 issue of Vanity Fair. Because of an agreement with the models, the
permissions editor for Conde Nast Publications maintained, these Herb
Ritts photographs cannot be reproduced. Thus I am left to describe them
here: on the cover, k. d. lang sits in a barber's chair, in a pinstripe vest
and pants, white shirt, and striped tie, her lathered, blissed-outface and
neck being shaved with a straight-edged razor by Cindy Crawford in a
spread-legged, bent-kneed, back-arched, head-back, lip-parted pose. Cindy
wears a black teddy and spike-heeled lace-up ankle boots.In the two-page
spread, pages 94-95, Cindy stretches out and lingers over the half
shaven recumbent k. d., their lips a breath away, k.d. 's hand on Cindy's
bare thigh.

he touch of the queer: k. d. lang's hand on Cindy Craw-

ford's thigh, the smallness of that hand at odds with the
masculine posturing in the barber's chair, in pinstripe suit,

1 I'd like to thank the various readers and listeners whose suggestions, pro-
tests, and provocations have helped me shape these ideas; I thank in particu~ar my
Spring and Fall 1993 undergraduate an? grad~ate c1~sses.at Berkeley; au.dlen~es
at Modern Times Bookstore (San FrancIsco), Rice University, Cornell University,
and the Newberry Library; Sue Schweik and Michael Lucey.

Exemplaria 7.1 © Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY
 76 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

button-down shirt, and shaving cream. The dissonant hand renders

what it touches unnatural, makes it strange: Cindy Crawford, an arti-
fact of high femininity with (as the Vanity Fair article describes it)
"frothy masses of tortured hair, thick layers of makeup, lips dripping
with sticky artificial gloss, [and] false eyelashes painstakingly applied
with glue."2 Who's the queer here? Such a denaturalization of femi-
ninity (via small hand) is no small feat in the pages of Vanity Fair, in
which this version of femininity is the norm. If the touch of the queer,
in staging this parodic, butch-fern version of Norman Rockwell's
America, doesn't out and out out Cindy ("Oh, no," she said to Arsen-
io, "I wouldn't come out on a magazine cover. That just wouldn't be
the way I'd do it"),3 at the very least it insists on the constructedness
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of this body and its detachability from conventionally defined desire

and gender behavior. And if this performance, qua performance, can't
out her, it nonetheless makes it clear that as a model she does in
some sense already function as a token of the inessentiality of hetero-
sexual subjectivity. And this can be a frightening prospect for straight
subjects: "k. d. lang's Edge," as the Vanity Fair cover headline reads,
is turned against her, very close to the jugular.
I begin with this representation of a hand on a thigh, and I speak of
the tactile-"the touch of the queer" -because I want to highlight the
metonymic workings and corporeal impact of queerness on its sur-
roundings. Queerness works by contiguity and displacement, knocking
signifiers loose, ungrounding bodies, making them strange; it works in
this way to provoke perceptual shifts and subsequent corporeal
response in those touched. When, centuries before magazine covers
and k. d. lang, in a profoundly different cultural and ontological
space, the Pardoner interrupts the Wife of Bath on the road to Can-
terbury in the Tales, he not only speaks but first "starts up" ("Up
stirte the Pardoner," 111.163),4 disturbing the air around him, sending
shock waves into the body of pilgrims with whom he travels. "There
is an explosive shock," writes Roland Barthes in SjZ abou t the contact
between yet another queer-a eunuch-and a woman in Balzac's Sar-

Leslie Bennetts, "k. d. lang Cuts It Close," Vanity Fair, August 1993, 98.
2

Quoted in "K. D.'s Dick, Cindy's Razor: A Mass Cultural Fantasy" by "C.,"
3
Out of WAC (Bay Area Women's Action Coalition Newsletter), September 1993,
n.p.
4 ~l q~otations of the Canterbury Tales are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed.,
'0e R,vers,de Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), by fragment and
hne number.
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 77

rasine, "a paradigmatic conflagration, a headlong flight of the two

bodies brought together in so unseemly a manner.,,5 The Pardoner's
touch sends into a queer skid what has theretofore been confidently
represented, and represented as perfectly natural-the robust hetero-
sexuality of the Wife-and exposes her femininity as itself a pose,
something theatrical, an act. As I want to suggest in this essay, the
touch of the queer works similarly across such tracts of space and time
(the distances separating Vanity Fair from Sarrasine from the Canter-
bury Tales) not because queerness is the same throughout time, a
diachronic parade of limp-wristed boys and big-boned girls, but
because, understood in its specific cultural contexts, it has similar disil-
lusioning, demystifying effects. Queerness articulates not a deter-
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minate thing but a relation to existent structures of power. Despite its

positioning on the other side of the law, it is arresting: it makes
people stop and look at what they have been taking as natural, and it
provokes an inquiry into the ways that "natural" has been produced
by particular discursive matrices of heteronormativity.
And as such a force of denaturalization the touch of the queer can
work powerfully toward historicization and localization of particular
sexualities. This "touch of the queer" works in the same way, I'm sug-
gesting, as "la femme" or the feminine in French feminists' mani-
festoes of the seventies, particularly in Julia Kristeva's claim that "la
femme, ce n'est jamais ~a"-woman can never be defined.6 It seems
to me that the specificity of such claims to denaturalization by the
feminine, or the mulatto, or any other denaturalizing agent must be
honored: different ideological fields require different agents of cri-
tique. I suggest that the field of sexuality is denaturalized by the
queer, as gender is by the feminine, and race is by the mixed-race per-
son (even as I understand that all of these fields are interrelated and
that thus such denaturalizations do not proceed independently; for
the purposes of brevity here, however, I shall concentrate on the sex-
ual). But I want to deploy the concept of the touch of the queer some-
what differently from what I see as the end point of analyses of "la
femme" in, say, the seventies Kristeva. I want not to rest with the
observation that queerness defies definition and empties out any

5 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974),
65.
6 Julia Kristeva, "Woman Can Never Be Defined," fr~m a 1974 interview in
Tel que~ excerpted in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtlvron, eds., New French
Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1981), 137-41.
 78 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

essence of "sexuality" but to work toward specifying the local con-

structions of "essence" that are thus revealed, and toward mapping
the differences between, say, the late fourteenth-century versions of
heteronormativity in London and ours today. This is work done in the
service of tracing a history of sexuality. Throughout this talk, I will
allude to queer touches I find to be operating similarly across time
and place; this may seem to impart an essentializing emphasis at odds
with these stated intentions to historicize. Because of limits of time
here I can't contextualize each of these allusions, can't explain how
the queer I'm invoking relates as queer to the particular structures of
power around him or her; but despite these limitations I want to insist
on the persistence of queer touches, to plague you with this ubiqui-
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tous contagion, as I point to effects of demystification at various

moments, in various places.
A queer touch, then, like Orlando's in her nineteenth-century incar-
nation, nudging tidy pairs of men and women out of the center of the
road:

Couples trudged and plodded in the middle of the road indissolu-

bly linked together. The woman's right hand was invariably
passed through the man's left and her fingers were firmly gripped
by his. Often it was not till the horses' noses were on them that
they budged, and then, though they moved it was all in one
piece, heavily, to the side of the road. Orlando could only sup-
pose that some new discovery had been made about the race;
they were somehow stuck together, couple after couple, but who
had made it, and when, she could not guess. It did not seem to
be Nature.?

Such queer contact points up what has heretofore been imperceptible,

unanalyzed, and taken as ineluctable in the human condition: that
coupling, purely natural and timeless. And it invites us to see how
such a sense of the sexual norm has been constructed ("It did not
seem to be Nature"), in various ways, in various times and places, and
(as Foucault comments in a tantalizing sentence in Volume One of
The History oj Sexuality whose implications I can't pursue here) for the
perpetuation of an economic status quo.8

7 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928; San Diego: Harcourt Brace, n.d.),
242.
8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (1978; New York: Vintage, 1990),36-37.
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 79

So the queer in the text "queers" our view of the text. But the
touch of the queer is not only confined to that of characters in narra-
tives; sometimes the touch of the queer is my touch, as critic focusing
on the ways in which heterosexuality is constructed and represented-
my queer touch disorienting and rendering strange what has passed
until now without comment. The queer touch, that is, moves around,
is transferable, is no one's property. Who receives its force? I want to
explore the ways certain Chaucerian texts deploy the touch of the
queer in fact to promote heterosexuality in their audiences: texts con-
struct queer effects in order finally to contain these disturbances of
hetero-Iogic. Thus the force of the queer touch is carefully controlled
and managed in the fourteenth-century context, as I shall suggest, and
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it's only our latter-day bodies that can feel the shock and appropriate
that power for queer use.
Lately-after Donald Howard's brilliant 1976 reading in The Idea of
the Canterbury Tales cleared the way-there has been growing critical
interest in the Pardoner as queer and in claiming him either as the
first in English literature or as some kind of hermeneutic or ideologi-
cal key to the Tales.9 But even the Pardoner's first audience sensed
something about him: when he begins to speak his own tale, for
example, the other pilgrims seem to back away from him. Recall the
scene: the Host invites him to tell a tale, in language that intentionally
highlights the Pardner's apparent sexual anomalousness: "Thou beel
amy, thou Pardoner" (VI.318), he taunts: "Hey, lover boy." The
Pardoner responds by picking up and mimicking the Host's garbled
oath to "Seint Ronyan" (VI.320; cf. VI.310). This barbed repetition of
the Host's diction hints at the Pardoner's denaturalizing power,
denaturalization working here by means of mimesis and parody. The
Pardoner then draws the pilgrimage to a halt in order that he might
have a snack. Even before he says another word the "gentils" cry out:
"Nay, lat hym telle us of no ribaudye!" (VI.324).
Now, the narrator of the Tales has already registered his incompre-
hension. In the General Prologue, the Pardoner is introduced last
among the pilgrim company, at which point the narrator can only
speculate: "I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare" (1.691), he concludes

9 Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1976), 333-87. For recent treatments of the Pardoner as an
ideological or hermeneutic key to the Tales, see my "Eunuch Hermeneutics" in
Chatuer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 156-84,
and Glenn Burger, "Kissing the Pardoner," PMLA 107 (1992): 1143-56.
 80 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

dubiously, after describing his physical person. The Pardoner is uncer-

tainly sexed and uncertainly gendered, a man who's not a man (the
way others claim to be men), womanish but not a woman-"femi-
noid," as Donald Howard called him.1o Different critics, seeking to
nail down his physical condition, have made some impressive diagno-
ses on the basis of this General Prologue portrait: in what are now
widely lampooned critical judgments, he's been called "a testicular
hermaphrodite of the feminine type," and "a manic-depressive with
traces of anal eroticism, and a pervert with a tendency toward alcohol-
ism."n But the point is that it's unclear to the narrator, just by look-
ing at him, what he is; he doesn't fit into the "felaweshipe" (1.32) of
pilgrims gathered for the journey to Canterbury.
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If you think back to the famous opening lines of the General Pro-
logue, it'll be clearer why this character doesn't belong. These lines are
arguably the most famous in all of English poetry: in fact, I think they
have come in the anglophone West to signify Literature itself-liter-
ature with a capital "L," the kind that is believed to underwrite the
foundational values of Western Civilization. And if these lines signify
Literature, it is perhaps because they may be the first in English to
articulate with such clarity what we may call a sexuality-heterosexual-
ity, taken to be one of the founding markers and guardians of the
Western world:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

10 Howard, 344.
11 For the Pardoner as hermaphrodite, see Beryl Rowland, "Animal Imagery
and the Pcu:doner's Ab~ormality," Neophilologus 48 (1964): 56-60; for the Pardon-
er of multIple perversIons, see Eric W. Stockton, "The Deadliest Sin in the
Pardoner's Tale," Tennessee Studies in Literature 6 (1961): 47-59.
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 81

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
1.1-18
The passage employs eloquent, highly poetic diction, making use of
the conventional discourse of mythology; it thus places itself in a long
classical and medieval tradition, and specifically locates itself among
literary works, such as the Roman de Larose and Guido delle Colonne's
Historia destruction is Troiae, that lavishly detail the coming of spring.12
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But further, in its representation of that general vernal awakening it

locates humans in a great chain of being, linking them both to the
physical and to the spiritual realms. And it does this by establishing-
or spelling out, since Chaucer certainly didn~t invent this-a network
of binary oppositions (as Joel Fineman has also observed)13 structur-
ing the world that both produced and is produced by the Tales: April/
March, summer/winter, male/female, active/passive, desire/inertia,
fecundity/barrenness, generative/ non-generative, sky/ earth, spiritual/
physical, knowledge/the unknown, outside/inside, public/private,
health/illness. A large cultural paradigm, governing the cycle of the
seasons, the energies of animal life and human labor, and the dynam-
ics of human spiritual development, is specified in that first instance
in which male pierces female to the root. The Riverside Chaucer re-
duces the multivalence of the Middle English when it glosses "his" in
the first line as Modern English "its"; Middle English had no "its," but
the whole context of personification here ("Zephirus eek with his
sweete breeth," "the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his half cours

12 On Chaucer's detailed knowledge of Guido, see W. W. Skeat, ed., The

Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 5:1-2,
Introduction to Explanatory Notes to Troilus; see the notes on these lines in The
Riverside Chaucer, 798-99. The following analysis here of the General Prologue
appears in shorter form in my article, "A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and
its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 205-
26.
1~ Joel Fineman, "The Structure of Allegorical Desire," SteJ:>henJ. ~reenblatt,
cd., Allegory and Representation, Selected Papers from the EnglIsh Inst~tute, n.s..5
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 26-60. The follOWInga~alysl.s
is indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology o/the Closet (Berkeley: UnIversI-
ty of California Press, 1990).
 82 Chaucers Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

yronne") provides generous evidence for a reading of "his" as "his"

as well.
An act of generative penetration inaugurates this work, an act which
links humankind to the generative cycle of nature: it is the principle
of all generation. It's notable that Chaucer here reverses the tradition-
al gender of April, usually female; this gesture not only draws atten-
tion to the sexual valence of these lines but also (in a dynamic we'll
see again in the Tales) manifestly obviates-after it perhaps suggests-
the potential for a representation of male-male sodomitical relations:
in the overarching context in these lines of physical fecundity and
generativity, March must finally be female. This fecundating masculine
act, performed on the feminine surface, is associated with the positive
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poles of those binary oppositions: desire, for example, and health,

knowledge, public space, spiritual life. The act thus can be understood
as the expression of a sexuality if we understand sexuality as the large
cultural structure that locates the individual in relation to his or her
desire.14 This act is, I argue, heterosexual, and heterosexuality in
Chaucer's Tales is precisely this complex web of cultural relations that
structures and locates individual subjectivity. The celebrated voiceless-
ness of these lines-the magisterial diction of that sweeping single
sentence, without any "He said" or "I said"-is in fact crucially oper-
ant here: it creates an invisible authority of and for the text. This pas-
sage sets up and naturalizes a normative heterosexuality that is multi-
farious and conflicted (all those binary oppositions), while invisible,
cosmic and inevitable.
It's no surprise, then, that these are the best known of Chaucer's
lines-Chaucer, who is himself revered for his generative powers, criti-
cally constructed as the father of English poesy. They establish a tradi-

14 I develop and justify this formulation in "A Kiss is Just a Kiss." In so

arguing I situate myself in the debate over whether there is such a thing as
"sexuality" before the nineteenth century; see, for the now classic statements of
the poles of the debate, John Boswell, "Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual
Categories," and David M. Halperin, "Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics,
and Power in Classical Athens," both printed in Hidden From History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George
Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 17-36, 37-53. I argue
that there was a web of cultural relations operating in Chaucer's world that we
would now call hetero~exuality, and that.it operated as a norm in the way Fou-
cault suggests post-EnlIghtenment sexuality does. At the same time I want to be
clear ~hat.the deviati?ns I call "queer" here are not organized into' an opposing
sexualIty In Chaucer s culture, but exist, rather, as unorganized sexual behav-
iors-because the hetero norm keeps them that way.
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 83

tion of English literature consonant with larger heterosexualized liter-

ary structures: literary production itself has been construed as a heter-
osexual act, a masculine act of signifying performed on a feminine
surface.I5 Literary history, too, has been understood by some critics
as a heterosexual family romance, the poet seeking to couple with the
Muse his mother, his place to be in turn usurped by his poet-son.I6
It's no surprise, either, that critics have rather routinely interpreted
the Canterbury Tales as being structured in a major way by marriage:
early in this century, in a vastly influential argument whose effects are
still widely (and especially pedagogically) felt, the august Chaucerian
George Lyman Kittredge, following Eleanor Prescott Hammond,
analyzed the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale and tales following the
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Wife's as the Marriage Group, and various critics after him have
extended this group to include just about all of the Tales.I7 Since
Chaucer himself has established such a norm in the opening lines,
those heterosexual arrangements become a means of interpreting, a
hermeneutic according to which events and characters are rendered
intelligible or unintelligible. Kittredge is looking through the lens
Chaucer has polished. Thus the language of heteronormativity orga-
nizes Kittredge's reading: the Wife of Bath's tone, for example, is
"frankly sensual,-unmoral, if you like,-but too hearty and too pro-
foundly normal to be unwholesome" (170). She is a normal wife; and
as such, "She is not to be taken too seriously, but she deserves a
rebuke" (189). Kittredge understands what the Wife is and thus knows
how to put her in her place.
But who, then, is profoundly abnormal? Kittredge never describes
the Pardoner's person-a notable omission, since he specifically refers
to the physicality of many of the other pilgrims-but he does make the

15 See my Chaucer's Sexual Poetics for Chaucer's use of sexualized figures of

literary production.
16 For the classic statement of literary history as a heterosexual family ro-
mance, see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influeru:e: A Theory of Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. 36-37.
17 Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York:
Macmillan, 1908), 256-57; George Lyman Kittredge, "~haucer's Dis~,!~sion of
Marriage" Modern Philology 9 (1911-12): 435-67, rpt. In Chaucer CntaClSm, ed.
Richard Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dam~: U~iversity of Notre Dam~
Press, 1960), 1:130-59; the argument is elaborated In Kittredg~,. Chaucer a~ Hzs
Poetry, Fifty-Fifth Anniversary Edition with intro. by B. J: Whlt1ng (Cambndge:
Harvard University Press, 1970), 185-86. Page numbers In parentheses refer to
Chaucer and His Poetry.
 84 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

Pardoner's exceptional status clear: "The most abandoned character

among the Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner" (211); he is their
"one lost soul" (180).18 "Abandoned" by whom? Not Kittredge him-
self, who valiantly and at length tries to make sense of the Pardoner's
performance. He famously describes that puzzling moment at the end
of the Pardoner's performance-in which the Pardoner finally recom-
mends Christ's real, not his own fake, pardons after he has gloated
proudly over his own pardons-as a "paroxysm of agonized sincerity"
(217) that comes out of nowhere, "suddenly, unexpectedly, without an
instant's warning" (216). The Pardoner's lines about Christ's pardon
are part of an outburst that remains unclearly motivated for Kittredge,
a strange-queer-moment that can make little sense when the Canter-
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bury Tales is understood uncritically to have featured heterosexuality

as its major organizational category. Kittredge tries hard to make
some sense of the Pardoner, but ends up performing interpretive con-
tortions to account for his behavior: he describes first that "parox-
ysm," then, further, a "wild orgy of reckless jesting," then finally
"another revulsion of feeling" in the last moments of his performance
(217). It's hard not to note the intensely sexual connotations of Kit-
tredge's phrases-suggestions of a forbidden yet fascinating sexual
experience rendered homophobically-as they trace an arc of spasm
("paroxysm") and "orgy," then "revulsion." And, like the discourse of
normalcy, the discourse of sincerity-"agonized sincerity"-cannot fail
to be hetero-Iogical here: the Pardoner's only normal moment is that
agonized one; all else is false; according to Kittredge, the Pardoner is
a bad copy of a man. Or, as Donald Howard so clearly saw, the
Pardoner is constitutively an actor, and his Canterbury performance
is a performance of a performance. 19
Now, the Pardoner's first words on the pilgrimage (after the General
Prologue description and before his own Tale, in the Ellesmere order)
interrupt the Wife of Bath, the flamboyant and much-married wife, as
she recounts her own "tale / Of tribulacion in mariage." And in the
eye of that uncertainly-gendered and uncertainly-sexed creature, the
Wife of Bath's enthusiastically heterosexual subjectivity becomes in

18 ~n his 1893.essay, "Chaucer's Pardoner" (Atlantic Monthly 92 [1893]: 829-

33), Kittredge obhquely gestures toward the Pardoner's body: "His debasement
seems to .b~ utter, for on~ must not forget ~he picture in the general prologue"
(8~3)..Th~s~sthe closest Kittredge gets-and It's not very dose-to a description of
thIS pIlgnm s person. I thank Larry Scanlon for this reference.
19 Howard, Idea, 339-76.
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 85

itself an object of study. He plays the marriageable and marrying

"young man" to her termagant wife, and thus alerts us to the acting
that is going on in her performance, too. The two pose as bachelor
and wife: "I was aboute to wedde a wyf," he asserts; "whan that I have
toold thee forth my tale / Of tribulacion in mariage / Of which I am
expert in al myn age," she replies, "than maystow chese wheither thou
wolt sippe / Of thilke tonne that I shal abroche." "[TJeche us yonge
men of youre praktike" is his response (111.166-87). The dissonance
between his "geldyng" body and "marish" sexual behavior, on the one
hand, and what he claims to the Wife ("I was aboute to wedde a wyf,"
suggesting normative sexual desire and gender behavior), on the
other, leads us to perceive the latter, male heteronormativity, as itself
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an act. And in turn we can see the act the Wife is performing; this is
made all the clearer by the gap between her insistence on the desire
to dominate her husbands that is at odds with her articulation of
mutual desire and gratification between husband and wife at the end
of her Prologue.
The observation that the Wife's heterosexual subjectivity is an act
suggests that it is produced as a unity in and by discourse: her Pro-
logue is a veritable analysis of the constitution of the female heterosex-
ual subject in and by late fourteenth-century dominant culture in Eng-
land. Normative female sexual behavior is a contested territory in the
Wife's Prologue, inculcated on the one, negatively restrictive, hand by
Biblical exegesis (since Christ went to only one wedding, at Cana, so
the proper Christian only marries once, 111.9-13), clerkly antifeminism
(women's love is like fire: the more it burns, the more it desires to
consume everything, 111.373-75), and antimatrimonialism (a wife
destroys her husband from the inside, as a worm does a tree, 111.376-
77), and by the discourses of daily life, on the other, positively rein-
forcing, hand, including astrology (which provides "inclinacioun / By
vertu of [aJ constellacioun," 111.615-16), economics ("Wynne whoso
may, for al is for to selle," 111.414), and "dames loore" (old wives'
tales-the pretense of enchantment to lure a naive prospective hus-
band, for example: "I bar hym on honde he hadde enchanted me- /
My dame taughte me that soutiltee," 111.575-76). The Wife's particular
gender behavior and her desire are made up of a specific and local
matrix of appropriated exegetical discourse ("I have the power dur-
ynge al my lyf / Upon his propre body, and noght he. / Right thus
the Apostel tolde it unto me," 111.158-60 [my emphasis]), as well as
personally rejected clerkly misogyny ("After thy text, ne after thy
nJ briche, / I wol nat wirche as muchel as a gnat," she snaps at her
 86 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

first three husbands, 111.346-470), customs in her community (being

first at the altar for Mass offerings, 1.449-52), sartorial style (those
attractive and well-worn "gaye scarlet gytes," 111.559), and contempo-
rary literary narrative (the Roman de La rose, for example, is Chaucer's
source of the memory of her amorous youth, tickling her "aboute
myn herte roote," 111.469-79). All these contestatory discursive fields
constitute the Wife's subjectivity.
Romance narrative, in fact, provides her with the final ideological
resolution of these competing discourses at the very end of her Pro-
logue. The Prologue ends with the Wife's assertion that she was "as
kynde" to her husband "As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, /
And also trewe, and so was he to me" (111.823-24), this mutual affec-
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tion and the vast geographical span of that assertion invoking ro-
mance. In her use of it, romance provides the literary form of and for
finally unified subjectivity. Romance is, in fact, one major narrative
form whose ostensible task is to promote heterosexuality against all
odds: not only the sword-bridges and perilous beds, but also the
homosexual potential of bonds between men and plots between
women (as is clear in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example)
imperil heterosexual fulfillment. It's no surprise that the Wife uses
romance in her Tale-as I'll detail in a minute-to elaborate her expli-
cation of the "natural" relations between men and women.
Not only are feminine gender and desire discursively produced-and
revealed as such by the touch of the queer-in the Wife's Prologue; the
body is produced, too, as "the body" by these discourses, and it is the
unity of gender, desire, and body that constitutes straight subjectivity
(that "fictitious unity," as Foucault writes).20 One of the profoundest
insights into the constructed nature of the heterosexual subject comes
from the Wife's comments on the creation and function of "membres
. .. of generacion" (111.116) in her Prologue. She sees clearly that
"clerkes" understand body parts according to their own dried-up
clerkly desires; and since clerks were the ones producing the official
mappings and descriptions, their allegation that genitals are merely
for purging and discriminating male from female does seek to estab-
lish "the body" as pleasureless, nonreproductive, and altogether
asexual. The Wife, in opposition to this outlook, is eager to propound
that genitals must be for generation-for, as she puts it, "ese / Of

20 Fouca~lt? History, 154; see J~dith Butler's extension of this analysis in Gender
Trouble: Femlnzsm and the Subverszon of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 87

engendrure" (111.127-28, my emphasis), for the ready yoking of male

and female together. What is revealed here is that "the body" is a con-
tested interpretive collation-articulated in this case by either clerks or
wives, each with differing agendas-of various and disparate corporeal
parts. And for Chaucer, "the body" as specifically heterosexual is
naturalized: he has the Wife argue in the voice of common sense, of
"experience." The full force of this naturalization is felt when the
Pardoner, with his apparently deviant body and desire confounding
the fundamental categories of the natural, breaks in not long after.
"Monster!" is Sarrasine's response to that denaturalizer of feminini-
ty, La Zambinella-La Zambinella, a castrated man who plays a woman
on the Italian stage: Sarrasine has fallen in love with "her," and sud-
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denly realizes that the woman whom he has adored is a "nothing," no

woman at all and no man either. When disabused, he screams: "Mon-
ster! ... you have wiped women from the earth,,21 (And a cold chill
hits everyone around the castrato as he moves through the world in
his old age: this is the tactile contagion, the touch of the queer.)
"Abyde!" (111.169) is what the Wife says to the effeminate, perhaps
castrated Pardoner-and she goes on, apparently unfazed, to tell her
story. But it's crucial that the "naturalness" of the heterosexual body
be restored after the infectious touch of the queer, and thus the pro-
duction of a normative feminine body becomes the ultimate achieve-
ment of the Wife of Bath's Tale: "Cast up the curtyn, looke how that
it is" (111.1249), says the hag-turned-lovely-bride triumphantly at the
denouement of the romance. "It" is a body transformed from foul to
fair, rendered possible to look upon and touch by the husband's duly
granting "maistrie" to the wife: that is, it is only in the space of
heterosexual relations, the binary of male-female, proper gender, and
properly-directed desire, that this body can become tolerable, speak-
able, something to behold in the light.
It's interesting to note that Gower's rendition of the analogous
"Tale of Florent" in his Confessio amantis makes even clearer the
power of this heterosexuality to order "the body." As many readers
have noted, his version of the loathly lady is full of physical detail,
whereas Chaucer's simply relies on the force of "foul" to convey a
sense of the repulsiveness of this lady. Gower's hag-as is the case with
hags in other Middle English redactions-has body parts in th~ wrong
proportions and where they shouldn't be:

21 Barthes, S/Z, 252.

 88 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

Hire Nase bass, hire browes hyhe,

Hire yhen smale and depe set,
Hire chekes ben with teres wet,
And rivelen as an emty skyn
Hangende doun unto the chin,
Hire Lippes schrunken ben for age .
Hir front was nargh, hir lockes hore .
Hire Necke is schort, hir schuldres courbe ...
Hire body gret and nothing smal,
And schortly to descrive hire al,
Sche hath no lith withoute a lak.22

It takes the "love and sovereinete,,23 of the knight to undo the wick-
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ed stepmother's curse-to, that is, organize and fix this female as a

normal, recognizable (read marriageable) body. In the space of mar-
riage the female is composed.
Meanwhile, back on the pilgrimage, similar forces of naturalization
are at work: if his touch is shaken off by the Wife, the Pardoner is
finally silenced after his own Prologue and Tale. Consider this perfor-
mance again for a moment: as Donald Howard puts it, "he role-plays
himself' in his own Tale.24 He fully demonstrates how he bilks his
gullible provincial audiences with fake relics, pardons, and tricks:
By this gaude have I wonne, yeer by yeer,
An hundred mark sith I was pardoner.
I stonde lyk a clerk in my pulpet,
And whan the lewed peple is doun yset,
I preche so as ye han herd bifoore
And telle an hundred false japes moore.
Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke,
And est and west upon the peple I bekke,
As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne.
Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne
That it is joye to se my bisynesse. VI.389-99

You can sense the performance he's giving of his own performances.
He then delivers a sample sermon as his tale. And after the aforemen-

22 Confessio amant is 1.1678-91, cited from The English Works ofJohn Gower, ed.
G. C. Macaulay, EETS, e.s. 81 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900), 1:81.
23 Ibid., 1.1847.

24 Howard, Idea, 376.

 CAROLYN DINSHAW 89

tioned "paroxysm," asserting that Christ's, not his own, pardons are
best, he then turns to the pilgrim audience itself and apparently tries
to bilk them. When can he be believed-when he tells everyone pres-
ent that he is a fraud? When he expects them to purchase his fraudu-
lent pardon? Is he sincere when he states that Christ's pardon is best?
Is that, rather, his trump card in the game he's playing? Critics have
hashed out these questions time and again: he's faking there, he's
being sincere here. But the queer, always playing a role (and thereby
revealing that everyone does), eliminating any idea of essence, obvi-
ates all question of originality, sincerity, even truth. The creature who
falls outside heterosexuality so thoroughly confounds these criteria of
originality, sincerity, and truth because heterosexuality is of a piece
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with-it draws on and entails-notions of origin, wholeness, unity,

sameness, the natural, the spiritual, the true. The queer empties out
the natural, the essential, empties out the conventional foundations of
representation and identity, shakes with his touch the heterocultural
edifice.
The Host's response to the Pardoner's performance is intense: vehe-
ment, insulted, infuriated. Harry Bailley is singled ou t by the Pardoner
to offer tribute to his fake relics first; the Host, of whom the narrator
has said, "of manhod hym lakkede right naught" (1.756), is enjoined
to
offre first anon,
And thou shalt kisse the relikes everychon,
Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purse VI.943-45
In the context of the Pardoner's performance, this is sexualized
language: those relics constitute a substitute masculinity for the
Pardoner; and though the Pardoner is not soliciting the Host, the
latter nonetheless responds as if he is, in his anal fantasy of shit-
stained breeches and of a relic made of the Pardoner's balls. He
recoils, snarling:
"Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
Though it were with thy fundement depeint!"
VI.948-50

-and wishing to cut the Pardoner's "coillons" off to enshrine them in

a hog's turd (VI.952-55). The first threatened queer bashing in
English literature? There is nothing like this. ou~raged di~t~~n, the
images so vividly imagined, on the rest of the pdgnmage; thIS felawe-
 90 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

shipe" does touch on some low-down things in its late moments, in-
cluding vomit and fleas, but the unique severity of response to the
Pardoner is an index of the depth of the threat he poses. A threat to
the Host, who will soon complain of being cowed by his brawny wife
Goodelief, who demands of him, "I wol have thy knyr' (VII.1906); to
the pilgrimage, which proceeds toward a saint's relics whose power
derives from the unitary One, the Truth; to the tale-telling game of
stones. t h at are suppose d to represent "".
sentence -some WIS d om,
some truth-as well as provide some "solaas"; to what constitutes the
"felaweshipe" as, precisely, a body. The Pardoner has been viewed ini-
tially with uncertainty; when he first opens his mouth, he's repellent
to the group; and at the end of his Tale he's enraged into silence,
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shunted back into the margins, having been introduced last in the
General Prologue, as Donald Howard remarks, like a bad memory.25
He is the recipient of the Host's ostensibly reparative and apologetic
kiss, elaborately staged by the Knight, a kiss whose subversive sexual
potential (following on what has just happened) is refused by the pil-
grim community. They want now to continue on their way, laughing
and playing, and they do. The Pardoner continues on the pilgrimage
with them, but the denaturalizing power of his queerness is defused
by that careful kiss of peace.
It's typical of Chaucer, in some ways a classic liberal humanist (this
is why he is so continuously popular, I think), that this queer gets to
speak and begins to open a perspective on heteronormativity only to
have that norm reinscribed in even greater force-greater, that is, for
its continual reinscription.26 As at the end of Troilus and Criseyde,
Chaucer at the close of the Canterbury Tales, having revealed the con-
flicted constructedness of subjectivity (the conflicts between authori-
ties and discourses in the Wife, for example), without mystifying those
power conflicts turns back toward sincerity, origin and truth. Nigel
Saul has recently written of some of the pervasive values in the court
culture which was Chaucer's primary audience: they may have been
due, he suggests, to the changing nature of that court, from a military
to greater civilian emphasis. In such a climate, remarks Saul, "People

25Howard, Idea, 338.

26 See Lee Patterson, "'No Man His Reson Herde': Peasant Consciousness
Ch~ucer's Mill~r, a~d ~he Structure of the Canterbury Tales," Literary Practice and
SOC'l.alC~ange zn Bntazn, 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 113-55, for a discussion of a similar phenomenon in
Chaucer's "articulating but finally silencing the voice of peasant protest" (155).
 CAROLYN DINSHAW 91

were no longer accepting an automatic identity between inner and

outer, between spirit and substance; the evidence of disharmony
between the two was altogether too strong to be ignored." But
"(w]hen forced to make a choice, they almost invariably settled for
,.Inner. , "27 Suc h a sh·£: · h t ren d er th·IS poem ,s work 0 f normalIz-
llt mIg .
ing-airing difference, then "settl(ing]" for the law of the Same-par-
ticularly useful.
It is also part of what makes Chaucer easy for the modern liberal
humanist to love. And I want to suggest, further, that Chaucer's strat-
egy here articulates a more general way in which heterosexuality as a
norm works; it is a particular inflection, in a specific time and place,
of a general normalizing strategy-a "law of heterosexuality" that is
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productive of an "outside" (as judith Butler describes it) that is fully

" 'inside,' not a possibility beyond culture, but a concrete cultural pos-
sibility that is refused and redescribed as impossible."28 As should be
apparent from the vastness of the cultural space that it occupies,
heterosexuality is not the property of one person, and can't be con-
trolled entirely by one poet. Thus what we might be seeing here are
the designs of heterosexual culture seeking its own reproduction,
articulated through, as it were, the poet. The queer touch of the critic,
looking back at this medieval poem, finds those queer touches that its
culture has tried to disavow, opens up their denaturalizing perspective
on heterosexual identity and can thus contribute to the mapping of
heterosexuality's long and varied history.
Clearly, then, the touch of the queer on early texts performs a func-
tion not as simple as "outing the past" in order to create a liveable-
an outed-present. I'm here paraphrasing (and opposing) Derek jar-
man, who modernized Christopher Marlowe's play in his recent film
Edward II. In a book documenting the film,jarman opens the project
with a challenge: "Marlowe outs the past-why don't we out the pres-
ent?,,29 But since the whole concept of queerness clears out the
ground of identity as essential, it renders categorization problematic
and puts in question the meaning, if not the very possibility, of such
"outing." Finding and identifying (with) the queer is not my point
here; the point is, rather, that around the queer it's harder and harder

27 Nigel Saul, "Chaucer and Gentili~y," Chauc~r's Eng~nd: Literatur~ in Histo~-

cal Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 4 (MinneapolIs:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992),41-55, esp. 52.
28 Butler, Gender Trouble, 77.
29 Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991), n. p.
 92 Chaucer's Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer

to mystify existing structures of power completely: the queer makes

heterosexuality visible. Around the queer it's thus harder to keep the
categories that underwrite oppressive control invisible. Around the
queer what is natural and what is unnatural tend to lose their distinc-
tive differences. This disillusioning touch of the queer has not, histori-
cally, been welcome: "I wol no lenger pleye / With thee, ne with noon
oother angry man," as the Host rebukes the Pardoner (VI. 958-59); or
"Abyde!" as the Wife commands; "Monster!" as Sarrasine screams; or
"Oh my God!" as the man at the cash register exclaimed, and shoved
my Vanity Fair into a bag-these are the milder of responses. But the
queer contagion isn't going to go away. The touch of the queer carries
a disillusioning force that may be discomfiting but can only, finally,
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work to the social good. That Pardoner still walks by the side of the
other pilgrims, still goes where they go, his person an unwelcome but
insistent reminder-get used to it-of heterosexual incompleteness.

University of California, Berkeley