Abstract
Old French fabliaux frequently invoke a traditional gender binary associating masculinity with reason and femininity with desire, but even the most conservative examples of the genre unsettle this normative distribution. By taking comic advantage of men's inability to regulate women's desires, fabliaux challenge gender's ability to order bodies according to conventional structures. As the contests of these stories attest, desire founded upon lack produces competitive, alienated, and oppositional sexual relations. Other fabliaux undermine this model of sexuality altogether, primarily by including masculinity within the domain of erotic plentitude. In focusing on the polymorphous possibilities of desire, these tales imagine erotic relations that move beyond gender's differential fixities. Rather than condemning men for failing to curb desire, these fabliaux take advantage of prescriptive regulations, disfiguring gender as a front for sexual abandon. Across the genre, the Old French fabliau uncovers desire's ability to create expansive bodily pleasures, using gender's delimiting boundaries to produce corporeal intensities that outstrip the prescriptive controls of masculinity and femininity alike.
Published Version
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