Queer Chaucer

Abstract

QUEER CHAUCER GLENN BURGER University of Alberta I I t’Sbeen morethan adecade since the publication ofJohn Boswell’sground­ breaking work on homosexuality in the Middle Ages. In that time medieval studies has rethought its traditional historicist methodology in light of con­ temporary literary theory and feminism, and a burgeoning gay/lesbian stud­ ies has embraced the cultures of Classical Greece and Rome and Renaissance England as objects of investigation.1Yet an equivalent engagement between gay/lesbian studies and medieval studies has never really taken place. In­ deed, relations between the two during much of this period might well be characterized as a dialogue of the deaf—or at least, the hard of hearing.2 A complete account of the reasons for the relative absence of a gay me­ dieval studies is beyond the scope of this paper. Certainly the otherness of “the medieval” has done important work from the Renaissance onwards in defining and maintaining “the modern” (cf. Patterson, Negotiating the Past). But I suspect that the apparent absence of dissident medieval sex­ ualities also says a lot about the identity politics of medieval studies itself. Recent work by Biddick, Fradenburg, Schibanoff, and others has begun to explore the consequences of a traditional emphasis in medieval studies on a dominant culture’s representations of itself to itself. Their analyses sug­ gest that medieval studies has thus often reproduced rather than critiqued hegemonic attempts—both medieval and modern—to construct and main­ tain the purity of its foundational epistemological categories. And growing numbers of historians and critics have begun the attempt to demystify me­ dieval dominant culture’s stabilization of its own identity through a series of interrelated otherings—of women, Jews, Muslims, heretics, and sexual dis­ sidents (e.g., Biddick, Kruger [“The Bodies of Jews”], and Moore). If there has been, comparatively speaking, a surge of interest in dissident medieval sexualities over the past few years, it is due in large part to this heightened awareness of these larger “identity questions”—medieval and modern.3 My own attempts to speak as medievalist/Chaucerian/gay academic first emerged as series of strategic questions about my professional identity poli­ tics. Did I have to make Chaucer “gay” in order to study him as a gay critic, 153 or concentrate on possible “gay” characters, like the Pardoner? Should I abandon Chaucer altogether, as a bulwark ofthe “straight” canon, and move on to more obviously sexually dissident writers of the Middle Ages—who­ ever they might be? Or should I change my area of specialization entirely in order to concentrate on modern or contemporary literature, since, as many have argued, “the homosexual” is an invention of modern discourses of sex­ uality and identity? If today I am less concerned with “who I am,” it is not that I have “answered” such troubling identity questions. Instead, they have helped me see the need to look alongside the categories of identity politics if I am to oppose traditional historicist and humanist hegemony decisions about “what Chaucer means” and “what medieval sexuality is.” For the apparent inability of either essentialism or social constructionism to mount a vigorously antihomophobic analysis of the role that compulsory heterosexuality plays in our construction of the Middle Ages suggests that the categories of identity politics often have worked to limit the questions we ask of the past, and thus to limit its ability to speak to and shape our present. Is it possible, for example, without lapsing into a reductively ahistorical essentialism, to talk of a role for sex/gender in the composition of subjectivity that can include discussions of individual formation? Can one discuss the operation of sexuality under different discourses of sex and gender with very different relationships to society without also insisting on an absolute separation of the pre-modern from the modern in terms of a sexual identity? If so, must the analysis of pre-modern subjects from the perspective and experience of the modern sexualized, gendered “self” mark either the erasure of difference assumed by an extreme essentialism or the rupture of modernity as outlined by social constructionism? Might there not be a more profound, intimate, and useful relationship—genealogical or otherwise—between past and present...