Thursday, December 6, 2018

New Publication: Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI


"Full of still stinging cuts and telling scars, narratives of transgender skin operations testify to the countless lives physically and socially made through the artifice of sharp-machines which continually make and unmake supposedly natural states."
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Transliterature was recently featured in Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer edited by Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp with the chapter, "Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI." While published later than other articles and book chapters, this chapter is actually the first finished piece of peer-reviewed work I produced. The book experienced unexpected delays of a couple years that are nonetheless understandable by anyone familiar with the travails of academic publishing. That said, it is great to see the piece finally in print!

The abstract:

This chapter reclaims the Pardoner as a critically trans figure in the Middle Ages through an analysis of the discursive and historical reconstructions of skin. Given how narratives of transition and the politics of surgery become written on the skin of countless transgender lives across time, a trans literary approach to Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales cannot ignore that the Pardoner’s presence and story arises in response to the Physician’s tale of medical authority and the nature of gender. Putting the medieval praxis of castration in dialog with Judith Butler’s theorizing of the ‘sharp-machines’ that construct culturally intelligible trans bodies, this study looks at how the narratives of Fragment VI fashion skin as a natural signifier of gender in the “Physician’s Tale” and as a mark of unnatural reconstruction in the “Pardoner’s Prologue.” Indeed, the deployment of the Pardoner’s body, relics, and voice speak back with tenants of what might be called medieval trans feminism against the subjugation of non-cisgender men and the devaluation of surgically altered bodies throughout Fragment VI. A critical outcome of such a reconsideration of Geoffrey Chaucer’s sexually complex figure is that while we may never know definitively what is between the pilgrim’s legs – as with many transgender persons – nonetheless, based on the physical and social operation of gender he embodies, the Pardoner evidently stands at the crossroads of medieval trans discourse.

The book Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer is available now for purchase!

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