Lately, I've been very interested in the figure of the Pardoner from The Canterbury Tales and have been wondering if there's a way to connect him to modern trans studies. It's been widely accepted in academic discourse for a long time now that the Pardoner is a eunuch and while I don't necessarily refute that point, I wonder if there could be something more there. I recently reread both The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale and Carolyn Dinshaw's piece "Eunuch Hermeneutics" to think through this more and I find myself interested in Dinshaw's discussion of the Pardoner's fragmented body. Is it possible that the Pardoner's fragmented body is a trans one? And is it possible that instead of reading the Pardoner's usage of relics as a way to try and make himself whole, he is instead trying to further confuse and obfuscate his body? Utilizing Susan Stryker's theories about the monstrous and unnatural trans body may also prove useful here. Maybe the Pardoner’s relics are a form of transition for him in the same way hormones and surgeries are for modern trans people, maybe through using them as a stand in for the parts of himself that are missing he too is reconstructing his body.
Dinshaw argues that the Pardoner’s obsession with relics is fetishistic since he knows they cannot make him whole but imagines a world in which they could. But I would like to argue that he doesn’t want to be whole, that he enjoys being a fractured, incomplete, ambiguous body. The Pardoner shows no remorse for his schemes even though he knows the relics he peddles are false and does not show an interest in having any other line of work. The Pardoner’s position as a figure who is beloved by some but hated by many, especially members of the church and other prominent figures (such as Chaucer himself) already makes him an outcast and he is subjected to ridicule from the other pilgrims. Perhaps the Pardoner chose this line of work because he enjoys living on the margins of acceptable society as it frees him from gendered expectations.
Through doing a trans reading of the Pardoner, I don’t want to attempt to “solve” him by deciding what I think his sex assigned at birth, gender identity, or sexuality are in a modern framework since that is not what queer theory is meant to be used for. Instead, I would just be making a case for viewing the Pardoner as a trans or proto-trans figure. In addition to using queer theory, I may also pull from psychoanalysis, as Dinshaw does in her piece as there is so much there about fragmented bodies and disidentification with gender that I could draw upon.