Gelded Ladies and Unsexed Peasants: Queering Language and Gender in the Fabliaux Kayla Kibbe College

The graphic portrayal of sex and explicit references to its most immediately related organs need hardly be pointed out to even the most careless reader of the fabliaux. Representative episodes are vivid, strange, and even raunchy: man confuses his wife’s vagina for a massive anus, a peasant and his wife find themselves covered in genitals from head to toe, and an overbearing wife and mother watches as hidden testicles are removed violently from her body.And yet, the above the scenes are scarcely erotic. Sex in the fabliaux is bizarre and often alienating. Featuring sex and sex organs in strange and unsettling circumstances, graphic depictions in the fabliaux continually subvert expectations of sexual language and obscenity.

At first glance, the fabliaux read as little more than bawdy accounts of the trials and tribulations of heterosexual life and lovemaking. Much of the sex takes place between men and women, and much of the action is rooted in the domestic sphere dominated by man and wife. With this emphasis on marriage and gender roles, the fabliaux lend themselves well to feminist criticism, with much scholarship devoted to the feminist or antifeminist implications of the reactions against the domestic order that often drive...