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RECENT FEMINIST cRITICISM of Spenser's Faerie Queene has increasingly focused attention on the construction of gendered subjectivities throughout the epic romance, and especially within Book 3, the book of chastity. The difficulties of constructing or representing a heterosexual relation based on reciprocity (the Spenserian version of Lawrence Stone's "companionate marriage") has been of critical concern ever since the publication of C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love. In contrast to the social constructionist views fashionable today, Lewis posited an innate or naturalized heterosexuality one which is, of course, embattled and in need of mediation by a discourse of love which escapes the barren dead-ends of Petrarchism and idolatry,. Other critics have represented sexuality as a battle between the sexes: the dynastic marriage which Britomart's narrative aims at requires the overcoming of a sexual difference which, in a variety of ways throughout the epic, is posited as fundamentally antagonistic.2 Recently, however, Spenser criticism has been increasingly influenced by discourses such as feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, the majority of whose practitioners refuse an essentialism which characterizes sexual difference and sexuality as invariable, natural, or "unwavering." But despite the sophistication of the various paradigms of gender construction which these critics cite, their efforts remain marked by a tendency to suture a specific sexuality onto a specific gender-in other words, to assume that the subjectivities constructed in The Faerie Queene, even in their moments of failure, are inevitably heterosexual. For example, Sheila Cavanagh's work on The Faerie Queene defines female sexuality as female heterosexuality-and slippages from the chaste ideal always remain heterosexual.' Lauren Silberman argues that the Malecasta episode-a potentially "lesbian" encounter-foregrounds the problem of gender identity and "the defamiliarization of heterosexual desire." But her brief reading of this episode, in which she convincingly argues that Ariosto's more explicit lesbianism is suppressed by Spenser, requires that she read Britomart's reaction to Malecasta's desire as "naive" and "ingenuous"-a reading which, as I will argue, neglects Britomart's complicit response to Malecasta's courtship.4 Elizabeth Bellamy also notes how Book 3 is marked by its fears of unnatural sexual acts; despite her allusion to Glauce's fears of "endogamous and sodomitic sexuality" she notes Spenser's privileging of incest (via a series of concrete images and allusions) as that form of sexuality most inimical to...