Content area
Full Text
INTRODUCTION
Is Pandarus queer? From the outset of this essay, I freely admit that I have no absolutely conclusive evidence to support an argument that he is queer, if by "queer" one means "homosexual."1 In this essay, I uncover no smoking gun to convince the critic resistant to my assertion that Pandarus may be read as queer, but, nonetheless, I find sufficient moments of ambiguity in the text which allow me to feel comfortable with such a conclusion. Certainly, the friendship between Pandarus and Troilus is overtly homosocial; scholarship has yet to address, however, whether their relationship can be read as subtextually queer as well. I explore this issue here, although my objective is not to prove that Pandarus loves Troilus in a sexual manner. I will argue neither that the text presents them as lovers nor that their homosocial relationship must be read as homo-erotic. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that the text refuses to disallow a queer reading of their friendship. In this project, I follow Allen Frantzen's lead in foregoing a move to establish sexual identities for medieval people in preference of describing "`same-sex love' and `same-sex relations' that range from sexual intercourse to expression of non-sexual affection" (1).2 Obviously, Pandarus and Troilus do not have sex, yet a great deal of male affection characterizes their intense friendship. Criticism has been remarkably silent on the sexual undertones of their friendship since Beryl Rowland's suggestion in 1969 that Pandarus represents a bisexual pimp,3 and I would like to re-examine Pandarus's character from the vantage point gained from the last thirty years of feminist and queer scholarship.
The question of whom or what Pandarus desires provides the basis of this investigation. Troilus and Criseyde does not explicitly present Pandarus and Troilus as lovers, but desire-both homosocial and queer-remains firmly in the background of their relationship. As Carolyn Dinshaw notes, "Pandarus's activity ... provides its own erotic satisfactions. It keeps him physically active, breathless, and sweaty: he leaps, he perspires, he moves back and forth between the two lovers" (Shoaf 65). A queer reading of Pandarus and Troilus's friendship offers explanatory force for Pandarus's erotic energy and the ways in which it directs the action of Chaucer's plot: his activities in some manner address...