Chaucer's Queer Poetics is the latest in a series of queer interventions in medieval literary studies, and it follows and builds upon the innovative work of scholars such as Glenn Burger, Carolyn Dinshaw, Louise Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Steven F. Kruger, and Karma Lochrie. Indeed the title deliberately echoes Dinshaw's own provocative and groundbreaking Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989). Schibanoff pays further homage to Dinshaw's hugely influential book by defining her own literary project in relation to it: while Chaucer's Sexual Poetics "reveals the gendered corollary between sexual and literary activity in the Middle Ages... [Schibanoff's] 'queer poetics' focuses attention on the deep-rooted heterosexism of our most basic modern thinking about Chaucer's art... [and] the contention that Chaucer developed 'virile' artistic control over his literary sources" (13). One of the possible limitations of queer criticism in medieval English literary studies is the extremely restrictive focus on the works of Chaucer. Indeed one might argue that Chaucer has become to medieval queer criticism what Shakespeare is to certain strands of New Historicism. However, there are often good theoretical reasons for this obsession with Chaucer, the most obvious being simply that he cannot be ignored. Glenn Burger, for example, in Chaucer's Queer Nation (2003), is concerned to confront the prejudices of Chaucerian critics for whom queer studies may seem largely irrelevant. But at the same time, Burger hopes to challenge the blindness of contemporary queer readers, forcing them to pay attention to what is still seen as the "foundational" pre- modern text: The Canterbury Tales. If queer criticism and theory, as it is developed in relation to medieval literary culture, is to be taken seriously by scholars working in later periods, it has to be accessible, and to address texts that are still widely read.
For Schibanoff, however, Chaucer's traditional title as "The Father of English Poetry" is one that should be interrogated rather than accepted, given that she is explicitly concerned with examining the use of patriarchal, heterosexual, reproductive tropes in relation to literary art. Nevertheless, Chaucer's status as central to the early English literary canon is not something Schibanoff sets out to challenge. Rather her distinctive contribution to the field of queer Chaucer studies is the shift in focus away from The Canterbury Tales to Chaucer's dream poems. Furthermore, as Schibanoff explains in her introduction entitled "There is nothing French about Chaucer," she intends to overthrow the outdated but tenacious critical paradigm that presents Chaucer's literary development in terms of an early French phase, followed by one in which the author was greatly influenced by Italian models, culminating in the period in which he produced his great "English" poetry. This paradigm, Schibanoff argues, is often framed in nationalistic, Francophobic, sexist, and homophobic terms of a progression from French sterile effeminacy to English potent masculinity. Schibanoff's dismantling of this paradigm frames her own exploration of the queer aesthetics of Chaucer's dream poems. The body of Chaucer's Queer Poetics is divided into three parts. Part 1 further develops Schibanoff's critique of Chaucer scholarship, and explores the homophobic connection between effeminacy and French courtliness. It also introduces the key idea of the "queer decoy" or the "overtly deviant figure" (such as Absolon in "The Miller's Tale") who serves to "deflect patriarchal aim from the merely feminized (or courtly) heterosexual man who loves woman" (28). This leads to a reading of the "heterosexual poetics" of the Book of the Duchess. Part 2 focuses on the House of Fame, which follows on from an examination of how Chaucer might have understood Dante's Divine Comedy. Chapter 3 includes a lively engagement with David Wallace's monumental Chaucerian Polity (1997), and with recent developments in Dante criticism. Part 3 brings us the Parliament of Fowls via a detailed rereading of Nature--and Nature as lesbian--in Aristotle, Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun. The afterword, "Au revoir: Queer Poetics and Chaucer's Englishness" brings the reader back to The Canterbury Tales in order to reflect briefly upon the implications of this analysis for what is still Chaucer's most widely-read, if not his "ultimate" work. Chaucer's Queer Poetics offers an informed, up-to-date analysis of the dream visions, paying full attention to their continental literary contexts. What is sacrificed in this reading is any consideration of Chaucer's English contemporaries; most notably John Gower, who shares with Chaucer many of the influences that Schibanoff emphasizes, and with whom Chaucer engaged and competed in his writing career. Nevertheless, Chaucer's Queer Poetics is an important, engaging and challenging contribution both to Chaucer studies and to medieval queer criticism.