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Notes
1. I am much indebted to Boyd and Karras's editorial work and to their commentary on this document: David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, "The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London," GLQ 1 (1995), 459-65, and Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd, "'Ut cum muliere': A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London," Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York and London, 1996), pp. 101-16. The GLQ essay prints the Latin as well as an English translation of the document. Brackets at various points in Boyd and Karras's English translation signify that gender is not indicated in the Latin text. For the prostitution context I have also relied on Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York and Oxford, 1996).
2. See Michel Foucault, "La Vie des hommes infames," first published in 1977 and collected in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols. (Paris, 1994), 3: 237-53. See Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris, trans., "The Life of Infamous Men" in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney, 1979), pp. 76-91. Didier Eribon discusses this essay in his Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (Paris, 1994), pp. 265-69. I worked out these ideas about Foucault and queer history with Professor Michael Lucey while team-teaching a course at the University of California Berkeley in the fall of 1995; his essay touching on these materials is now in print ("Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends," Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick [Durham, 1997], pp. 167-98).
3. Earl Jackson, Jr., "Interview with Robert Glück," Red Wheelbarrow 1 (1995): 24-40, at 40; Donna J. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), pp. 183-201, at 193 (emphasis original).
4. On dating, see Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, 1992). On speculations about the "flesh-and-blood Roger of Ware," see Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1967; rpt. London, 1975), pp. 187-88. Edith Rickert, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 20 Oct. 1932, p. 761, lists documents that seem to identify the Cook; see also Earl

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D. Lyon, "Roger de Ware, Cook," MLN 52 (1937), 491-94. And see V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford, 1984), pp. 257-79, esp. 259, for discussion of Chaucer's representation of the Cook.
5. See Boyd and Karras's notes in "Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute."
6. Thanks to Jim Cain for suggesting this to me.
7. General Prologue in The Holy Bible ... Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, 4 vols., ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden (Oxford, 1850), 1: 51. On the date of the General Prologue--between January-February 1395 and January-February 1397--see Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (1920; rpt. Cambridge, 1966), pp. 256-58.
8. Paul Strohm, "Chaucer's Lollard Joke," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995), 23-42, at 31, 29.
9. See Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 24-29 and notes.
10. "Ðe thirdde conclusiun sorwful to here is þ at þ e lawe of continence annexyd to presthod, þ at in preiudys of wimmen was first ordeynid, inducith sodomie in al holy chirche; but we excusin us be þ e Bible for þ e suspecte decre þ at seyth we schulde not nemen it. Resun and experience prouit þ is conclusiun. For delicious metis and drinkis of men of holi chirche welen han nedful purgaciun or werse. Experience for þ e priue asay of syche men is, þ at þ e[i] like non wymmen; and whan þ u prouist sich a man mark him wel for he is on of þ o. Ð: e correlary of þ is conclusiun is þ at þ e priuat religions, begynneris of þ is synne, were most worthi to ben anullid. But God for his myth of priue synne sende opyn ueniaunce" (Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, p. 25). (The third conclusion, sorrowful to hear, is that the law of continence [i.e., celibacy] annexed to priesthood, that was ordained first in prejudice of women, induces sodomy in all holy church; but we excuse ourselves [for mentioning sodomy] by the Bible because of the suspect decree that says we should not name it. Reason and experience prove this conclusion. For delicious foods and drinks of men of holy church will have necessary purgation or worse. Experience [proves this conclusion] because the secret test of such men is, that they like no women; and when you prove such a man mark him well for he is one of those. The corollary of this conclusion is that the private religions [i. e., orders of monks and friars, plus hermits, anchorites, and secular canons], beginners of this sin, are most worthy to be annulled. But God for his might send open vengeance on secret sin.)

11. Joan Cadden, "Sciences/Silences: The Natures and Languages of 'Sodomy' in Peter of Abano's Problemata Commentary," Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 40-57, at 44.

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12. The Historia vitae et regni Ricardi Secundi records another event at that parliament in 1395 that carried a sodomitical charge, though it seems that this event must have in fact occurred at an earlier date. See Historia vitae et regni Ricardi Secundi, ed. George B. Stow, Jr., Haney Foundation Publications, 21 (Philadelphia, 1977), p. 135.
13. Thomas Walsingham, Annales Ricardi Secundi, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, Rolls Series (London, 1866), pp. 182-83. For consistency, I have capitalized "Sodomorum."
14. Thomas Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, Rolls Series (London, 1861) 2: 128. For the Lollard guerilla action, see John Bale, Conclusion, A Brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ Syr Johan Oldecastell ([Antwerp?], 1544), ff. 50-1 (qtd. in Foxe, Acts and Monuments [1853-70; rpt. New York, 1965] 3: 819 n).
15. Note that the last line might be alluding to burning sodomites. There's a lot of uncertainty about sodomy's punishment in late medieval England, but this poem seems to be the only known suggestion that sodomites might have been burned in medieval England. Thanks to Alan J. Fletcher for his comments on this line (personal correspondence).
16. For terminology linking heresy and sodomy, see Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford, 1979), pp. 8-9.
17. Compare David M. Halperin's observations about "what constitutes authoritative speech about a gay subject: who is authorized to speak, to whom, and with what truth-effects, " questions that, I want to argue here, are particularly raised by the occasion of speaking about sodomy (Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography [New York and Oxford, 1995], p. 13).
18. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, 1992), p. 19, and Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982).
19. Karras and Boyd, "'Ut cum muliere,'" pp. 104-105.
20. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; rpt. New York, 1990).
21. This option was exercised in other, perhaps specifically politically sensitive, cases. For a discussion of the language of the rolls, see A. H. Thomas and Philip E. Jones, Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1926-61), 4: vii-xix; on the verbatim confession of John Russell, see esp. 4: xii.
22. For the character of the rolls, see Thomas and Jones, Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 2: vii.
23. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York, 1992), p. 16.
24. For this point about Garber's effacement of transgender subjectivity, see

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Susan Stryker, "Introduction," The Transgender Issue, GLQ 4 (1998), 145-58, at 148.
25. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, p. 101.
26. See Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, 1999), especially chapter 5, "Sodomy and Other Female Perversions"; Allen J. Frantzen, "The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness," PMLA 111 (1996), 451-64.
27. But it seems that lens cannot clarify exactly what the crime or crimes were; as Karras and Boyd put it in "'Ut cum muliere,'" He was feminine, if not literally a woman; but this was not a crime. He was not a prostitute as medieval people understood that concept, and it was unclear whether he was a sodomite.... If, in fact, they did not prosecute him, but took his statement and released him, this may have been because they did not know quite what to make of him. (110)
28. According to Karras, who quotes this passage in Common Women (185 n. 7), the authorship is contested. But this motto, whether by Aquinas or not, was popular through the Middle Ages.
29. See Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, 1976), p. 344. Karras and Boyd (113 n. 9) cite the fourteenth-century Venetian case of Rolandino Ronchaia, who "was a male transvestite working as a prostitute, but he was accused of sodomy, not prostitution." For this case, see Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), p. 136. Details therein help open interpretive possibilities for John/Eleanor Rykener; Rolandino became known as Rolandina, living and working as a female prostitute because of his feminine appearance
30. Karras and Boyd argue strenuously that a prostitute could be seen as a certain type of person and prostitution a sexual orientation and not simply the act of selling sex. Whether or not this is the case here, my point concerns something else: in the act of prostitution Rykener takes on a feminine role that s/he apparently sheds or plays down in other sexual contexts, so that the prostitution is the occasion to perform a gender transgression.
31. "I wish I had your balls in my hand, instead of relics or relic-boxes; let them be cut off, I'll help you carry them": The Pardoner's Tale, ll. 952-54, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987).
32. Foucault, "The Life of Infamous Men," p. 77 ("La Vie des hommes infames," 3: 237-38).
33. Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, 1977), pp. 165-96, at 183. For Deleuzian intensity as distinct from phenomenology (with its "unified subject" and "originary experience"),

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see Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 47 and note.
34. Massumi, A User's Guide, p. 47.
35. Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," p. 185.
36. Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains (265), quoting the book cover describing Les Vies parallèles: "Les Anciens aimaient à mettre en parallèle les vies des hommes illustres; on écoutait parler à travers les siècles ces ombres exemplaires. Les parallèles, je sais, sont faites pour se rejoindre à l'infni. Imaginons-en d'autres qui, indéfiniment, divergent.... Ce serait comme l'envers de Plutarque: des vies à ce point parallèles que nul ne peut plus les rejoindre." Michael Lucey quotes this passage (and notes Judith Butler's use of it as well) in "Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends," p. 169. For an explanation of parallel lines' joining at infinity, see http://www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/questionCorner.
37. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1989), p. 102.
38. Didier Eribon, "S'acharner à etre gay," Ex Aequo, No. 5, May 1997.
39. Boyd and Karras, "Interrogation," p. 460.
40. Lucey, "Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends," p. 169.
41. Robert Glück, Margery Kempe (New York and London, 1994), p. 82. His comment about "disorganizing" a self was made in conversation on 25 October 1995. Scott Bravmann analyzes and critiques this identificatory strategy in his Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge, 1997).
42. Evelynn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," differences 6.2-3 (1994), 126-45, at 131, quoting Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993), p. 18.
43. See Homi K. Bhabha, "Postcolonial Criticism," Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York, 1992), pp. 437-65; "Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt," Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York, 1992), pp. 56-68.
44. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," Nation and Narrative, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London, 1990), pp. 291-322; Paul Strohm, summary remarks at the Cultural Frictions Conference, Georgetown University, October 1995; Bhabha, "Postcolonial Criticism," p. 451.
45. Geeta Patel has recently remarked on Bhabha's limited engagement with homosexuality and gender in "Home, Homo, Hybrid: Translating Gender," College Literature 24 (1997), 133-50.