Burger's article “Kissing the Pardoner” asserts that the Pardoner is an instrumental element of redefining social and political constructions, specifically those of Chaucer’s time. He criticizes other writers who propose that the pardoner is a kind of present “absence” that opposes coquettish feminity, or that he is too extreme in flouting any sort of categorization. On the face of the Pardoner’s image, the reader receives a clear binary when he’s interacting with Harry Bailey, effeminate and masculine—or as Burger writes is the “heterosexual language”. Instead, Burger relates that the necessity for building a new transcendent power over the male-ascendant is already filled by the Parson/Chaucer’s Retraction. The Pardoner performs both powers
