Glenn Burger's article, "Kissing the Pardoner", provides a queer reading of the Pardoner's Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Burger argues that most critical readings of the Pardoner's Tale are stringent, binary interpretations that socially ostracize and construct the Pardoner as an "other." Burger charges that "medieval hermeneutical models" rely on "masculine heterosexual language" to indentify the Pardoner as a threat to "genealogical succession" (1143). In the opening lines of the article, Burger cautions against readings that determine the Pardoner's contrary conduct to his religious code stems from the "perversity of the Pardoner's body" (1143). He suggests that patriarchy provides socially, acceptable signified meaning
