SOURCE: Watt, Diane. “Sins of Omission: Transgressive Genders, Subversive Sexualities, and Confessional Silences in John Gower's Confessio Amantis.” Exemplaria 19, no. 2 (2001): 529-51.

In the following essay, Watt asserts the presence of subversive homosocial, homoerotic, and transgender elements in the Confessio Amantis, placing particular emphasis on the motif of cross-dressing featured in the poem.

The relationship between confessional discourse, interiority or self-consciousness, and the regulation of sexuality is well established.¹ Yet, while in orthodox Christian thought the soul itself was held to be sexless, the penitential literature of the Middle Ages was gendered: it was written by and primarily for men. As Jacqueline Murray has explained “confession and penance was in itself a singularly androcentric sacrament … whenever women enter the discussion it is as a marked category, a signal of difference, exception or emphasis.”² Further, if, as Michel Foucault famously claimed, confession is “one of the West's most highly valued...