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with inhabitation, aggression, usurpation, and vampirism’. 55 In this sense the impersonation can be seen as a positive source of play and energy. 56 Yet it also ‘castrates’ the performer, first because of the inability to ever match the icon; second because of the implicit ‘transvestism’ which destabilises the normativity of race, gender, and sexuality. 57 It is this ambivalence of Elvis-as-Elvis, an empowering but also castrating performance, a site of passivity but also of resistance, which I explore in the
. As a result, ‘her performance is a kind of transvestism’. 66 Here, in contrast to those critics who argue that Chaucer intends us to sympathise with the Wife’s reflexive exposure of clerical misogyny, I will argue that Chaucer himself satirises her performance. Even though Alisoun relies on familiar clerical and scholastic modes of argument, such as appealing to traditional