In her provocative work Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam suggests that,

In Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde performs both traditionally defined femininity – located primarily in her anxiety, her beauty, and her inconstancy – and a female masculinity that shows itself in a series of moves that attempt self-preservation in a world defined by male masculinity's “real thing.” Suggesting that a “widespread indifference to female masculinity … has sustained the complex social structures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination,” Halberstam offers an explanation for the hesitation on critics' part to identify and interrogate Criseyde's masculinity except in light of a perceived “unmanning” of her counterpart Troilus within the contexts of courtly and sexual love. Yet doing so shows Chaucer to anticipate two assumptions of contemporary criticism: that gender is not tied exclusively to sex, and that masculinity (and femininity, of course) is performed multiply as characters move through the contexts he provides. If these multiple performances are ultimately constrained by a normalizing force that concludes his works, Chaucer's own resistance to conclusion suggests an anxiety about the very act of gender restriction required by narrative closure, while simultaneously showing it to be, in Carolyn Dinshaw's words, “a set of assumptions, a catalogue of postures” located not in sex but in a rhetoric of performances and “impersonations.”