Seemingly rooted in the shrew-taming tradition, the Old French fabliau La dame escolliee (The Gelded Lady) defies the rules of any genre in which it is placed. As a fabliau, the setting, characters and the disturbingly graphic violence diverge from the usually light-hearted comedy typical of the fabliaux. As a shrew-taming tale, the story breaks several of the genre's conventions, which generally work to confirm the accepted social order of male dominance and female submission in a marital relationship. In its graphic depiction of a fake castration performed on a woman, La dame escolliee does not restore masculine order and dominance, but transforms a female body into a male one through a violent performance, challenging the very concept of what masculinity is. The husband of the castrated woman is not the one who punishes her. His passivity makes him more feminine than masculine in many ways. The man who performs the false castration (the woman's son-in-law) presents a harsh and exaggerated form of masculinity that insists on a narrow construct of maleness that destabilizes the very structures it seemingly tries to preserve. By undermining his father-in-law and transforming his mother-in-law, the supposed shrew-tamer reveals inherent problems with such a limited view of masculinity. The use of a false castration on a woman changes the purpose of the performance and moves the dynamic of the tale from a tale about the proper role of women to a cautionary tale for men and masculine identity.