The subtext of this interpretation
Now for the essay by Dr Kit Heyam that explains why Joan of Arc & Elizabeth Tudor were too good to be mere women.
Dr Heyam uses the bespoke pronouns right off the bat, and the result of course is confusing meaningless drivel.
Title: ‘It was necessary’: taking Joan of Arc on their own terms
Whose own terms?
Subtitle: We take a look a fresh look at Jeanne d’Arc’s story, and what they tell us about the history of gender
What who tell us about the history of gender?
Pronouns are there for a reason: to convey needed information without having to repeat people’s names a million times. Sticking in “they”s where they don’t make any sense doesn’t convey any information, it just creates clumsy bumps that interfere with comprehension. It’s shit writing.
We start with clothes, because of course we do. Joan of Arc wore men’s clothes. The audience gasped as one.
This is how Joan’s story is often told: as a tale of pragmatic gender nonconformity, men’s dress as a strategy to navigate a patriarchal world. The subtext of this interpretation – increasingly made explicit as our society continues to deny the historical existence of trans experience – is that Joan shouldn’t be seen as part of trans history: that their story is about gender-nonconforming behaviour, not identity.
Bollocks. We can perfectly well think Joan was also gender nonconforming, and I’m pretty sure lots of people have, and we can think that without having to think she was “trans.” I for one think it’s the other way around: idiots like this Kit Heyam person impose their fatuous socially constructed ideas on people who wouldn’t have understood a word she he they is saying, even in translation.
In my new book Before We Were Trans, I take a fresh look at histories like Joan’s, and consider what they tell us about the history of gender. The book tackles histories of gender nonconformity which overlap with other kinds of history, including histories of queer sexuality, intersex embodiment, and defiance of gender roles…
I have to wonder why the Globe is helping this fool market her his their new book.
…saying Joan’s gender nonconformity was motivated by practicality doesn’t prevent us from also saying that it had other, deeper motivations – or that it had other, deeper, unexpected consequences for how Joan felt.
No shit. Of course it could have had other motivations! Of course she could have wanted a wider more interesting life than the one that was allotted to women. Lots of girls and women want that and always have – that doesn’t mean they’re “trans.”
The ninth-century English ruler Æthelflæd, who governed Mercia after the death of their husband, was later described as ‘conducting…Armies, as if she had changed her sex’: to take on a male-coded military role was, in some sense, for Æthelflæd to become male. Elizabeth I, similarly, described themself regularly in speeches as ‘king’, ‘queen’ and ‘prince’, choosing strategically to emphasise their female identity or their male monarchical role at different points.
Still doesn’t make them “trans.”
This person is an idiot. I’m finished with her him them.
It’s not just convenience, either. Pronouns can improve clarity. Pronouns indicate sex. Pronouns fill in as dummy subjects. Pronouns indicate direction and presence of relation. Pronouns are not mere vocabulary; they are part of the language’s structure.
I read John Scalzi’s most recent book, The Kaiju Preservation Society. In it, there is one character who is (implicitly) “non-binary”; no big deal is made out of it, the character is simply referred to using they/them pronouns or by name. The weirder bit, something of an affectation, is that the main character, the narrator charactor, is named Jamie (perfectly common for either sex), and is never, ever, not once in the whole book, referred to by a pronoun. No details give away whether Jamie is male or female. This is done about as smoothly as it could possibly be done, and yet I found it irritating and awkward, the way entire conversations were oh-so-cleverly arranged so as to avoid having someone use a pronoun for this one character out of all the characters. I’m more sensitive than the average Jo to this, I’m sure, but still.
That would irritate the hell out of me.
I mean, I did that in a short story once, to see how well it would work and how much it would contort my writing. For the latter, the answer was “a whole fucking lot”. Now, I do think the exercise made me a better writer, as the restriction was little different from the rhyming and metric restrictions of poetry.
I’m not sure how well it worked, though. People seemed to like the story, at least.
My first-person narrator’s name was Sasha, which is gender neutral in Russian, and the story was explicitly a Russian dark science-fantasy. On the other hand, the name’s highly gendered in English, so maybe that minimized the ambiguity for my readers.
I see what you did there.
Remember in M.A.S.H. when Hawkeye and Lt. Houlihan had to perform surgery alone together under bombardment? And she was thinking of Joan of Arc? And all this time it turns out Mademoiselle d’Arc was non-binary! Which is a made-up concept that doesn’t mean anything.
Then there’s the 1939 novel Gadsby, written without the letter “e”. No “love,” no “hate,” no “life,” no “death.” No past tenses ending in “ed.” No “eyes,” “noses,” or “ears.” An interesting exrcise, but no political ramifications.
#4 @Nullius in Verba
Rhyme and meter might be less important in written poetry, but they may have been more important in oral poetry, as they helped people remember.
This is how Joan’s story is often told: she was not a platypus. The subtext of this interpretation – increasingly made explicit as our society continues to deny that people like her were platypuses – is that Joan shouldn’t be seen as a platypus.
I see no fault in Dr H’s logic.
The sex of Professor Hilary Tamar, the narrator of Sarah Caudwell’s four mystery novels (which I highly recommend!) is never explicitly stated–and she manages to carry this through four entire books–but one very small incident near the beginning of the first novel I think (intentionally or unintentionally?) reveals the answer.
Nullius @ 4 – “Sasha” is highly gendered in English? But there’s Sasha Baron-Cohen. It’s my impression it’s one of the flexible ones.
Ophelia: Perhaps I should have been more specific. In America, it’s a feminine name. I often link language to culture in my mind.
Joan of Arc was, above all, a religious fanatic who thought God was in direct contact with her. I remember watching the Ingrid Bergman movie when I was around 8 years old and being puzzled. “So she was right, God wanted her fighting the English and putting the Dolphin (sic) on the throne?” I asked my mother. She sighed, shook her head, and said “No, I don’t think God would care about such things, or want violence.” There was a dilemma, then: who to trust — my mother, or a cracking good story?
I could see a play in which Joan refers to herself as neither male nor female. It might depend on whether she believes God (He/Him) is guiding her, or the Holy Spirit (It/It or, arguably, They/Them.) Unsexing the Maid of Orleans would be exploring the mind of someone so deep in the thralls of a religious delusion that they cannot separate their own self from The Ghost which dwells within them and smites The Lord’s enemies through His instrument. The Holy Spirit isn’t a mere human, let alone a female one. That’s a legitimate interpretation.
But no. It’s just boring propaganda creating an anachronism by transing the women of the past.
Sacha Baron Cohen. (Spelling variant, but that’s the one he uses.)
Sasha Cohen won the silver medal in women’s figure skating at the 2006 Olympics. I suspect people confuse her with SBC occasionally.
Sasha is more commonly given to girls than boys in the US, I agree. Ditto Ashley and Laurie; I had British male colleagues with those names who I thought were female for the longest time.
That sums up woke attempts at art, though, doesn’t it? Take a subject that could be interesting, evocative, challenging, transgressive, then render it sterile and lifeless, devoid of anything save The Message. Woke art always becomes only propaganda, because the doctrine is totalizing. Far from smashing binaries, it is built upon the binary of Us & Them. Any resource or effort not spent in spreading The Message is not neutral; it is actively evil. Under Wokeism, the only proper form of art is propaganda.
@12 reminds me of this woman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend