https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5182-5470
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Abstract
Jean de Létraz’s unpublished, little-known vaudeville play The Maiden of Auteuil (La pucelle d’Auteuil) ends, after the stage goes black and just before the curtain falls, with six characters performing a genital inspection on the main character Camille, who passed as both a man and a woman over the course of the play. Performed at the Palais-Royal Theatre in Paris in 1952, the comic play highlights anxieties in the 50 s about how cisgender communities know who is and is not “transsexual.” This article interprets this striking final scene in light of the rest of the play and the legal, medical, and cultural context of 1950s France, arguing that the genital inspection performs the reestablishment of public order out of gender disorder at the same time as it warns the French public about the coming hegemony of binarized sexual definition based on external appearance of genitalia, as codified in French juridical discourse.
Notes
1 Because the play’s script uses masculine pronouns for Camille, I will use them, with the understanding that his gender is complicated.
2 All translations are my own. In the interest of space, I will generally offer English translations only. References to the play’s script will be indicated parenthetically by act followed by page number from that act, as the text is composed of three separate booklets, each one act. The title page of the script indicates that it was used for a mise en scène at the Théâtre du Palais Royal in Paris in 1952 and contains handwritten annotations. Létraz himself was the director of the theatre and of the production based on his own script. I know of no other version of the play in Europe, including manuscript or printed copy.
3 For Halberstam, the term also “holds off the certainty of diagnosis” (4)—radically unlike medicalized “transsexuality” in the 1950s. I cannot establish if Létraz can be taken as trans* or how his biography connects him to trans* questions.
4 Létraz himself, in a radio interview on 2 October 1952, notes that the play was widely performed in France and abroad (“Jean de Létraz parle”), and that it played to full houses. After its successful run at the Palais Royal, the play ran at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu (in the second half of 1957). Along with other documents and reviews, the program is archived at the Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu: “Ambigu: 1769, 1959” (4-SW-522; 1-2). A later program talks of “la verve” of Létraz with respect to the play. Létraz was a prolific writer of comedies, producing over 200 works, and according to program notes for the Ambigu production, his theatre was performed not only in Paris but also across Europe and in North Africa and Latin America.
5 On this media attention, see chap. 1 in Foerster.
6 For an overview, see chap. 2 in Meyerowitz.
7 On Poulain, see Foerster 59–60.
8 On the film, see Reeser.
9 On categorizing Elbe, see Amin.
10 For trans* in the previous century, see Mesch; Manion. On early modern France, see Ferguson.
11 Linton studies intersex “outlaws” in the nineteenth century in “Hermaphrodite Outlaws.” Linton notes, too, that the case for a third or neutral sex was also made before the 20th century: “a number of doctors called for a third, neuter, sex to be added alongside the official ranks of ‘female’ and ‘male’” (89). For this critique of Foucault’s “true sex,” see Lindon “Lusting,” (297–98); “Outlaws,” (89–90).
12 On “Camille” as a gender-neutral name in nineteenth-century novels with intersex characters, see Linton “Mutating Bodies,” (581–84). On Fragoletta, see Linton “Lusting,” (300–8). On the “third sex” (one possible historical precursor to transgender), see Murat. On the imposition of sex binarism broadly, see Fausto-Sterling.
13 Reay talks of “overlap” in the period between intersex and trans (52). French medical discourse of the period often includes intersex as one of several possible “causes” of transsexuality (e.g. Alby 184–9).
14 Interestingly, this comment is crossed out in the script consulted.
15 The bibliography on d’Eon and gender is extensive. See, for instance, Kates and Brogan.
16 On d’Eon and virginity, see Kates 159–65; 286–88.
17 On calls to revise the code earlier, see Linton “Hermaphrodite Outlaws.”
18 Although the case had no relation to transsexuality, courts from 1903 until 1990 evoke it as precedent (Branlard 454; Salas 62–69). Courts evoke this case as precedent until 1990. On the case, see Linton “Hermaphrodite Outlaws,” (102–3); Iacub 110–14.
19 The scene’s absurdity may be influenced by the beginning of the Theatre of the Absurd, launched by the Parisian performance of Beckett’s En attendant Godot in 1953 (although the play was published in 1952). The absurdity here would correspond to Bennett’s reading of the movement as forcing viewers “to confront his or her own worldview in order to create order out of the chaos presented in the plays” (8). For me, that “order” would be a critique of the nation-state’s absurd sexual binarism.
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Todd W. Reeser
Todd W. Reeser, professor of French and chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, has published three monographs at the intersection of French studies and gender/sexuality studies, including Masculinities in Theory and Setting Plato Straight.