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ABSTRACT
Gender-focused studies of nineteenth-century French literature and history in the last few decades have often relied on heteronormative and gender normative paradigms. Using Rachilde as an example, I demonstrate how trans studies can offer tools through which to recover the gender-creative past. These tools are meant to work in concert with feminist and queer theories, while centering gender in a broad sense by focusing on challenges to the gender binary, modes of gender expression, attention to the material body, and a felt sense of gender.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on the Contributor
Rachel Mesch is Professor of French and English at Yeshiva University in New York. She is the author of Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford UP 2020); Having it All in the Belle Epoque: How French Women Writers Invented the Modern Woman (Stanford UP 2013); and The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Vanderbilt UP 2006).
Notes
1 I would like to thank Anna Klosowska, François Proulx, Raisa Rexer, and Hannah Frydman for their invaluable feedback on various drafts of this piece. My ideas here are also deeply informed by discussions with Kirstin Ringelberg. Any errors are of course my own.
2 Melanie Hawthorne (Citation1987) and Dorothy Kelly (Citation1989) were among the first modern feminist scholars to study Rachilde. In my own feminist treatment of Rachilde (Citation2006) I argued that ‘[Rachilde’s] critique of gender roles is relevant [to feminism] to the extent that it helps us to appreciate the challenges of expressing female intellect in a male-dominated literary discourse’ (123). For a helpful summary of more recent feminist and queer readings, see Rickard (Citation2020) 270–271.
3 See for example, Lisa Downing (Citation2011), Katherine Gantz (Citation2005), and Dominique Fisher (Citation2003).
4 Rachilde told Maryse Choisy (Citation1978) on several occasions, ‘as for me, I am a man’ (106, 112, 113,138). Rachilde likely had a similar conversation with close friend Georges de Peyrebrune, whose character Hélione, based on Rachilde, declares ‘je ne suis pas une femme … Le hasard a fait de moi une femme; ma volonté a fait de moi un homme’ (qtd in Finn Citation2009, 39). On Rachilde as werewolf, see Mesch (Citation2020) 197–205.
5 For an excellent history of trans terminology and scholarly uses, see Kim and Bychowski (Citation2019) 21–23.
6 Trans is acknowledged within recent queer readings of Monsieur Vénus by Pugh (Citation2020) and Rickard (Citation2020, 281, n. 4). Foerster's notion of “heterosexual trouble” (Citation2018) hints towards a more complex relationship between queer and trans lenses without considering the author's own investments.
7 On the relationship of trans to queer studies, see Chu and Drager (Citation2019); Spencer-Hall and Gutt (Citation2021) 20–22. Keegan (Citation2018) explores the relationships between trans and queer studies, and trans and women’s studies.
8 See also Keegan (Citation2018) on how Queer Studies’ interest in gender as ideology has obscured the reality of trans bodies and experiences.
9 My use of the term axiom is a nod to Eve K. Sedgwick’s groundbreaking introduction to The Epistemology of the Closet (Citation1990).
10 My own practices have evolved since the publication of Before Trans (Citation2020) in which I used she/her pronouns, in order to ‘[preserve] the historical nature of their lived experience’ (25). On the most recent developments in gender inclusive language in French and best practices, see Kris Knisely (Citation2020).
11 Jules Gill-Peterson writes of her own work: ‘it is likely that the categorical landscape will continue to change in the future, at some point rendering the language of this book anachronistic, something that I embrace’ (Citation2018, 9).
12 See Eve K. Sedgwick’s critique of the way scholars have unwittingly deployed Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis to ‘[mandate] ever more of the oppressive verbal proliferation that had also gone on before and around it’ (Citation2003, 10). Sedgwick notes that Foucault’s ‘analysis of the pseudodichotomy between repression and liberation’ has led to a facile opposition between ‘hegemonic and the subversive’ (Citation2003, 12) through which the two terms lose their meaning and specificity. Lynne Huffer (Citation2009) argues that queer studies has relied too heavily on Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume I.
13 Foucault’s and Butler’s readings of Barbin have been criticized for this reason (Holmes Citation2004, 31–32; Heaney Citation2017, 223).
14 This approach has its roots in feminist praxis. Emma Heaney writes that her book ‘uncovers the trans feminine self-representation that is part of the recovery of women’s writing that the gynocritics made central to their critical project’ (Citation2017, 16).
15 See Dinshaw Citation1999, 14–15.
16 Finn astutely mines the traces of these discourses in his comprehensive, essential study of Rachilde’s life and works. While he recognizes ‘a sense of bitter, personal conflict’ at the heart of Rachilde, he stops short of trying to name that conflict (Citation2009, 41.)
17 The notion of ‘disruptive acts’ is indebted to Caroll-Smith Rosenberg’s notions of ‘disorderly conduct’ in the Victorian Era, distinguished in the Belle Epoque by an acting out beyond the domestic sphere (2002, 9).
18 ‘Rachilde played a skillful double game of ‘art or life’ hide-and-seek with her public. She traded on her reputation as an innocent, reserved, virginal young woman who had produced a shocking book.’ (Hawthorne and Constable Citation2004, xv). ‘Rachilde’s dramatic attempt to parlay her own image to make a splash in the male-dominated literary pond of fin-de-siècle Paris raises fascinating questions.’ (Lively Citation1998, 8).
19 Rachilde describes Lorrain’s important role in their sartorial changes in Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe (68–69, Citation1928).
20 ‘In the modernist period, sex became cis,’ (Heaney Citation2017, 14). Gill-Peterson argues that this divide was created by mid-twentieth-century theories about intersex (Citation2018, 17).
21 On the changing meaning of ‘gender’ and its distinctions, see Debuk, ‘A Brief History of “gender”’ https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/a-brief-history-of-gender/
22 Cf Gill-Peterson (Citation2018): ‘[T]he European sexological concept of ‘inversion’ was a much more complex blend of what today is separated into sex or gender on the one hand and sexuality or sexual object choice on the other’ (14).
23 See the discussion of female marriage in Victorian literature in Marcus (Citation2007).
24 See, for example, Lukacher Citation1994, Downing Citation2019.
25 Montifaud latched onto French anger at Germany following the Franco-Prussian War as a predominant theme of their later novels. I read this anger in Montifaud’s revenge fictions as a response to their own sense of ‘gender exile’ (2020, 269–71).
26 In her study of female friendship in Victorian England, Marcus (Citation2007) argues that contemporary notions of the boundaries between homosexuality and heterosexuality prevents modern scholars from noting same-sex desire between women in nineteenth-century texts.
27 For an example of this surface reading in a queer context, see Proulx (Citation2020).