Trans Literature: Transgender Histories and Genres of Embodiment, Medieval and Post-Medieval

Home , A Line That Connects, Constance Stone, TERF, Transgender literature, T and O map

by Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

B.A. in History and English, June 2010, DePaul University M.A. in English, May 2012, the George Washington University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 31, 2017

Jonathan Hsy Associate Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of 16 May 2017. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Trans Literature: Transgender Histories and Genres of Embodiment, Medieval and Post-Medieval

Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

Dissertation Research Committee:

Jonathan Hsy, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Committee Member

David Mitchell, Professor of English, Committee Member

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Dedication

To the Trans Future of the Past

Acknowledgements

Transitions never happen alone or in isolation, telling the stories of transition even less so. Thanks must be given to an extraordinary committee, a dream team for this project. Jonathan Hsy was a committed and loyal director throughout the process as well as my primary gardener, knowing where to fertilize ideas and where to prune in order to help the rest flourish. Robert McRuer was indispensible for challenging ideas and broadening critical archives, as well as giving enthusiastic support for this project while the question was still being asked, “is this something that can be done?” David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder provided mentorship and models for what work needs to get done as well as how to get that work done. Susan Stryker jumped into the work with an enthusiasm that was a true gift in the final push, yet was also was an inspiration for this project well before she was involved, providing entrance into a hallway of discourse and history off of which this work hopes to set up a door and room.

The university and program into which one pursues a Ph.D. will largely define the potential and limits of a dissertation. I am proud to say that a theoretically invested project on transgender in the Middle Ages is a piece of work that in many ways reflects the unique gifts of the George Washington University English Department: a renowned institute for Medieval Studies, a diverse faculty with leaders in queer, disability, and gender theory, as well as an established investment in innovative works that do things in different and new ways. Thank you to John Dimucci, James H. Murphy, Anne Clark

Bartlett, William Fahrenbach, and Warren Schutlz for helping me forge my way into the serious study of medieval literature, history, and theology. Also, work at G.W. would be impossible without the indispensible contributions of Constance Kibler and Linda Terry.

The G.W. Medieval and Early Modern Institute provided an intellectual environment full of faculty and graduate colleagues exploring their own uniquely daring work, as well as a regular influx of visiting speakers that gave roadmaps and invitations into wider scholastic communities and conversations. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Jonathan Gil

Harris remain two icons that drew me into the MEMSI family and set me down the path to finding my own meaning to the Institute’s motto, “The Future of the Past.” It was my first professional talk, only months into the program, given as part of a MEMSI

Conference, that allowed me to introduce a risky and challenging question: what might transgender look like in the Middle Ages? This inquiry was then tested and reworked throughout courses and a series of workshops led Holly Dugan.

Often partnering with G.W.’s MEMSI, the Babel Working Group and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship were other important communities that gave early support for this project, expressing radical inclusiveness to me and my work and a willingness to turn and face the strange. Special thanks must be given for the leadership of Eileen Joy and the irreplaceable friendship of Dorothy Kim.

During my tenure at the George Washington University, I was privileged to participate in the early imagining and development of the G.W. Digital Humanities

Institute where I worked under the guidance of Alexa Alice Joubin. Her kindness and generosity not only strengthened my skills in medieval and early modern research as well as the digital humanities but also was a support for which I am deeply grateful.

These years also saw the rise of MATCH: A Crip/Queer Reading group where faculty and graduate students would share our studies and enthusiasm. Numerous outstanding graduate colleagues had a mark on this project. Em Russell and Lubaaba

Amatullah were kindred spirits who pushed me time and again to not try to imitate the work of others but to unapologetically hold fast to the concerns and perspectives that were important to me. Erin Sheley, Theodora Danylevich, Will Quiterio and Shyama

Rajendran stayed up late with me unpacking our work and reaching for the reason behind it. Chelsey Faloona and Michael Horka, thank you for your kindness and fierceness.

Alan Montroso, Patrick Henry, Sam Yates, Ray Budelman, Sukshma Vedere, and Derek

Newman-Stille were all integral partners in the management of MATCH, its wider networking and programing. Leigha McReynolds, Erin Vanderwall, Mark de Cicco and

Tawnya Azar helped develop and broadcast the project into new fields through an ongoing series of conferences. To my sister-friends Megan Bowman, Maria J. Carson,

Brenna Markle, and Emily Hofsteadter, you were constant inspirations to me. Thank you also to D. Gilson and Haylie Swenson for your comradery and friendships.

Finally, academic work is important but drains energy that was daily replenished thanks to my family. Thank you to my mother, Theresa Bychowski and the whole

“Wheaton Bobsled Team,” who spent countless hours answering phone calls, driving me to airports, babysitting, and teaching me how pursue my vocation with love and dignity.

Also to my father, Thomas Bychowski, thank you for teaching me how to learn tirelessly, as well as to my brother and sister, Steve and Laura Bychowski, for teaching me how to argue generously. The Reverend Rachel J. Bahr is a true partner in all things, advocating, assisting, arguing, and inspiring me; you are my constant champion. At last, to my children: you are ever the precious joys in my life that remind me each night as we read together, talk over dinner, or play games that the impact of scholarship goes far beyond the academy, touching on the formation and hearts that carry the future of our past.

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Abstract

Trans Literature: Transgender Histories and Genres of Embodiment, Medieval and Post-Medieval

This project seeks to develop a literary theory of trans discourse that better allows for the study of transgender prior to the coinage of identity terminology in the 20th century. By examining transgender as an array of genres of embodiment (based on Sandy

Stone's genre theory from the Posttranssexual Manifesto) with distinct but intersecting cultural genealogies, a series of trans histories can be told that connect the way trans figures function within literature to the production of trans identities. To demonstrate this theory, the late medieval period (between 1350 and 1450) is selected as this is the first time in which literature began to written in a form resembling modern English, allowing for a larger degree of historical division with contemporary texts (mostly drawn from the

1990s) while still operating within the same language. Each of the four chapters are structured to (1) provide an analysis of a different genre of embodiment, exploring the development of certain trans identities as tied to the production of certain forms of trans literature, and (2) examine case studies within the genre, one from late medieval England and one from contemporary America, in order to demonstrate how the form of literature enacts transhistorical social functions in historically specific ways. A critical outcome of the study is the development of a trans way of reading and composing literature, an expansion of transgender history into the medieval period, and a reevaluation of modern texts as a cultural inheritance of medieval discourses that lay narrative foundations for later iterations of trans literature and identity.

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Table of Contents

Dedication………...... iv Acknowledgments………...... v Abstract of Dissertation ...... viii Introduction…………….………………….…………………...... 1 Chapter 1: Exempla of Transsexuals………...... 87 Chapter 2: Confessions of Dysphoria...... 166 Chapter 3: Hagiographies of Transvestites...... 242 Chapter 4: Pilgrimages of Hermaphrodites………...... 326 Conclusion: Swerves and Swervers ...... 408 Bibliography……...... 413

Introduction

This disseration develops a literary theory of trans discourse that facilitates and promotes the study of transgender prior to the coinage of identity terminology in the twentieth century. By examining transgender as an array of genres of embodiment (based on Sandy Stone's genre theory from “A Posttranssexual Manifesto”) with distinct but intersecting cultural genealogies, a set of trans histories can be told that connect the way trans figures function within literature to the production of trans identities.1

To demonstrate this theory, the late medieval period (between 1350 and 1450) is selected as late-medieval Middle English texts are foundational in English (Anglophone) literary history, allowing for a larger degree of historical division with contemporary texts (mostly drawn from the 1990’s) as I trace how such foundational contexts are revisited in a pivotal era of identity construction for trans people. In this project, I argue that transgender histories, real and imagined, provide a sense of continuity that sustains lives across time and genres of embodiment and invites audiences to ethically engage with the demands for transgender lives to enter narratives in order to make the process of change culturally intelligible.

Each of the four chapters are structured to (1) provide an analysis of a different genre of embodiment, exploring the development of certain trans identities as tied to the production of certain forms of trans literature, and (2) examine case studies within the genre, one from late medieval England and one from the contemporary United States in order to demonstrate how the form of literature enacts transhistorical social functions in

1 Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed., (NY: Routledge, 2006). 221-235. 1

historically specific ways. A critical outcome of the study is the development of a trans way of reading and composing literature, an expansion of transgender history into the medieval period, and a reevaluation of modern texts as a cultural inheritance of medieval discourses that lay narrative foundations for later iterations of trans literature and identity.

While resisting a universal definition for transgender, this project aims to introduce new methods of reading and writing existing canons. This bifurcation between specificity and ambiguity exists even in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of transgender, “Of, relating to, or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these,” adding the rejoinder, “Although often used (esp. among participants in transgender lifestyles) as a generic and inclusive term which deliberately avoids categorizations such as transsexual or transvestite, in wider use transgender is sometimes used synonymously with these more specific terms.”2 Transgender as a term functions simultaneously to describe a particular mode of being while also remaining open, making it a particularly useful term for the study of diverse peoples from diverse contexts.

The definition of the word “trans” likewise offers useful ambiguity. For the purpose of this study, “trans” in one sense follows the colloquial use as shorthand for

“trans” identities (e.g. transvestite, transsexual, transgender) or related identities that do not share the “trans-” prefix, such as “gender queer” or “cross-dresser.”3 “Trans” in this sense is opposed to “cis” or “cisgender,” meaning, “a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds to his or her sex at birth.”4 Beyond these definitions,

“trans” also functions as a critical term much like “queer” or “crip.” In this vein, “trans”

2 "transgender, adj." OED Online. 2017. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com (accessed April 17, 2017). 3 "trans, adj," OED Online, (accessed April 17, 2017). 4 "cisgender, adj. and n.," OED Online. (accessed April 17, 2017). 2

signals bodies that construct, embody, and articulate forms of gender beyond the binary of male and female. Transgender and trans lives often function is queer ways, disturbing norms, yet may also offer norms and stable forms within their alternative frameworks.

Before proceeding further into the study, there are some necessary contributions and limitations that need to be considered. First, a brief review of the existing literature within Transgender Studies, Medieval Studies, and literary studies sets the foundations on which this study is based as well as demonstrates how a turn towards the researching of trans history, such as medieval trans literature, requires movement not only within one field but a myriad of disciplines. Because each field not only focuses on different objects but asks distinct questions in distinct ways, each of the three main tributaries will be considered in turn, even as all point to the need for such an interdisciplinary field.

Because the emergence of an expansive field such as premodern trans studies necessarily uses a variety of tools from each discipline that may not be evident to others that are also cooperating in the work, as well as some tools and ideas being used in new ways not originally imagined by their founders of discourse, it is also useful to lay out a common method that will function as the broad structure within which each chapter of this project. I call this method, “genres of embodiment.” A brief description of the parameters, roots, and rationale for the methodology is also given.

Due to the variety of texts that will be used from both medieval and post-medieval traditions, a brief overview of the archives and critical methods is useful to make clear why certain objects are chosen, what they are, and how they relate. Why are certain critical methods used in favor of others? How does modern theory connect to medieval conceptions of gender and literature? What connects the texts that are chosen for close

reading? Each of these questions demands some brief consideration. Finally, a general overview of the chapters is given to describe how the broad field of premodern trans studies can be approached through a series of genres of embodiments.

1. Literature Review

A. Transgender Studies

This project comes in response to an implicit question that can be harder to answer in the academy than on the street: does transgender have a premodern history?

Public conception of transgender as a historical entity is divided but fairly straightforward, with a significant contingent believing that transgender as a form of being does not exist now and never has existed and another contingent believing that of course transgender has always existed in much the same way that cisgender people have always existed. A general sketch of these opinions is useful because it serves to justify why the study of premodern trans history is important and necessary in this moment.

On the one hand, if historical scholarship can demonstrate that trans people have existed in some form for centuries, then this lends credibility to the argument that transgender people are not a momentary symptom of gender studies and progressive politics gone awry. Prominent examples of those who affirm transgender as just such a temporary crisis being Pope Francis, who famously compared trans studies to the intellectualism gone amuck that produced the atomic bomb, and Vice President of the

United States, Mike Pence, who believes that transgender is an illness that can be

corrected through therapy. In 2015, Pope Francis was attempting to reconcile with the transgender community by inviting a trans man to the Vatican for a private meeting. The meeting was described by the executive director of New Ways Ministry, “as genuine interest in learning about the transgender experience from a firsthand source.”5 The meeting ended with the man asking if despite the Church being a toxic environment for trans people if there was "a place somewhere in the house of God for him.”6 Francis hugged him, an act that would pacify progressive Catholics, but, a shrewd politician, he voiced no firm reply.

The meeting was arranged to pre-empt the publication of a book in later 2015,

This Economy Kills, where Francis compares the trans population with atomic bombs.

“Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings… or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation… With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator.”7

Excerpts of the book were released in early 2015; thus the meeting, the question, and the silence between the Pope and the transgender man. For Pope Francis, because

Transgender Studies and transgender as a word is new, “a new sin,” so too is the phenomenon that transgender describes. For the Catholic pontiff, transgender does not have a place in the order of creation. It is a momentary blip, a disorder, or an event that has not existed before and with aggressive social reform will not exist in the future.

Born into a Catholic family, Vice President Pence shares Pope Francis’s historical disposition towards transgender even after his conversion to Born-Again Evangelicalism

5 Thomas Fox, “Pope Francis Meets/Hugs Transgender Man,” National Catholic Reporter, Jan 2015. www.ncronline.org. (Accessed 2 Jan 2017). 6 Ibid. 7 Pope Francis, This Economy Kills, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015). 5

later in his life. A statement on sexual healthcare from Pence’s 2000 congressional campaign reads, “[r]esources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”8 While Pence denies that this statement refers to a practice under the unpopular title, “conversion therapy,” authorities such as the Executive Direction of the LGBT Taskforce observes, “[t]hat is very specific language — some might call it a dog whistle — that has been used for decades to very thinly cloak deeply homophobic beliefs… Particularly the phrase

‘seeking to change their sexual behavior,’ to me, is code for conversion therapy.”9

Whether or not the Vice President affirms conversion therapy, many of his proponents and that of his 2016 running-mate consider this an important issue, and the idea that transgender and queerness are new lifestyles without a deep history might continue to give room for the suggestion that they are explosive time-bombs without a deep future.

On the other hand, a general belief that transgender people have always existed offers a more positive prompting for the telling of history than flat out denial. Such general historical statements have been espoused by trans actor and activist Laverne Cox when describing what she views as the real question posed by anti-transgender bathroom laws, “whether we believe transgender people should exist in public space. It’s really about us having access to public space, because transgender people have been using the bathroom for a long time. We’ve always been here. We’re not going anywhere.”10

Whether affirmed through such ahistorical statements or through transgender histories, the pressing implicit political statement of such projects is that if trans communities have

8 Liam Stack, “Mike Pence and ‘Conversion Therapy’: A History.” The New York Times. 30 Nov 2016. www.nytimes.com. (Accessed 1 April 2017). 9 Ibid. 10 Raha Lewis, “Laverne Cox on Threat to Transgender Students’ Rights: They’re Trying to ‘Make Us Not Exist … We Will Not Be Erased’” People. 24 Feb 2017. www.people.com (Accessed 1 April 2017). 6

existed across time despite challenges and change, then present problems can also be overcome. In short, if trans people have a past, they may also have a future.

While born out of the immediate political needs of the transgender community, assumptions such as those made by Ms. Cox ultimately turn toward the rigors of academic inquire and historical study. Even in its failing to grasp the historical specificities and diversities of gender that shift across time, wherein a straight cis man may be as unlike a medieval chivalric knight than a transsexual is like an eunuch, yet this well meaning ignorance calls for the academy to provide better data, more histories, and archives of trans literature. As a brief survey of transgender, history, and literature studies demonstrates, the answer the academy can provide current political question, “the time of transgender,” ends up somewhere between all or nothing, forever and never, which is generally where history as well as literature does its work. As will be shown, the transitions of transgender call out for histories that cross the divides of identity and time.

The question of transgender history in the academy faces different divisions that offer their own complicated problems and incentives for the study of a premodern transgender past. As with public sentiment, there is no one single issue or one transgender history. There are many. Nonetheless, the primary divide that will be considered for intervention is the professional chasm that exists in the 2010’s between Transgender

Studies and premodern fields such as Medieval Studies on the basis of language. As discussed in the “Trans Historicities” panels at the inaugural Trans* Studies Conference

2016 at the University of Arizona, a split that exists between disciplines and as a boundary against premodern trans studies is how to respond on the study of peoples who reflect the definitions trans identities but exist in a time and place without the word

“transgender.”11 Some take the position these peoples should constitute a study as their own identity while others call for a collective study under the trans umbrella. The effect of this divide is that most scholars who work in Transgender Studies do not study literature and history prior to the twentieth or late nineteenth century. As a result, most

Transgender Studies focus on the late modern (1900-today) in American or English forms. This does not so much create an inaccurate picture of transgender within certain linguistic, intellectual, and historical circles but rather creates a problematically small circle in which to study trans lives.

The aversion to using anachronistic terms in Medieval Studies is more spotty because translations of terms are more regularly used in a field where modern medievalists must write scholarship using both modern and not modern languages. As a result, medievalists seem willing to accept certain anachronisms in describing transgender but not others. Those academics who touch on trans figures, cultures, ideas, or tropes in fields such as Medieval Studies are often woefully ignorant not only about the insights of Transgender Studies but can be offensively or comically (depending on the writer and disposition of the reader) out of date on the basic facts about trans persons.

Thus, the term “transvestite saints” or “transvestite women” (by which they refer to trans men, or “women” who live as men) without an awareness that their use may be offensive, out of date, or lacking specificity.12 The divide is slowly changing and this study works to encourage fields to bridge this gap.

The work of developing transgender history has been encouraged in recent years by scholarship in trans and Medieval Studies. Taking on the argument embodied by the

11 Trans* Studies Conference 2016 at the University of Arizona. www.lgbt.arizona.edu. 12Alice-Mary Talbot, Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996). 8

title of her book, Susan Stryker’s Transgender History acknowledges the problems facing the composition of writing trans history, namely the dilemma of names and language which may be unfamiliar to readers or even subjects of the history. The project of writing

“transgender” history as opposed to a history of “transsexuals” or “non-binary genders,” was a generalization that irked some historians. “Oddly enough,” admits Stryker, “for somebody trained as a historian, I sometimes use these words [queer and transgender] in ways that may sound anachronistic.”13 Historians aware of trans studies may yet resist any project identifying peoples under a term that they do not use themselves. This is a problem that will be directly addressed in the next section, “Genres of Embodiment.”

Here it is enough to acknowledge that beyond being a methodological issue, this is also a fundamental challenge to the undertaking of studies called “transgender history.” Yet also it may be offered that transhistoricism may be a beneficial (even necessary) frame of reference for geneaologies of gender that necessarily cross generations and may include significant transitions of embodiment, identity, and time within a single life.

Despite the linguistic and cultural difference between modern and medieval peoples, there are valid reasons that historians would chose to identify across such temporal divides. On this question of anachronism, Stryker argues that there are reasons to proceed anyway, “[transgender and queer] are short, easily pronounced, familiar words that can serve as shorthand for a more complicated idea or identity or way of acting.”14

Shorthand is something that historians do all the time. Medieval people did not call themselves medieval, yet Medieval Studies exists and uses the term as a useful if often nebulous and debated identifier for an era of history, religion, art, and literature. There is

13 Susan Stryker, Transgender History, (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008) 23. 14 Ibid. 9

value in society and academia to have a field called “Medieval Studies” to do specialized work. So too transgender history or even medieval Transgender Studies may usefully describe a field or project that studies people who themselves do not use these words.

In the inaugural issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), Karl Wittington writes on transgender in the Middle Ages, “too few scholars are aware of the rich range of materials that Medieval Studies can offer to transgender history,” yet notes, “[s]ince the concept of the transgender person did not exist in the Middle Ages, scholars instead investigate concrete medieval subjects that relate to the issue, such as intersexuality, cross-dressing, and the medical alteration of the sexed body, all of which are discussed in primary sources.”15 While optimistic, Wittington’s short essay calls on trans studies to learn from the methods of Medieval Studies in order to find era specific ways of studying premodern transgender. Without such interdisciplinary work, Transgender Studies would be unable to see the same in the medieval other, nor Medieval Studies to see how premodern forms have developed and adapted over the centuries in a modern context.

In short, developing a field such as medieval Transgender Studies will require some degree of mastery in two fields that currently stand separate. To be able and willing to explore transgender in the Middle Ages requires familiarity with diverse ideas of trans- ness, so that medieval scholars should be able to detect new nuances and complexities in premodern texts. For instance, intersexuality looks different within medieval religious and literary discourses than it does within modern medical texts. Likewise, to track history before the nineteenth century, Transgender Studies will need to build familiarity and understanding of the diverse medieval modes of gender, embodiment, and literature

15 Karl Wittington, “Medieval,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1. Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a 21st Century Transgender Studies. 10 June 2014. Duke University Press. 125-6. 10

in order to be able see the Middle Ages with the eyes of a premodern trans persons or the medieval authors who encounter transgender in their world.

B. Medieval Studies

In December 1394, seven hundred and twenty years ago, “Eleanor Rykener walked the streets of Cheap Ward, a busy commercial district in London.”16 This is how

Carolyn Dinshaw begins her description of the events that would lead to the only recorded case of a medieval London court narrating the life and operations of a prostitute.17 What makes this case so remarkable that it is tried and archived? Eleanor was born John Rykener. We know this because Rykener’s confession produced a medieval history of a transgender life, collating the experiences of “John/Eleanor” from multiple witnesses. In what Dinshaw describes as “all the makings of a good fabliau,” the transcribed testimony accounts how John arrived one day at the house of Elizabeth

Brouderer and was accepted into “an unofficial apprenticeship in embroidery” during the day, “having sex in the manner of a woman and getting paid for it” at night.18 The governess of the house confirms how she facilitated the transition of John into Eleanor.

While Dinshaw was not the first to write about this narrative of trans medieval prostitution, her reading in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and

Postmodern (1999) became central to framing the study of “John/Eleanor” in terms of

16 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, (NY: Duke University, 1999) 100. 17 Ruth M Karras and David L Boyd, “Ut Cum Muliere: A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth- Century London.” Premodern Sexualities. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero ed., (New York : Routledge, 1995) 100. 18 Dinshaw, 103. 11

contemporary queer theory.19 A decade later, it is not unusual to see “John/Eleanor” shirts and buttons worn at Medieval Studies conferences. This appears to be an origin point for trans studies and histories in the medieval period, yet it must be stressed that

Dinshaw herself never uses the word transgender (although she does describe “him/her” as a “transvestite”), preferring the term “queer” throughout her analysis. The reasons and limits of Dinshaw’s queering of Rykener are integral to understanding where a

Transgender Studies intervention in medieval literature may arise and why we need it.

Coming at the end of a decade that saw the rise of Queer Theory from the fields of feminism, the studies of gender and sexuality, and Gay and Lesbian literature,

Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval worked to bridge postmodern discourses to extend “the resources for self- and community building relations” into the pre-modern past.20

Working against medievalists disinclined to interrogate their texts through the terms

“queer,” “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender” and against contemporary theorists who had historicized a pre/post modern divide between communities and discourses, Dinshaw argued for the construction of a “queer history” as a “contingent history” basing itself not in the forms of categorizing bodies, texts, and times but in the silences, slippages, and potentials for mutual touch.21 Defining sex as “heterogeneous” and “multiple” but most importantly “fundamentally indeterminate,” Dinshaw’s methodology for creating queer histories necessarily elided more structural approaches to gender such as genre.22

While Dinshaw admits a desire “to look at, not through, the transvestite,” as part of a project of queer history, it is not surprising that Dinshaw emphasizes “John/Eleanor”

19 Ibid., 100-143. 20 Ibid., 1. 21 Ibid., 2-3. 22 Ibid., 1. 12

as “a crisis of categorization” that will bring her to the ultimate aim for her discussion,

“that is sodomy.”23 This desire for finding queer history and community in the silences around the unspeakable sin (sodomy) draws Dinshaw away from the construction or reconstruction of transgender in the Middle Ages, leading her, despite her desire to stay with the transvestite, away from Rykenor’s work and body and towards the indeterminacy of the text, concluding, “the silence of the records regarding this case might be the final silence of death, or the muteness of a maimed life.”24 Continuing the work of the linguistic turn, the queer medievalist invokes the specters of trans lives only to deconstruct the gender and genre by which they speak in and through the text.

The untapped (even elided) potential of Dinshaw’s queer history of transgender has caught the attention of those in Transgender Studies seeking to tell trans history. In a

Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Jack Halberstam goes to

Medieval Studies to articulate the desire for a transgender history that is hard to tell but calls out to be touched, felt, even kissed.25 Halberstam writes, “the kiss is a place where, as Carolyn Dinshaw terms in Getting Medieval, different histories ‘touch’ or brush up against each other, creating temporal havoc in the key of desire.”26 A polemical and performative writer, Halberstam is infatuated with the explosive possibility of trans literature and history. If the current system of narrative and history does not allow for transgender narratives, then this framework must be reworked. In the section of his book on “Transgender Histories,” Halberstam admits that such a project is paradoxical,

“because it represents the desire to narrate lives that may willfully defy narrative, but

23 Ibid., 106. 24 Ibid., 112. 25 Published as Judith Halberstam, “Transgender History.” In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, (NY: New York University Press, 2005). 26 Ibid., 3. 13

necessary because without such histories, we are left with only a bare trace of a life lived in defiance of gender norms.”27 How do we tell histories that have not been told? How do we tell narratives that do not fit within current models of narrative? Some would throw up their hands in defeat but Halberstam calls to move forward into the past regardless. By narrating trans stories, new forms of narrative arise and new ways of thinking narrative.

Telling transgender histories calls readers to consider gaps and uncertainties where the dominant recording methods falter, because that is often where trans histories lived.

Too often, when transgender texts and histories arise and challenge assumptions about gender, history, and narrative, scholars try to fix the problem by denying that the problem element is transgender and instead insisting that it is really some variation of a structure with which they are already familiar: damaged masculinity, unbridled women, or some sort of metaphoric fancy. Above all, writes Halberstam, “[t]ransgender history should allow the gender ambiguous to speak; too often, I will claim, the histories… attempt to rationalize rather than represent transgender lives in the glory of all their contradictions.”28 Problematically, one of the forms of rationalization that erases or explains away trans figures in history and literature is the work of queer theory.

Transgender lives become figures of queerness rather than figures of transgender. At times, transgender and queerness can go together. But not all forms of transgender are necessarily queer, sometimes functioning or affirming the dominant structures of gender and sexuality. But in any case, what Halberstam points to in his insistence on listening to histories and literatures for the transgender voice is to affirm that transgender need not serve some other agenda, rather trans literature and history can be ends in themselves.

27 Ibid., 49. 28 Ibid., 56. 14

Transgender lives do more than disturb other peoples sense of gender and sexuality, transgender lives also build things, structure things, embody things for themselves. The challenge is not to see through transgender in order to gaze on another object but to see transgender itself. Within Medieval Studies, there are places where confusions, rationalizations, and erasures exist that transgender history and literary study could develop into a better articulated, complicated, and representative vision of the past. In the process, however, Medieval Studies, including medieval feminists and queer theorists may need to extend their reading list to include other emerging forms of theory.

What are the alternatives? In the 1990s, as certain veins of queer theory moved from the body towards psychoanalytic, linguistic, and metaphorical structures of desire, others were moving towards bio-political approaches and social construction. Such approaches understood that it took more than re-signification to alter embodiment, that flesh offers its own forms of power and resistance. These divergent threads grew up and in places still thrive in queer theory, especially its Deleuzian and Marxist materialisms, but also generated what in the 2000s came to be known as Disability and Transgender

Studies. Aware of the dependencies of the social body, “crip” and “trans” theoretical approaches were not so quick to deconstruct systems without regard for lives intermeshed with them, “to begin to articulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured and reinscribed body.”29 Queering (as destabilizing) is only part of the agenda.

In the seminal trans studies essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual

Manifesto,” Sandy Stone called for a critical approach where trans bodies embrace the artificial, the productive as well as deconstructive, “[t]o begin to write oneself into the

29 Stone, 232. 15

discourses by which one has been written.”30 Responding to definitions of transgender as a unique pathology or third gender, Stone calls for a socially engaged narrative model of transgender that would transform it from a fixed category into a genre of composition, “a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structural sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.”31 As a method of approaching transgender, genre resists the enclosure of difference in the medical model and the identity model by admitting that all bodies function inter-textually. In this more flexible approach to category, all iterations reproduce tropes while producing new irreducible differences.

As when Dinshaw observes that Eleanor’s “confession” had “all the makings of a good fabliau,” there are critical reasons that genre may be an effective mode of approaching the reconstruction of trans bodies in the Middle Ages.32 While modern thinkers distinguish between the scientific and the cultural, the personal and the social, medieval texts worked “between” these because, perhaps more than all other modes of thought, they thought through narrative. A trans genre method of reading and composing

“embodied texts” may be all too familiar to Rykenor in 1394, whose life suggests an inter-textual as well as transgender production with other fourteenth and fifteenth century stories. Attention to such texts illuminates how fourteenth century medieval histories

(esp. 1350-1450s) lay material and creative resources for twentieth century post-medieval trans lives (esp.1950s-2000s), while contemporary transgender texts reshapes how we approach texts from the past. While the specifics of how transgender existed in Rykenor’s

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 231. 32 Dinshaw, 103. 16

medieval world is largely missing from historical archives, the imaginative environment of literature offers other avenues to approach the premodern historicities of transgender.33

C. Literary Studies

As a way of studying transgender, genre plays upon a critical etymological genealogy with gender. The English term “gender” comes from the French “genre,” meaning “a class of things or beings distinguished by having certain characteristics in common,” often referring to “men and women” among humans, but also, “the fact, condition, or property of belonging to such a class.”34 If “trans” signifies a crossing, a critical understanding of “trans-gender” or “trans-genre” should not be limited to recognized genders, but open to existing between, “across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of” categories, as well as changing and producing categories in the process.35 Genre as a method of thinking difference reflects transgender’s critical function both as a definition and umbrella. This critical approach does not seek to exist without gender and genre but to transform our approach to them from ahistorical divisions into an archive of modes of embodiment that is constantly growing and being revised. This act of relating texts acknowledges difference in form or historical context by admitting that it is “producing” something through the act of categorizing. A critical “trans” model develops here arguing against that notion that

33 Bruce Holsinger offers an imagined version of this. Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book, (NY: William Morrow, 2014). 34 "gender, n.," OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. (accessed April 21, 2017). 35 "trans-, prefix," OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. (accessed April 21, 2017). 17

bodies could or should be understood as defined by the limits of fixed essential categories, living instead towards an existence “across” or “between” working definitions and through the new methods and constructs this hybridity generates.

While premodern transgender history is limited and medieval transgender history is largely elided, nonetheless, transgender literary theory (modern or premodern) is largely unwritten. As will be shown, transgender literature is nothing new and in fact much recent trans literature which has been recognized as such is often adapting or continuing traditions which run back through the Middle Ages. Yet what might define a trans way of writing or reading—how trans themes, tropes, metaphors, and narrative work together—has yet to be explored. There are queer literary critics who –like queer historians— may read trans stories in queer ways for their queer narratives.36 In a field such as medieval literary studies where it is often enough to read theory and read premodern literature, it is understandable that there has been limited innovation in the form of developing trans literary theory in addition. Much queer medieval readings of trans figures may likely result from this deficit in theoretical resources. Queer literary theories and queer theories of history have been written.37 The practice of reading medieval figures in queer ways has been established. This suggests that if more trans literary theory were available, especially one suited to the study of pre-twentieth century literature, then scholars would use it; assuming the theories are valid and useful. In the next section, I venture such a theory in the framework called genres of embodiment, a methodology that I root in the foundational discourses of Transgender Studies. Yet as the field currently stands, however, there is little trans theory for scholars who want to study

36 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 1999. 37 A foundational text in queer Medieval Studies is Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1990). 18

trans literature. Nonetheless, a few texts on trans narratives, Jay Prosser’s Second Skins chief among them, which, like Halberstam, have influenced this approach of trans literature.38

In the absence of an existing field called trans literary studies, acknowledgements of trans narratives and trans literary structures cannot be undervalued. In the very last sentence of Halberstam’s introduction to In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender

Bodies, Subcultural Lives, he makes just such a proposition for a wider network of meaning in trans literature, wherein he claims, “this book tries to keep transgenderism alive as a meaningful designator of unpredictable gender identities and practices, and it locates the transgender figure as a central player in… historical conceptions of manhood, gender and genre, and the local as opposed to the global.”39 While chiefly aiming towards the politically explosive aspects of transgender, Halberstam’s recognition of transgender figures in historically specific frameworks, his interest in gender and genre, and his concern for local places points beyond the fire that deconstructs the system to the alternative transgender system that might emerge and indeed already exists in unrecognized ways and places. While Dinshaw helped Halberstam touch trans history, it is Prosser who is cited as guiding his way in examining trans literature, stating, “Jay

Prosser’s book Second Skins: the Body Narratives of Transsexuality, in particular, has been enormously useful… his formulation of the role of narrative in transsexual transition has established itself in opposition to what he understands to be queer and indeed postmodern preference for performativity versus narrativity.”40 As his project tends

38 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: the Body Narratives of Transsexuality, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 39 Halberstam, 21. 40 Ibid., 50. 19

toward the queer over the trans, or as the way of reading the trans, Halberstam takes issue with Prosser’s “understanding” and preference of the two. Yet Halberstam dutifully acknowledges that such a debate may be useful, if only to develop conversations on what distinctions exist between the queer and the trans. The argument that narrativity is central to transgender clearly comes out of Prosser’s work and calls to be developed further.

What does it mean to say that narrative is an essential tool and function of transgender? Prosser begins to answer this question by first considering what the function of transgender, or transsexuality more specifically, is supposed to be in society.

Repeating an old joke, Prosser writes, “[t]ransitioning is what transsexuals do.”41 While certainly transgender does more than one thing and many trans persons feel they have always been the gender with which they identify, cultural perceptions of transgender do often focus on transition. Indeed, transition is where society tends to become aware that transgender is operating at all because it is at this point that the person or group –which may have been living as transgender for some time in a quiet, hidden, or repressed way— comes out to the community and enacts social change. The transition of pronouns, access to gender segregated spaces, even the reordering of memories about the person all involve a range of persons beyond the trans individual. Often, by the point of transitioning, the transgender person has come to terms with themselves, setting themselves at odds with others who are just learning this information for the first time and may even react as if this was a sudden or thoughtless change. As such, because of its social element, transitioning is often feared, avoided, or delayed to avoid conflict and resistance. This feature of transgender also applies to collectives, where there are those who may meet the insertion of transgender into the national consciousness, workplace, or

41 Prosser, 4. 20

academic field with hostility, refusing to go along with transgender as if it is a new thing; although it has existed for some time within other forms of discourse, terminology, and methodology. Thus, saying that transitioning is something transsexuals do has significance beyond the personal. Transgender becomes a way in which society undergoes transition. As such, transgender literature and history may be helpful in assisting communities undergoing change.

Society often turns transgender into an occasion for storytelling, demanding stories of transition to help facilitate and explain differences in gendered embodiment between the past and present. Because of the demand on them to narrate and unpack the signs of their own story for others, it is important to prepare many trans persons to become storytellers and critical readers of stories. Prosser goes further, asserting that transgender (as a social operation and sign for “transition”) is essential narrative and history. Prosser writes, “I enlist transition in its narrataological sense: transition as the definitive property of narrative, the progression and development that drives narrative and coheres its form.”42 Another way of articulating this is to say that storytelling is a way of discussing change. While poetry and prose may be arranged so that the collective text forms images, most literature functions by reading one word and then another. On another scale, one idea replaces another. On the level of narrative, a character (which may be a person, place, or thing) or characters reache some conflict, tension, or limit that produces some change; even if that change is only to affirm the original state with a higher degree of stability. This dialectical form of narrative, consisting of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is an effective way of thinking about narrative and reflects how

42 Ibid., 5. 21

much literature thinks about change.43 As a form of story, Prosser argues that history works in much the same way, “I use transition in its historical sense: to describe developments that take place in and between discourses of gender that allowed the transsexual to emerge as a classifiable subject.”44 One may tell the story of the nineteenth and twentieth century as a conflict between men (a thesis) and the other sex, women (the antithesis), which produced a categorical crisis for those who could not resolve their lives within either static framework, provoking the arrival of the transsexual (the synthesis).

Whatever terms and discourses one studies, the telling of history time and again tells the story of unsustainable divisions that demand a third term to resolve them.

Affirming transgender as a form of personal, social, literary, and historical change, Prosser makes the move to assert that transgender as a form of action, a method, is a way of approaching personal, social, literary, and historical structures to facilitate change. In short, if one accepts that transgender works with change, this begs the question, how? To answer this, Prosses ties the personal and social, the literary and historical together by privileging narrative as a unifying technology. One might cite surgery, or hormone replacement therapy, or diagnosis, or even changes of clothing as critical technologies that explain how, the way in which, transgender people transition.

Yet Prosser asserts that each of these technologies follow and indeed are incorporated into a wider socio-historical network of narrative. “Reading transsexuality through narrative, I suggest that the resexing of the transsexual body is made possible through narration the transition of sex made able by the transition of narrative” writes Prosser.45 A

43 “Hegel’s Dialectic.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Julie E. Maybee ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2016). 44 Prosser, 5. 45 Ibid., 5. 22

change of clothes or genitals may be significant parts of a transition, but Prosser argues that these are instrumental moments stitch together to form a larger narrative of transition. Whether telling a story or a history, the construction of these wider narratives that assert what the genre, theme, or intention of the constitutive events means is where the argumentation arrives. This is where literature and history becomes ethical, theoretical, and critical discourses that provoke a rethinking of the status quo. Even on a personal level, Prosser writes, the ability to tell such a narrative convincingly is necessary to gaining access to transition, “the transsexual’s capacity to narrate the embodiment of his/her condition, to tell a coherent story of transsexual experience, is required by the doctors before their authorization of the subject’s transition.”46 Transgender becomes a figure and function of storytelling because arguments demand transgender stories to affect or accept change.

While previous scholarship on transgender literature and history have largely focused on advocating for the fields writ large, broadly discussing transgender as an identity and general archive of texts, room is opened for different genealogies of trans embodiment to be told. In Transgender History, Stryker affirms the potential to tell many transgender histories that look at moments in the development of different forms of trans identity. In A Queer Time & Place, Halberstam affirms the multiplicity of genders and genres to be explored within Transgender Studies. And in Second Skins, Prosser acknowledges the numerous technologies that demand different narratives to be told in order to open up access and meaning to transgender lives. Thus, while this project continues the work of moving towards a Transgender Studies of literature and history, it

46 Ibid., 9. 23

intervenes into the still emerging field by offering a method and theory of trans literary history called “genres of embodiment” which will be explored in the next section.

As transgender literature and history grow as fields, different literatures and histories will be explored which transform the meaning of the collective. By developing genres of embodiment as a theoretical methodology and then following the process through a series of four genealogies, the goal is to help make ends meet. Between now and never, there is transgender history. Between the real and the imagined, there is transgender literature. Between the personal and the collective, there is transgender identity. By attending to particular voices from particular times in concert with later voices from another time, themes, movements, and narratives arise. Thus the value of trans literature and history is that by asking for some surrender of “nit-picky” individuality, collective archives and relations may be built that can be shared to propel further the development of specific lives, literatures, and periods of history.

2. Methodology: Genres of Embodiment

In this section, I develop a theory for the study of transgender in literature that accounts for trans lives and texts prior to the coining of modern trans terminology and identity. In particular, from the roots of Transgender Studies I locate untapped critical methodologies that consider gender within the framework of genre and then contemplate a form of Trans

Studies that I call “genres of embodiment.” Genres of embodiment may be understood as a creative and social framework within which to consider the broad array of gendered forms of life beyond traditional binaries of man and woman, which are not only

continually changing but also mixing. Furthermore, genres of embodiment register the ongoing relationship between forms of literature and art with the range of non-binary genders that it imagines, reflects, and affects in society. Such a theory represents not only an answer to problems in categorization and identification within Transgender Studies but better reflects an internal creative drive within the study of gender and genre.

Scholars of language and literature may intuit the connection and advantages of reconsidering gender from a set of natural gender identities to a creative system of embodied reconstructions. The English term “gender” directly derives from Middle

French “genre” which signifies both a categorical framework of sex and as framework of art.47 In medieval England, gender would have been spoken and composed as “genre” since the twelfth century.48 In turn, the word derives from the Latin, “genus,” meaning,

“category.”49 Medievalists who utilize such an etymology for genre (alongside related if sometimes divergent definitions from The Middle English Dictionary and The Anglo-

Saxon Dictionary) may thus be more ready to grasp a concept Gender Studies knows too well: gender has long been considered the fundamental categorical division from which other forms of difference are understood.50

The drive toward a literary approach to transgender is not new but remains underdeveloped. Genres of embodiment emerges out of foundational texts within

Transgender Studies, citing Sandy Stone’s “the Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual

Manifesto” as a key text in which trans embodiment, history, and literature become

47 "gender, n.," OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com (accessed March 24, 2017). 48 Ibid. 49 "genus n,” OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com (accessed April 21, 2017). 50 It is worth noting that a tradition in Medieval Studies considered the question of grammatical gender in ways that correspond and nuance the relationship between gender as a form of generic categorization as well as a form of distinguishing between sexed bodies; including, David Rollo, Kiss My Relics: Hermaphroditic Fictions of the Middle Ages. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 25

interrogated through the idea of “genre.”51 The background of this generic turn in

Transgender Studies is unpacked by looking at the essay’s cited authorities on genre and gender, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler.52 Such a theory offers not only a new way of understanding gender through transgender theory but also a method of examining history, literature, and especially premodern historical literature. By turning to a literary theory of transgender, the essential modernity of trans history is challenged, opening up new eras and modes of being trans to interrogation.

Genres of embodiment argue that gender is not a natural state nor one that can be naturally described but rather is composed through the ongoing creative generic work of reconstructing the body in accord to changes in the self, environment, and associations.

Genres such as medieval and modern, man and woman are deconstructed from essential categories where certain bodies and texts naturally belong into an ongoing system that changes objects as it categorizes them. This process functions both in the future-directed generation of social constructs and the past-directed generation of social reconstructions.

In other words, the categorization of man and woman prompted the rise of trans man and woman as an extension, resistance, and correction, inciting more trans persons to identify in later generations. Conversely, the projection of manhood and womanhood (what we might now call cisgender manhood and womanhood) into histories of gender likewise produce gaps, erasures, and rationalizations that leave unaccounted for problems that demands reparative interventions by trans history.

The project of developing transgender history in general or medieval Transgender

Studies in particular challenges scholars and readers to perhaps reconsider some of their

51 Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” 221-235. 52 Stone, 230-2. 26

current definitions, limits, and associations with certain words. For some the word

“transgender” cannot describe anyone before the 1990s when the term was coined. Others regard it as a twentieth century word.53 There are those for whom “medieval” definitively signals “not-transgender.” To this, Stryker calls for some reconsideration and careful attention, “[t]he idea I’m trying to get across [in Transgender History] is that many different kinds of people might in fact have something in common with one another in their opposition to an oppressive situation.”54 The argument that the medieval or any pre-

1990s era was not transgender is implicitly to say it was normatively cisgender. Yet by the assertion that cisgender norms dominated a period is to incite discourses on all those who do not follow cisgender norms. Transgender Studies calls such persons transgender.

It is useful then to acknowledge that while the form of response and identity that arose from opposition to cisgender norms were different depending on era, location, and linguistic community, there is a shared critical transgender position and movement that each of them occupy. In a sense, the transhistorical nature of cisgender demands that we tell transgender histories. The story that is being told is a story and a history of transgender, “calling all these things transgender is a device for telling a story about the political history of gender variance that is not limited to any one particular experience.”55

For all the analysis and rigor that goes into history, a key function of the study is to tell understandable histories, as the key function of literary studies is to tell stories. As a whole, this project continues the work of telling transgender history, while genres of embodiment allow for a greater degree of specificity at the same time retaining continuity.

53 Stryker, Transgender History, 24 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 27

The overall structure of “Trans Literature” is different from Stryker’s

Transgender History insofar as it seeks to tell several transgender histories, each genealogy represented by a different genre of embodiment. As a groundbreaking text,

Stryker found it necessarily to use a broader term to tell a wider collective history, even while she admits that within the umbrella of transgender identity exists many different identities, some of which “in periods before the word is coined” and “some who might not apply it to themselves” if given the chance, using or choosing other terms.56 “All of these terms have their own histories,” admits Stryker, “which can bog down the storytelling, unless telling those histories is the point of the story.”57 Genres of embodiment offer a middle ground wherein multiple histories and stories can be told within a wider compendium on transgender history. This practice of collecting narratives with distinct acts within a thematic collection aimed at education and calling for social reform is in fact very medieval, reflecting to varying degrees the many stories contained within each of the key medieval texts under examination: The Canterbury Tales,

Confessio Amantis, The Book of Margery Kempe, and The Travels of John Mandeville.

Yet creating a collective umbrella within which many different identities can function is also a signature feature of transgender identity and studies. Genres of embodiment then follow a very medieval and very transgender impulse to categorize in ways that allow for others to tell their own stories or make their own additions. A genre-based project is not and cannot claim to be exhaustive. Such a claim would be contrary to the creativity that drives such storytelling. By necessity, genres of embodiment are proposed in specific ways in order to root in the foundations of gender and genre studies, medieval and

56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 28

Transgender Studies, so that others may follow to revise, embellish, and grow the archive.

In order to articulate and substantiate genres of embodiment as a useful theory for describing transgender identity and literature, medieval and post-medieval, this section is divided into four subsections. First, I establish the need for premodern stories of transgender as a drive rooted in the foundations of Transgender Studies through Susan

Stryker’s introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader and Sandy Stone’s

“Posttranssexual Manifesto.” In particular, I note a critical dilemma facing the study of transgender history and literature prior to the twentieth century that insists on a voluntary, articulated identification with some form of trans identity: transvestite, transsexual, transgender, etc.58 Such frameworks enact a linguistic and temporal bias for those trans lives who can know trans terminology and have the agency to elect identification.

Pushing deeper into Stone’s landmark text, I identify genre as a categorical method of considering forms of gender identity that can fill in personal and collective histories where voice and agency have been denied.

In the next two sections I interrogate how genres of embodiment arise as a theory out of two sources that Stone explicitly names: the genre theory of Jacques Derrida and the gender theory of Judith Butler. In Derrida’s “Law of Genre” are the seeds that may develop into a literary theory of transgender.59 Approaching transgender as a function of genre redefines the categorical act from a mere description of texts into a creative act that generates new forms of difference and association through the act of differentiating. This ever evolving system of distinguishing genres of gender, historical era, or literature

58 Transgender Studies Reader, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006). 59 Jacques Derrida, “Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry. 7.1. On Narrative. Avital Ronell trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). 29

demands the ability to recognize associations that are emerging and altering during the act of describing as what Derrida calls “participation-without-belonging.” Such a method allows for the study of systems of production and productions undergoing transition, particularly those Derrida names as embodying the “transsexuality” of genre.

To understand how a trans theory of genre functions in relation to textual bodies and bodies of texts, embodiment and literature is examined in turn. As the second major author Stone uses to understand genres of embodiment, Butler offers a creative analysis of the distinct cultures of femmes and butches, transgender and transsexual persons. Such forms of embodiment may emerge in relation to existing genres through a trans-ing process that Derrida describes; yet the resulting products are objects of desire in and of themselves. A butch is not merely a queering of manhood or womanhood but a discrete object of desire. The distinct genre in question emerges out of the composition of embodiment through habits, use, clothing, language, and sexual experience. A butch woman is thus distinct from a man or even a butch man. The trouble, writes Butler, is that such genres of embodiment are not always culturally intelligible.60 This is why Stone argues that trans genres of embodiment need to be told and read: to take trans histories from the erased middles of plausible histories and write transgender back into discourse.

In the final subsection, genres of embodiment are connected back to genres of literature in order to demonstrate how literature and life functions in a continuous system of self-composition. I put a trans genres of embodiment into conversation with medieval genre studies which have already come far in predicting the need for such a theory as well as identifying how medieval texts are peculiarly useful in demonstrating the ways in which literature comes to structure how persons define, imagine, limit, and embody

60 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1990). 30

themselves. Genres of embodiment will be asserted as not merely an extension of

Transgender Studies into the premodern past but an ongoing movement that has been underway for centuries; and a project in which medieval texts and studies may have critical insights that will drive the rethinking of transgender literature, now and then.

A. Trans History: The Need for Premodern Stories

Transgender Studies as an emergent field of study continues to wrestle between different definitions of transgender and trans. In many respects, what the word means determines what the word does or can do. A landmark definition arrived with the first publication of the Transgender Studies Reader, wherein Susan Stryker describes the words ascent within identity politics, “Transgender, in this sense, was a ‘pangender’ umbrella term for an imagined community, encompassing transsexuals, drag queens, butches, hermaphrodites, cross-dressers, masculine women, effeminate men, sissies, tomboys, and anybody else willing to be interpolated by the term, who felt the call to mobilization.”61 What distinguishes this definition is its investment in identity, inclusion, and volition. Transgender was not merely a relational term. While “queer” or “gender queer” is often defined in relation to some norm, transgender included a variety of identities that were, in a sense, fully formed constructs within their own rights and norms.62 The second quality, the inclusiveness of this definition disrupts the settling or isolation of the identity. Transgender as an identity and a field of study was not just the study of one thing but many things. Entrance into this inclusive umbrella identity is determined by willingness. Stryker’s description suggests that while nested identities may

61Susan Stryker, “Desubjugated Knowledge: An Introduction to Transgender Syudies,” Transgender Studies Reader. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006). 4. 62 "genderqueer, adj.,". OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. (accessed April 21, 2017). 31

or may not be choices, claiming the label transgender is chiefly an act of agency and one aimed at forging collective agency with other identities that also chose to be included.

Within contemporary identity politics, this definition of transgender is effective insofar as it includes those who wish and does not presume to include those who do not wish. Yet the feature that makes the definition useful for current politics and makes it less useful for history and literature.

Historical figures and literary figures that do not exist within the sphere of contemporary identity politics are often excluded from the definitions of transgender because they cannot willingly vote for inclusion. The reason for this policy is that persons will not feel that their identity is being represented by some monolithic figure which they have not elected and might seemly be wholly foreign to them, “that no voice in the dialog should have privilege masking the particularities and specificities of its own speaking position, through which it may claim false universality or authority.”63 This refusal of transgender as a historical or literary term that scholars might apply is based both on the desire to present agency and ensure inclusivity. Yet by insisting on the power of voiced assent to transgender as an identity, a problematic tension arises because in fact this works against its goals of inclusivity. Modern transgender becomes, against its own best wishes, a universal authority that elides the particular features, circumstances, and genealogies of historical figures (real or imagined) that reflect and contribute to the cultural power of a transgender identity from which it is excluded. In some cases, those who might be recognized as historically trans find that the isolation and silence they experienced in their own time is reiterated and compounded by modern trans scholars.64

63 Stryker, Desubjugated Knowledge, 12. 64 The silence in the archive on Eleanor Rykenor reflects a politically silenced life. Dinshaw 100. 32

Transgender ends up limited and defined by those with the blessings of historical circumstance, agency, and language to show up.

So what is the alternative to universal temporal supremacy only for those familiar with modern identity politics? Could we allow eunuchs or Amazons to join

Hermaphrodites, transsexuals, and cross-dressers under the umbrella of transgender?

These are central questions that motivate a critical historical and literary mode of studying transgender. There are dangers in choosing the benefits of inclusion over exclusion for those who cannot vote in our modern identity politics. Yet Stryker admits that this danger exists within the inclusiveness of transgender at any level, “[t]he conflation of many types of gender variance into the single shorthand term, ‘transgender; particularly when this collapse into a single genre of personhood crosses the boundaries that divide the West from the rest of the world, holds both peril and promise.”65 The central concern Stryker stresses time and again is one of complexity over simplicity and democracy over tyranny. In this way, if we understand the volition clause as aimed at protecting against universality and affirming multiplicity would, then we should further affirm that there is no one way, place, or time to be transgender. Dangers remain in simply and ignorantly calling eunuchs “transgender,” insofar as drawing on modern associations might dissuade readers from considering the medieval associations. Yet such short hand of a volition-based transgender definition likewise might affirm modern associations at the expense of multiple complex histories. In both reductions, eunuchs are erased from the conversation. An effective historical and literary mode of Transgender

Studies thus must double down in inclusiveness as a function of multiplicity.

65Stryker, Desubjugated Knowledge, 14. 33

Associations are drawn but not reduced, between modern between eunuchs and transsexuals.

The way forward into transgender pasts may already be nascent in the term,

“genre,” that Stryker employs and which draws her back to a source that she regards as

“an important cornerstone for Transgender Studies,” that is: Sandy Stone’s “the Empire

Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”66 In articulating the meaning of transgender,

Stone suggests that scholars begin to think of gender in terms of genre as a way to move towards a multiplicity inclusive of the past. Stone writes, “I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic ‘third gender,’ but rather as a genre— a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored. In order to effect this, the genre of visible transsexuals must grow by recruiting members from the class of invisible ones, from those who have disappeared into their ‘plausible histories.’”67 These “plausible histories” include those who deny or are denied trans identity by choice or circumstance, making them “invisible.” This invisibility may offer the benefit of passing but it denies them the agency being generated within trans discourse. Transgender as an umbrella must be in a sense evangelical, recruiting beyond those already present and speaking to consider those not in the room, those who never made it in the room, those nobody thought to invite.

Genres as creative enterprises are necessarily inclusive, generating new forms of art, identity, and association by continually mixing “embodied texts.” Cultures grow and change, finding new forms of expression as circumstances, language, and technologies

66 Ibid., 4. 67 Stone, 231. 34

change. Rock and roll is not jazz but would not exist without it, so too transsexuals are not all eunuchs but owe a debt of history to the music they made.

Genealogies of transvestism and genealogies of transsexuality cross and combine at places but also diverge, substantiating multiple genres with multiple histories. A critical part of the inclusivity of non-modern forms of transgender is the further divesting of any one form of transgender as monolithic. There is more than one way to be, to embody, to culturally occupy transgender. Even among modern trans persons, different forms seem to take president at different times. At one moment, wearing the clothes of a gender other than the one assigned by society was key. At another moment, Sex

Reassignment Surgery (SRS), now “Gender Affirming Surgery” (GAS) or Gender

Confirmation Surgery (GCS), are the hallmark.68 Later, a psychiatric diagnosis, such as

Gender Identity Disorder or Gender Dysphoria, seems to hold a privileged place of authority over who and what is “really trans.” Stone writes, “So long as we, whether academics, clinicians, or transsexuals, ontologize both sexuality and transsexuality in this

[or any one] way, we have foreclosed the possibility of analyzing desire and motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple contradictions of individual lived experience.”69 As feminists have argued that there is more than one way to be a woman, trans feminists say that there is more than one way to be a trans woman.

The challenge is one of imagination as well of careful analysis. Being able to imagine other forms of trans embodiment requires letting go of certain preconceptions of what transgender is. An eunuch’s castration and a transsexual’s sex change operation observe different techniques, products, and cultural meanings. Yet both share a lineage of surgery,

68 “Transgender Terminology,” Human Resources, Cornell University. Web. www.hr.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/trans%20terms.pdf. (Accessed 1 April 2017). 69 Stone, 231. 35

scar tissue, and a focus on the genitals as significant for gender identity.70

As a field that combines many disciplines, Transgender Studies benefits from developing a wide range of methodologies to develop the increasing number and complexity of ways to be trans. “In a world bent on becoming one, Transgender Studies grappled with the imperative of counting past two, when enumerating significant forms of gendered personhood,” writes Stryker.71 Transgender Studies turns out less a dissection of a single discreet understudied gender and more a field of discourse where many genders meet. Towards this end, in the next sections, I examine how a theory of transgender as “genres of embodiment,” gets scholars closer to the complex creative interdisciplinary work that is Transgender Studies, giving particular focus to disciplines, gender and genre studies, each featuring an intellectual source for Stone’s genre theory,

Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler.

B. Trans Genre: A Literary Theory of Transgender

Taking up Stone’s trans theory of genre answers both needs to account for the creativity within cultural embodiments and change within cultural genealogies. Such definitions of gender, Stone attests, arise from the insistence on a rule of genre that

Derrida critiques in his “Law of Genre.” Stone writes, “A transsexual who passes is obeying the Derridean imperative: ‘Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres.’”72

70 Piotr O. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. John A Broadwin and Shelley L Frisch trans. (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999). 3, 234. 71 Stryker, 8. 72 Stone, 232. 36

The reference to Derrida’s “Law of Genre” is a logical extension both of what Stone does to gender and what she does to genre by thinking the two of them together. Starting with the claim, “I will not mix genres,” drawn from a structuralist understanding of categories that seeks to naturalize divisions in art and society, Derrida falls on the side of post- structuralism that affirms division but asserts that it is not ahistorical or absolute.73

The nature of genre defies the force to deny mixture. Etymologically, gender and genre share roots through French, the language of Derrida’s “Law of Genre,” where the sexual meanings, the literary meanings, and generally categorical meanings do mix.

Because both derive from the Latin, “genus,” meaning category in general, when the poststructuralist selects and uses the word, genre, he means to play with the intermeshed iterations of genre. Things that share a genus are supposed to belong together, as specified in the definition of gender that derives from it, “the fact, condition, or property of belonging to such a class.”74 A genus as a statement of belonging to one category is then defined against every other genus in a statement of not belonging. Yet as in literature and art, genre does mix at times. Blues becomes Jazz, combines together with Bluegrass to become Rock and Roll.75 Each genre is different but also mixes and transitions into one another. So too with gender, where bodies are defined and divided but come together, mix, and transform if only to generate more bodies; and sometimes mix to form something new, a body which does not belong to either genre, gender, or genus.

The law of genus not to mix is eventually broken whenever genre is enacted. For the poststructuralist, genre is not just something that exists but is enacted. There is no

73 Jacques Derrida, “Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry. 7.1. On Narrative. Avital Ronell trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). 74 “Gender, n.,” OED Online. 75 “Rock n’ Roll,” OED Online. 37

genre separate from specific texts that fit into a genre, that enact genre by belonging or not belonging. For Derrida, this “not belonging” which defines one from another genre is another way that genres belong together. Men are not women and so need women to tell them who they are. Yet even this division, what Derrida calls a “hymen,” by its nature, will produce embodiments of that division whose function it seems is to split the two, to enact the law, and as a result belonging to neither. Without yet naming transgender,

Derrida imagines its existence as a logical extension of language and literature:

The question of the literary genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and masculine.76

Male and female generate one another in nature, Derrida acknowledges, but also in language, with man and woman defining one another as that genre to which one does not belong. Yet gender is not merely a structure but an enactment; gender is gendering. If gender is a process of becoming embodied, then there are intermediary phases, persons not fully gendered, and texts not fully belonging to a genre. One might imagine a fetus going through development in the womb, or even after, where an infant undergoes many changes into adulthood. This in-between phase may follow the telos of the law of genre, working to embody male or female distinctly, but so long as the gendering, the work of genre is underway, different forms and mixed forms are embodied. Before we become cisgender men or women, we exist in trans genres.

Forecasting the later use of genre within Transgender Studies, Derrida names this process of genre as well as the created genres, “transsexual.” Derrida writes, “genres

76 Derrida, 74. 38

pass into each other. And we will not be barred from thinking that this mixing of genres, viewed in light of the madness of sexual difference, may bear some relation to the mixing of literary genres. ‘I,’ then, can keep alive the chance of being a female or of changing sex. His transsexuality permits him, in a more than metaphorical and transferential way, to engender” (La trans-sexualité me permet, de façon plus que métaphorique et transférentielle, d'engendrer).77 For Derrida, trans genre goes beyond being a mere offshoot but grows outward from an inherent development within the law of genre.

Indeed, trans genres of embodiment seem to keep a system of gender functional. Just as culture tropes and figures develop in one genre and then move into the next, the genre changes composition. The shift is more than a mere “transferential” movement where one body moves from one structure of gender and genre to another without change to the body or structure. Likewise, the shift is more than merely performative or “metaphorical” in any way where “this” figure or trope functions “as that” without a change to its overall composition. This is because genre is not a mere description of things that are but a system within the wider life of discourse. The bringing together and exchanging of associations is creative and transformative. These genres, especially as they construct and reconstruct gender, are not limited to the proliferation of discourse in any way that is limited to language. In Derridia’s conception of genre as a system of discourse, the narratives we tell are not fundamentally separate from the narratives we live. The one orients and limits the other, and vice versa. If transsexuals did not exist, literature and language would have to create them.

Yet the creativity of genre is not merely a matter of wordplay and logic but actively participates in the creative arts of embodying and composing gender. It is not

77 Derrida, 76. 39

enough to say that transgender is an essential part of gender and genre discursively, without acknowledging that trans genres have implications on the countless iterations of gendered embodiments, histories, and identities. Jonathan Crimmin cites how Derrida stresses, “[the] structure of iteration—and this is another of its decisive traits—implies both identity and difference.”78 Iteration is easy enough to understand. Beyond being one of many periods in which trans genres of embodiment exist, within genealogical structures, medieval trans genres are responsible for how trans lives are created, narrated, and engendered in future generations. Genres of embodiment are creative in the biological sense of creating genealogies of trans cultures, identities, and literatures.

There is a danger in considering genealogies of gender as too biological, however, because it might draw us to consider genres of embodiment as something wholly defined by nature at birth. The creativity of genre is that as an ongoing action, within a personal or collective history, any number of variations and differentiations occur. How then do we account for the transitioning of genres within trans genres? How do we account for the number of people who exist in a specifically trans form of gender before becoming more fixed within a cisgender identity? This may be perceived as a question or problem by frameworks that want to assert transgender as a fixed genus in the way cis male and females profess the law of genre: someone is only trans so long as they remain trans and never mix with cis forms of gendering. Rejecting resolution into the law of genre is what qualifies trans theories of embodiment as a departure on how genre defines identity.

As a function of genre, identity is not a fixed genus but yet another enactment.

One might effectively say there is no such thing as identity separate from the process of

78 Jonathan Crimmins, “Gender, Genre, and the Near Future in Derrida’s ‘the Law of Genre,’” Diacritics 39.1. (Spring). (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2009). 45-III. 40

identification. Yet without a fixed identity, a trans method of genre would suggest that there is no such thing as absolute belonging –not only for transgender persons but any gendered being— even though one participates in an identity (i.e. enacts identification).

Crimmins concludes from Derrida, “I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging” [participation sans appartenance ]. The participation-without-belonging of the mark creates the possibility that future instances may fall within the genre.”79

Although all iterations of a body and text are unique, substantiating a genre in themselves, once a genre is defined, it invites others to identify. One may say that there is no continuity within a self (an “I”) without identifying with other iterations of the self.

Transgender history and literature can teach how transition challenges the self to labor at the work of identifying across time, iteration, and difference in order to tell a story as essential as a life story. Yet even outside trans lives there is no escape from the demand. Any attempt to compose the self or to classify a text or body, concludes Derrida, meanings inviting others (even other iterations of the self) to join in this classicization through an act of identification, “simultaneously and indiscernibly saying ‘I’ and ‘we’

[…] without it being possible to think that the ‘I’ is a species of the genre ‘we.’”80 The adult “I” and the child “I” identify are one same life but also exist across time and iteration as a “we.” The medieval and modern form of a genre are different “I”’s yet may be generated by the same genre to form a “we.” The historical particularities are not lost but are tied to the same engines that created and connected other historical particularities.

Yet if all genres function with a degree of trans contingency, why not fold trans figures back into conventional forms, reincorporate Jazz into Blues or trans women into

79 Crimmins, 47. 80 Derrida, 56-7. 41

women? Why not pass as cis women? Derrida opens up a possibility for the reintegration of hybrids in “the Law of Genre.” He suggests that all women experience moments of participating but not belonging in womanhood. As such, the law of genre may usually apply as a norm for a general population but not always for everyone,

not to woman or even…to the female genre/gender, or to the generality of the feminine genre but… ‘usually’ to women… This ‘usually’ avoids treating the feminine as a general and generic force; it makes an opening for the event, the performance, the uncertain contingencies, the encounter81

That every woman participates but does not always belong to womanhood begs questions on whether transgender, often characterized as participation in a gender without socially belonging to it from birth, is a failure in the law of genre. Is transgender, so defined, a break away from the law of genre or its fulfillment? Can we not simply consider trans women within the history of women and leave the trans-ness of gender and genre as a given? Derrida opens up these questions without giving an absolute answer.

In the end, Derrida seems undo “the Law of Genre” through a method that can be used to simultaneously affirm “the Law of Genre” in another way. Could transgender just be a way to fill in gaps in the wall between men and women? Perhaps, yes, but Derrida

(and Stone) seem to have more faith in the creativity of genre. If trans women are women in another way, participating in womanhood as well as in forms of gender not belonging to men or women, then why not explore these other forms as objects of art in themselves?

If we are creative enough to find ways to fill in the holes in the wall between men and women, are we not creative enough to make other things, such as doors? Derrida calls such a gap an “event,” “performance,” “uncertain contingency,” or “encounter.” If in the

81 Derrida, 75. 42

composition of genres we embody the wall, the gaps, and the fixes, are we not already more than just women? The problem of passing demands that we consider embodiments.

C. Trans Embodiment: A Generic Rethinking of Bodies

Because of how passing erases transgender history, stories, and lives, Stone’s essay and genre theory is aimed to strike back against it. In order to combat the gravitational force passing exerts to bring the creative composition back into the binary framework Stone turns to the body. For Derrida, the body is an event (or iteration) that remains opens to new encounters and creative possibilities. For Butler, the body is an object of desire that arises out of the admixture of the culturally intelligible ground and the figure it embodies. The turn to Butler in “the Posttranssexual Manifesto” functions as a logical expansion of the creativity of genre (i.e. if there are more than two genres, how do these genres manifest in gender communities?) while also bringing discourse of gender back around to consider how trans embodiment is desirable in and of itself.

“As one lesbian femme explained,” writes Butler, “she likes her boys to be girls, meaning that ‘being a girl’ contextualizes and resignifies ‘masculinity’ in a butch identity. As a result, that masculinity, if that it can be called, is always brought into relief against a culturally intelligible ‘female body.’”82 So specific is butch womanhood, femme lesbians may specifically desire it over butch manhood or any other form of gender. The genre of embodiment matters insofar as it is valued and insofar as it participates in masculinity without belonging to it. For those who only recognize male and female as

82 Butler, 156. 43

“culturally intelligible,” a woman may be a woman, but for those in the know, butch and femme are distinct genres of embodiment.

As trans genres of embodying enter discourse they deconstruct assumptions of forms, methods, and orientations while also offering distinct objects that may be pursued for their own sake. Stone cites Butler’s work on butches and femmes as useful and comparable genres to emergent trans identities, “Butler introduces the concept of cultural intelligibility, and suggests that the contextualized and resignified ‘masculinity’ of the butch, seen against a culturally intelligible ‘female’ body, invokes a dissonance that both generates a sexual tension and constitutes the object of desire.”83 In other words, transgender does more than just disturb others’ sense of gender and sexuality; transgender embodies something, does something, and builds something that matters in its own right.

Where do the divisions of genders and new fields stop? Butler calls such questions an ontological crisis that occur in society at large as well as in academy when the terms “transgenderism and transsexuality” are introduced, distinctions of gender she considers an acute enough division as “lesbian and gay” or “butch and femme.” Both embody gender in different ways different from one another while remaining distinctly trans. How is it useful to say that there is more than one trans genre of embodiment? Take the example of a Goth girl and boy in high school may be able to share more music, clothing, and make-up than the Goth girl and her cheerleader classmate. Choice of association is key but a teacher observing her students might be able to deduce the same by what Stone and Butler call “culturally intelligible” embodiments. Why is it necessary to make trans genres of embodiment culturally legible? So a person and community can be useful to another. Transgender is an umbrella where people and fields can work

83 Stone, 230. 44

together but also an archive and a critical methodology with insights to share. In the details, all transitions are necessarily different. Even across time, transsexuality studies have insights to offer the study of medieval eunuchs.

Trans genres of embodiment may offer a way of making sense of bodies that are not currently culturally intelligible. A critical trans method of reading gender looks for

“the same in the other,” features that connects and articulates trans modes of embodiment where others only see confusion or contradiction. This is one reason Butler address transgender in her examination of Gender Trouble, “a certain crisis in ontology… has become more acute as we consider various new forms of gendering that have emerged in light of transgenderism and transsexuality.”84 A difficulty arises insofar as the same in the other may exist between trans persons, medieval and modern, but not necessarily between cisgender persons and either era of transgender. In short, in order for medieval figures to be culturally intelligible as trans, medieval scholars may need to become familiar with various new forms of transgender described in contemporary trans studies and literatures.

Entrance into Transgender Studies demands a certain familiarity and competence with disturbances. Whereas the compulsion to pass orders transgender histories to erase moments that break from the norm and be reoriented back to cis binaries of male and female, critical trans studies affirm new networks of what bodies and what body parts matter, what Butler calls, “the sexed body as ‘ground’” as well as the technologies with which those bodies compose themselves into culturally intelligible genres, “the butch or femme identity as ‘figure’ [that] can shift, invert, and create erotic havoc of various sorts.”85 Trans-ing embodiment means looking at the dysphoria and diagnosis of

84 Butler, xi-xii. 85 Butler, 157. 45

transgender, the scars and scalpels of transsexuality, the clothing changes of transvestism, as well as the chromosomes and characteristics of intersex to discover and claim the narratives, tropes, and tools as primary in producing particular genres of embodiment.

As transgender has functioned for decades as a big tent, so too Trans Studies is more than a definition of a diagnosis or a queer disturbance in the gender binary. A key part of Stone’s manifesto is that there is no one easy definition of transgender. This is the reason Stone offers genres as a model of thinking about trans genders as well as why she points to Butler’s work on butch and femmes when she writes on “the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ as historical identities of sexual style,” also citing, “queens, butches, femmes, girls, even the parodic reappropriation of dyke, queer, and fag.”86 The work of transgender demands more than one monolithic definition. Once one gets into the study of transgender one discovers many interconnecting histories and embodiments. Far from deconstructing gender into oblivion, genres of embodiment demand a broad field of complexity.

Genres of embodiment allow the silenced body to speak of all the arts, the histories, materials, relationships and transitions that go into composing it. Opening the stitches and scar tissue of eunuchs and transsexuals to let them speak, navigating the conflicts of dysphoria in order to give voice to silenced calls for reform, all of this this can be painful and difficult. Stone writes, “I could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously ‘read,’ to read oneself aloud—and by this troubling and productive reading, to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written.”87 Culturally intelligible trans bodies and

86 Butler, 41, 156. 87 Stone, 232. 46

genres, histories and literatures emerge out of plausible histories, often breaking the systems which have allowed for them to personally and collectively belong for so long.

To make plausible histories, trans-ness is explained away, elided as exceptional, or erased. Defining passing, Stone articulates it as a form of ahistorical belonging, “to be accepted as a ‘natural’ member of that gender. Passing means the denial of mixture. One and the same with passing is effacement of the prior gender role, or the construction of a plausible history.”88 These plausible histories are not only personal but also collective. A plausible history of the Middle Ages is one where a cis man can uncritically consider a medieval knight as a natural ancestor or himself a natural heir to his manhood. Such a history does not allow for shifts in genres of manhood that occur in intervening centuries and the figures whose lives’ testify to the transition and diversity of genres.

Conversely, a trans person who denies a cultural ancestry with eunuchs and hermaphrodites likewise creates a plausible history where forms and eras do not mix. In order to “belong” to a binary society and field, the specifics of history are smoothed over to be considered “plausible” and the narratives forced into standard forms to be

“culturally intelligible.” Of such histories, Stone writes, “[t]ranssexuals who pass seem able to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed the possibility of authentic relationships,” and consequently, “transsexuals know that silence can be an extremely high price to pay for acceptance.”89 The price of a gender that cuts across all time or a temporally exclusive one—existing only within one period—is the denial of relations to other persons or

88 Stone, 231. 89 Stone, 232. 47

possible ways of life. In the end, both histories of passing are ahistorical as they do not account for change or diversity as a natural result of the evolution of gender over time.

A close reading of bodies across history suggests that cisgender binaries may have never existed and certainly do not exist now. Seen from within genres of embodiment, the problem is not that bodies are truly silent but have been silenced because they do not yet know how to make them culturally intelligible, so we pass over their stories and histories.

As Arthur K. Frank observes of the Wounded Storyteller, “[t]he body is not mute, but it is inarticulate; it does not use speech but begets it… Hearing the body in the speech it begets is never an easy task.”90 We can get lost in all the genres of speech they beget as we are born, wounded, and transition. The challenge of listening is that we cannot know the meaning of bodies in advance. New forms, narratives, and languages may be needed to hear what is said. To trans embodiment may begin as simply as listening to bodies. The task may be hard but once we begin to listen we find that bodies are almost too full of speech. By listening to trans lives, not only do their forms take shape but the tools and stories, the genres of embodiment that they turn to in order to compose themselves.

D. Trans Literature: A Generic Rethinking of Literature

Studied within the theoretical context of genres of embodiment, the history of transgender persons and collectives begins to reflect the development of literary genres.

This relation between gender and genre is not only analogical or etymological but also intermeshed and interacting throughout trans history. Transgender may be understood as representing generational responses to “the Law of Gender” and its failure, as historically specific discourses use transgender to answer different iterations of the transhistorical

90 Arthur K. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 27. 48

problem of gender divisions or as transgender persons draw on existing discourses in order to embody their own responses. While personal iterations of transgender may be highly specific and impossible to fully articulate, the attempt to compose these lives into culturally intelligible forms depends on relations to other texts and technologies that can be studied through the literary methodology of genres of embodiment.

As Transgender Studies looks to genres of embodiment as a method to explore premodern trans history, it is necessary to note how medieval literature studies has long anticipated the conclusions of Transgender Studies in systematizing how the construction of embodied identities function between society and art. Indeed, Medieval Studies appears particularly well suited to the examination of genres of embodiment given how dominant genres of literature were necessarily didactic. Likewise, given the highly structured (while also dynamic) organization of identity in the Middle Ages, genres of literature reflect and inform genres of identity, constituting what I have named genres of embodiment. Thus, the goal of a wider range historical discourses seeks not only for

Transgender Studies to affect how premodern studies function but also so Medieval

Studies and texts can speak back to historicize, deepen, even challenge modern trans studies.

A social constructionist approach insists that texts inform how readers live their lives, a creed that medieval literature confirms with archives that tend towards didactic, thematic narratives with morals through explicit lessons or exemplars of virtue and sin.

Reading was then not only a practice of entertainment but also improving the character of audiences. In the introduction to Medieval Genre, “Genre as Form-of-Life,”91 Ingrid

91 Ingrid Nelson and Shannon Gayk, “Introduction: Genre as Form-of-Life.” Exemplaria. 27. 1-2. Medieval Genre. (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2005), 3-17. 49

Nelson and Shannon Gayk’s contend that genre in the Middle Ages functioned both as a way of categorizing literature and encouraging specific forms of life. The authors write,

It is precisely because medieval texts so often make transparent their performance—and use—contexts and explicitly engage the dialectic between form and life that they may be especially instructive for theorizations of genre in later periods. Medieval texts were meant, above all, to be used: for entertainment, edification, and/or practical knowledge.92

Effective medieval writing invited changes in disposition or action, while effective reading included the ability to derive and embody the lessons therein. These norms in medieval reading practices may be less in use in later eras where entertainment value may be judged above, even against, the education value; especially in times where didactic narratives are disregarded on account of seeming “preachy” or “pedantic.” Reading medieval literature can this remind or arouse awareness in readers of the implicit instruction and ideology present in late eras of literature. While comedy may seem to elide questions about gender and sexism, focusing on entertainment, nonetheless tropes about the failure of “transvestites” to pass, which are supposed to be humorous, teach audiences a certain way of viewing, judging, and responding to trans persons. Studying medieval comedies use of overt messaging trains readers to be aware of the morals built into the humor and tropes of narratives, a skill that can be transferred to modern media.

Because different forms of art utilize different forms of narrative, figures, and tropes, it is logical then that these genres of literature might also tend to promote different lessons towards the living of different modes of life. Literature thus produces social models of habit, “forms-of-life,” based on the forms-of-literature. Nelson and Gayk write,

As form-of-life, genre binds texts to experience, not as prescriptive ‘law’ but as a structure for living. The porous boundaries between the ‘literary’ and ‘didactic’ texts… reflects a broader sense of permeability in medieval

92 Nelson and Gayk, 5. 50

genres and kinds, whose taxonomies, prescriptions, and conventions take shape within a lifeworld of text and practice.93

The assertion that genres of literature relates to specific forms-of-life is more than merely asserting that such works of art are consumed by or directed toward distinct audiences.

Rather Nelson and Gayk posture that genres of literature contribute in the production of distinct “forms-of-life,” or what might be called genres of embodiment.

Extending the concept of “forms-of-life” further, Nelson and Gayk insist that not only does literature form different modes of composition, called genres, these genres encourage different forms of life. In other words, genre not only describes forms of being but also forms of becoming. Nelson and Gayk write, “premodern literature and literary theory suggest that identifying what a genre does, as a distinct manifestation of form-of- life, is more important than pinning down what a genre is.”94 This definition of genre redirects the field from structuralism to post-structuralism, from the purely literary to the social. Confession then is not only a structure of composition wherein authors write according to certain rules but a process of writing that engages texts and readers along particular trajectories.95 Such forms-of-life can be considered confessional, i.e. social processes that structure ways of becoming confessional.

Yet literature and associated or affected populations are not always close or intentional. This feature of genre may seem to be a break or failure in its functioning yet allows generic constructs to operate in a general or creative society without the form being named and articulated by its participants. Such failed creative risks demonstrate how genres allow for participation-without-belonging. This fluid relation between texts

93 Nelson and Gayk, 3. 94 Nelson and Gayk, 5. 95 Katherine C. Little. Confession and resistance: defining the self in late medieval England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 2006. 51

and contexts/intertexts, sometimes direct and self-aware, and other times indirect and peripheral, is a feature of genre as an ongoing system that creates and reflects cultural forms; often regardless of intentionality. As Nelson and Gayk write, “however rarely medieval texts speak of genre qua genre, they evidence clear awareness of generic conventions, forms, and taxonomies, even as they depict genre as fundamentally dynamic, performative, and participatory.”96 Films can draw on comedic and derogatory representations of transgender without identifying the production as a comedy or trans text. Conventions exist and works of art can participate in the development of genres of embodiment without directly belonging to genres like comedy or transgender. Many subjugated minorities, like trans persons often are represented and affected by art that neither directly connects to their lives nor engages them as audiences. Because a large portion of medieval people were illiterate, a substantial amount of literature in the Middle

Ages represented parts of the population that would never read or react to their representations.97 Thus, whether or not medieval and modern authors intentionally articulate knowledge of specific genres of embodiment, they may nonetheless participate in the reflecting and influencing of generic norms.

Because the creative works of literature, medieval and modern, can participate in trans genres of embodiment without close, true, or helpful relations to trans populations, there is a wider sense in which trans persons must begin, “to write [themselves] into the discourses by which [they have] been written.”98 Nelson and Gayk conclude by stating that the essays in their connected collection, “begin to suggest ways in which medieval

96 Nelson and Gayk, 5. 97 Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Reading the Lives of the Illiterate: London's Poor” Speculum. 80.4. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1067-1086. 98 Stone, 232. 52

genres and genre theories might function as correctives or alternatives to modern treatments of genre insofar as they resist or complicate some of the binaries on which genre theory often relies: the instrumental and the aesthetic, the innovative and the conventional, the pure form and the hybrid, the read and the performed.”99 By examining how medieval genres functioned in what Derrida called “transsexual” modes, a better model of genre can be developed which impacts later eras of history in which these genres continue to evolve.

Another binary in “the Law of Genre” that may need to be rethought is the divide of medieval and modern to reflect the many transhistorical trans genres of embodiment that form an ongoing network of genealogies. While focusing on premodern genres and forms of life, Nelson and Gayk suggest that these genres are genealogical, allowing that medieval literary genres influence later eras, “[m]edieval genres and genre thinking have a vitality that presses against their historical boundaries, offering models that transcend their original contexts and articulate a form-of-life with implications for post-medieval texts and their practices.”100 Such conclusions raise questions that can inspire a whole new turn towards trans genres of embodiment. How are trans figures produced as a reconstruction of sexual and literary forms of embodiment within medieval romance? In what ways are modern trans narratives still developing the trans knight?

On the history and literature of transgender, Stryker summarizes, “‘sex’ is a mash- up, a story we mix about how the body means, which parts matter most, and how they register in our consciousness or field of vision.”101 Returning to the question of literature, by trying to reflect the genres of nature, art falls into the same traps of performance

99 Nelson and Gayk, 3. 100 Nelson and Gayk, 14. 101 Stryker, 9. 53

where exceptions must be considered and new categories made. Readers and writers within these genres in turn reflect the new genres in their lives as well as their art. This cycle of art and life continues with more and more trans genres (non-binary genres within or without the binary) being created as trans forms-of-life. The challenge becomes making these trans genres of embodiment culturally intelligible to a wider realm of society and the academy. In order to turn the study of transgender into pre-modern histories and literatures, a critical rethinking of gender and genre may be demanded.

In the end, man and woman must turn from natural states and gender as a natural description into a process always undergoing social construction and categorical reconstruction. Such an ongoing system also demands that the medieval and modern eras will erode as fundamentally divided and emerge as an ongoing system of cultural dialectics. Transgender becomes a form of composition – a doing that requires the mixing of various paints, seeds, ideas, and technologies to write something into being. Also, a historical critique likewise defies the law of genre because it asserts that contrary to the plausible history that holds to a fundamental division between medieval and modern, there are peoples, systems, and practices that cross from one the other. Indeed, the only way that a personal or collective story can avoid the creativity of literature and the dynamism of history is to focus exclusively; either on what we all share across all time or else only on what only one identity possesses to the exclusion of all other peoples.

3. Critical Approaches and Archives

A. Critical Theory

Following the primary trajectory of this project to develop Transgender Studies into the premodern past and to bring medieval literature in particular into conversation with trans studies, transgender scholarship is given a privileged place within the critical approaches used. In doing so, some prominent figures in transgender and queer studies are reinterrogated with questions concerning both contemporary trans lives and their relation to premodern histories. The Transvestites, the seminal essay that named and defined the trans population as a species, is reconsidered both for how it influenced the medicalization of transgender but also how it resisted such medicalization, anticipating many of the social constructionist critiques of Transgender Studies.102 Out of Butler’s canon of works on gender and sexuality, Undoing Gender proves the most helpful as it chiefly concerns trans, intersex, and non-binary genders. From the chapter, “Doing

Justice to Someone,” Butler’s “sharp-machines” or “technologies of the knife,” are developed in relation to research on medieval eunuchs and modern transsexuals.103 Such trans theory widens the view of operations to include all the social narratives and divisions that frame, direct, and participate in the cutting of flesh. Overall, the critical approaches in this project are drawn from (1) Transgender Studies, but they are also supported by (2) queer theory and (3) disability studies. This study provides a sense of the direction that the critical conversation has moved in the past twenty years from a concern over crossing boundaries (feminism in the mid 1990s), to deconstructing sex

(queer theory in the late 1990s and early 2000s), at which point the conversation shifted to stress how social constructions of gender and sexuality intertwine.

102 Magnus Hirschfield, “Selections from The Transvestites: the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress,” The Transgender Studies Reader, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed. (NY: Routledge, 2006), 28-40. 103 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, (London: Routledge, 2004). 55

In certain chapters, the trans literary texts also offer theoretical lens through which the question of the whole chapter can be considered. Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride offers just such an example of a text that is part memoir, part cultural history, and part theoretical treatise on the subjects of transgender, queerness, disability, class, and race.104

Clare’s insights on how marginalized communities relate to the organization of place and space are useful not only for studying his own story and histories but in approaching the field of medieval pilgrimage literature. Clare’s work is also useful in relation to the wider consideration of transgender within medical discourses of diagnosis and healthcare. As such, the medical definitions of transvestism and transgender will sometimes be invoked and examined for their social impact, again tying trans lives to the social marginalization and subordination of genres of embodiment marked by and as disability.

Insofar as this project also draws on disability studies, it explores intersections with new materialism. I contend that gender inconstancy undergirds conversations on medieval disability (e.g. bodies marked as deformed, unnatural) as well as the idea of an artificial body composed of multiplicities (e.g. mad, diverse, monstrous). A critical point of intersection comes in the politics of access to technologies that shape identity, such as clothing, surgery, drugs, and books, which are under the control of certain bodies and not others (men more than women, the wealthy more than the poor, etc.), and my approach shows that a disparity develops over who can control the process of bodily stability and change. In this way the trans woman seeking a gown in the fourteenth century and the trans man seeking hormones in the twentieth century could share a political positionality across time, a relation reflected in stories with the power to construct and reconstruct lives.

104 Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999). 56

Crip/Queer studies offers critical insights to the study of genres of embodiment; constituting that generative alliance of queer studies that turn toward the antagonizing of able-bodied norms and crip theory that redefines the embodiment, temporality, and desire of disability. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer offers broad theoretical models by which transgender may be thought through the embodied rhetoric of sexuality and capacity. In particular, McRuer’s insights on how film structures trans embodiment in the Transformation are useful in addressing the affect narrative has on the composition of the self.105 Likewise, the work of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder presents methods by which embodiment, including those artifice of materiality (drugs, diagnoses, surgeries) cooperates in the artifice of narrative, as represented in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse.106

Indeed, if one accounts for the myriad of ways in which disability and transgender not only intersect but also operate as forms of one another, the work of analyzing how transgender is constructed and used in narrative can be seen as an extension of Mitchell and Snyder’s method and project.

Other crip/queer theoretical texts play heavier roles within the study of specific genres of embodiment. Lynne Huffer’s Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of

Queer Theory is particularly useful in reframing confession from the revelation of an individual privacy to the manifold chorus of coextensivity, a society that yearns to speak- together, across the divisions of sin, ableism, sexism, and time.107 In rethinking

105 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, (NY: New York University Press, 2005). 106 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: The University Michigan Press, 2000). 107 Lynne Huffer, Mad For Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, (NY: Columbia University Press, 2010). 57

dysphoria, sloth, and mental illness, Depression: A Public Feeling likewise turns disability and diagnosis on its head.108 Depression turns from a personal failure or disorder into a vision of how society sets unattainable goals of productivity and reproductivity then limits certain populations ability to contribute, leaving those who fall outside the norms of gender and sexuality as silenced and powerless failures.

In considering the social systems that drive vulnerable populations to suicide, the field of necropolitics is indispensible. The essay “Trans Necropolitics” particularly names how isolation and social abandonment are built into the norms of society and industry to turn transgender suicide into a matter of course that is regretted after the fact but remains as a problem that is left to those isolated and abandoned souls to fix for themselves.109

This essay draws many of its insights from the earlier work, “Necropolitics,” which looks broadly at the way in which biopolitics, as the systems which limit and manage the forms of life, generate excess populations that it cannot or will not integrate as those marked for death. Jasbir Puar’s essays on how transgender, disabled, and queer figures become constructed by necropolitics are immensely useful in mapping the avenues built to direct trans persons towards death while simultaneously expunging the most social utility out of that death.110

B. Medieval Theology

108 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 109 Martin De Mauro, “Trans* Necropolitics. Gender Identity Law in Argentina.” Sexualidad. 20. (Rio de Janeiro: Salud y Sociedad, 2008), 10-27. 110 Jasbir Puar, “Coda: the Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 18. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 152. 58

Medieval theology plays a significant role in framing the genres considered within this study, especially given the religion function of those selected (sermon exempla, confessional writings, saints’ lives, and pilgrimage narratives) as well as a mode of speaking with and against contemporary theory. Because the project aims not merely to colonize the past with contemporary theory but to consider critical approaches within medieval historical contexts, a variety of theologians are brought into conversation with modern theory. This is useful in contextualizing how certain medieval theological concepts and discourses influenced the intellectual environment of contemporary authors and readers as they wrestled with the ideas and realities of trans embodiments.

Why such a focus on religious literature and theology? A glib response would be that in one way or another, religion pervades and structures most literature written within the medieval period. With the Church officials often serving as the authors, scribes, or publishers of literature, a certain amount of religious control over the market is directly evident. Even indirectly, clergy often served as the instructors of history and literature, as well as the art of writing and reading, leading to another mode of influence. In a wider scope, while the medieval west, particularly England which is the focus of the premodern study, contained a multiplicity of religions, even one could argue a variety of forms of

Christianity, on the whole medieval life occurred within the broad systematic norms of

Church life. That interesting forms of embodiment, such as eunuchs (often mentioned in scripture) should be used as examples for moral instruction seemed natural to medieval priests and those mimicking their style, like Chaucer does through his pilgrims.111 Public confession on corporate ills and reforms, even if done through literature, would have

111 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 59

understandably been influence and modeled on the chief manager of sin and salvation: the Church. That extraordinary persons should be Christianized by the Church or themselves be Christians makes sense for a religion looking to offer models of behavior for the faithful in the form of saints. Finally, while travel occurred for a multitude of reasons, from business to the demands of family life, in an era where the travel of the working class was heavily regulated by lords, as well as prohibitively expensive for most of the population, most free movement and journeying was legitimized through the practice of pilgrimage.112 That such travel should be composed as pilgrimages not only reflected the realities of the journey but the normative function of literature as a mode of

Christian instruction that may also serve as entertainment.

Out of this religious medieval context, trans literature and social structures developed into increasingly secular forms. As will be shown, trans folk are still being made examples of by authorities, confession is still occurring and diagnoses given if now in the form of the psychiatrist’s office instead of the confession booth, martyrs and extraordinary trans persons are still being stylized as saints. Such images often depict deceased trans youths with halos and other saintly iconography. Likewise, whether or not

God is invoked in medieval or modern travel literature, such texts tend to follow a pilgrimage narrative structure of a person going on a journey that moves (even reforms) them as a person while they physically move across space.113 Furthermore, while adapted and translated into secular forms in many ways, religious traditions and literature continue to influence contemporary transgender persons through the still existent

112 Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale, "The Medieval Pilgrimage Business." Enterprise & Society. 12. 3 (2011): 601-627. muse.jhu.edu (accessed April 21, 2017). 113 M.W. Bychowski, “Rest in Power: The Digital Iconography of Transgender Saints.” Transliterature. 6 Sept. 2016. www.ThingsTransform.com, (Accessed 1 April 2007). 60

establishment of the Church. While Christianity has greatly changed between 1390

England and 1990 America, Christianity uses many of the same traditions and discourses across history.

It must be stated that however the continuity between the medieval and modern forms of Christianity at work among the lives, texts, and contexts considered, decisions must be made on which threads to follow. Some effort has been made to consider theological questions as one in conversation with Christian writers of the Late Middle

Ages. This medieval historical and cultural leaning is perhaps most noticeable when addressing modern texts which live in a Christian context that leans Evangelical or Born

Again and certainly Protestant. Because of modern Protestant norms, the medieval language and insights may seem unfamiliarily Roman Catholic. Of course, medieval theologians would not have distinguished themselves as Roman Catholic and some if brought to the modern day might either disdain the distinctions in denominations or else identified with some Protestant thought. In any case, maintaining a medieval throughline via theology into the modern era is useful insofar as it gives entry to the voice of premodern peoples and premodern studies. This counter-movement is important in giving the study a sense of cooperation between modern (Transgender) Studies and premodern

(Medieval) Studies. If Transgender Studies is to be allowed to give its voice and influence in the study of the Middle Ages, then it is reasonable to likewise examine modern trans texts with the eyes of a medievalist. Indeed, to accomplish this work the author has had to develop the double, sometimes dysphoric vision of seeing as a trans theorist and a medievalist. The result is both a method of cross-conversations and a product of combined thought that might be called trans political theology.

While this project does not aspire to be an in-depth study of theology, a few theologians prove indispensible to the study of the medieval genres and texts. In particular, Augustine of Hippo proves to be a surprising resource for considering a variety of topics that are inextricable from the study of medieval genres of embodiment.

Augustine’s writing on the Christus Medicus (Christ as Physician) not only helped define medieval Christian understanding of medicine and the body but also continues to influence society in the modern era where medicine plays a prominent role in all areas of life, not least of which include transgender and disability.114 Likewise, as a standard of public confession as well as the particular discourse of written confessions, Augustine’s

Confessions is undoubtedly a model that influences medieval confessional literature. The idea that one should write a confession or that one should read it, suggests the broader social function of confession as a speaking-together about sin and social reform. The same text, Augustine’s Confessions, also has important implications in the long history of the modern memoir or autobiography, a genre heavily represented within trans literature, and is invaluable in understanding the medieval intermediary form, what might be called the auto-hagiography.115 It is not my concern to determine whether or not Augustine intended to write himself into sainthood but rather to affirm that his text is often cited as being perhaps the first western autobiography, wherein one writes of one’s exemplary life. That readers should find the author of such an exemplary life exemplary seems as much a function of the writing as it is a commentary on the saintliness of the person.

Elsewhere Augustine theorizes this exemplarity in the person as a feature of the Imago

114 Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 85.9 (PL 37.1088), quoted in Arbesman, “the Concept of ‘Christus Medicus,’” 22. 115 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Carolyn J.B.. Hammond ed. and trans, (Cambridge, MAs : Harvard University Press, 2014). 62

Dei, God’s image in and of the creature.116 Finally, Augustine’s description of the world as a place full of monsters and many kinds of humans in The City of God is useful in framing questions on how medieval people would have tried to understand the place of hermaphrodites within the Christian world.117

C. Literary Archives

The historical focus on this study is the late medieval period between 1350 and

1450 and the contemporary trans literature mostly drawn from the 1990’s. Late fourteenth century London is a useful site as it serves as the launching point of Middle

English literature, a creative and linguistic tradition directly responsible for and most closely resembling Modern English. As such, a greater historical divide can be considered between premodern and modern texts while still functioning within the same language group. While important linguistic differences will be noted, generally Middle

English is so recognizable to modern English readers that an amateur ability to read it is teachable to students within several classes. In order to sustain this tight linguistic focus, some other potential texts and versions of the texts selected are not included despite possible relevance, such as contemporary French and Latin literature in circulation in

England and some even composed by the same authors.

The similarity in language with the modern 1990s texts allows for a tighter genealogy to be drawn from the medieval texts. While the general theory and particular insights of this study could be employed to consider a wider range of languages, the

116 Augustine, The Trinity, Stephen McKenna trans., (D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). 117 Augustine of Hippo. City of God. William M. Green ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 63

scope of these chapters are mostly limited to texts within an English literary canon. This does not mean that multilingualism is not present throughout but the approach taken to the texts focus predominantly on the English that frames and structures the narrative; even focusing on the English subtitles such as in the Transformation. Even texts like the

Book of John Mandeville, which were published earlier in French, are considered for how they enter into the English archive through their Middle English adaptations.118

Including texts from the medieval and modern eras allows for a greater degree of flexibility and change over time to be considered while remaining in a similar genealogy.

The argument put forth is not merely that medieval trans identities and contemporary trans identities exist but that the premodern and modern exist in continuity. Indeed, medieval people did not use the same words for trans persons as we do today, and

“eunuch” does not mean the same thing today as it did six hundred years ago, yet this project works to build the foundations for a broader range of history. Just as the assertion is being made that transgender as an umbrella term for a range of genres of embodiment across the medieval and modern eras, even as those genres change over time.

Because even a broad theoretical claim about the way we tell transgender history and read trans literature requires specific evidence to be considered, two particular locations and periods are selected as case studies. Thus despite the transhistorical claims of the introduction and frame, in respect to the body of the study found in the chapters, this project is less a study of six hundred years of trans history but a close and critical look at two decades (with most texts gravitating around the 1390s and 1990s) that are six hundred years apart. From the comparison and contrast, as well as secondary scholarship,

118 Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson, “Introduction,” The Book of John Mandeville, (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). 64

the broader historical trajectories are projected. Sections of each chapter feel very medieval, and should, while other sections feel very modern, and should. Yet as the use of the term “post-medieval” suggests, even as each chapter moves forward to consider the modern, the medieval is not left behind but is read through its cultural descendants.

Address Evangelicalism

Culturally, the 1390s and 1990s represent important moments of transition in their respective largely English speaking countries. The late fourteenth century is noted as a time of significant urbanization. From this influx and increased population density, a wider range of ideas, peoples, and literatures were able to circulate. While the history of

Rykener has not yet been fully told, if it ever can be, the presence of a trans woman sex worker in London around the time of canonical city poets Chaucer and Gower are writing on the diverse tapestry of different folk makes sense together. While Rykener may not have met Gower, as medievalist Bruce Holsinger imagines in his historical fiction novel,

A Burnable Book series, she certainly reflects the increased mixing and mobility of ways of life where a farmer can become a city clerk or a pious churchman can become a statesman seemingly overnight.119

As the critical and creative grounding for transgender theory and literature, the

1990s was likewise a period of transition in the predominantly English speaking United

States. Like late fourteenth century England, which has just survived a plague, America in the 1990s was still living in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic which decimated the

LGBT population. Indeed, there was a kind of literary flourishing of Middle English as a way of coping with the post-plague population and cultural shifts much like how the

HIV/AIDS epidemic spurred a similar response in queer culture in the wake of its own

119 Holsinger, 2014. 65

environmental and social crisis. These decades also signaled a rise in collectivity and organization in the wake of uprisings like Stonewall (1969) and the ACT-UP movements in the 1980s, reflecting an era of possibility and revolution that was in London’s air following the Peasant’s revolt of the 1380s.120 Thus while Rykener would not have been able to have a fully fluent conversation with Sara, a trans woman sex worker from New

York featured in the Transformation documentary, they both would have recognized and understood something of one another’s ways of life and contexts working the streets.121

Although texts and genres of embodiment are necessarily diverse and interconnected, with Eleanor’s Rykener’s historical era offering no shortage of narratively transformed gender, four main conversations stand out as pivotal to understanding how medieval people reconstructed gender and the later repercussions on transgender identities, technologies, and communities in the twentieth century. The texts selected for close readings were chosen for their canonical status and their capacity to show how competing medical and theological concepts inform genres of embodiment.

This project will focus on a few genres that were of great importance to medieval writers as well as contemporary post-medieval narratives of transgender experience: the moral exemplum, the literary confession, hagiography, and the pilgrimage narrative.

D. Literary Genres

120 See: Alan Sinfield, "The Challenge of Transgender, the Moment of Stonewall, and Neil Bartlett," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10. 2. 2004: 267-272. muse.jhu.edu (accessed April 21, 2017); and Ian Cornelius, “Gower and the Peasants' Revolt,” Representations, 131. (Berkeley, CA: 2015). 22. 121 Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio. The Transformation. (New York: PBS, 1996). 66

When searching for a text to ground the study of trans exempla in the late medieval period, Fragment VI of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1390s) boasts important examples of trans embodiments and narrative.122 Furthermore, because the Pardoner (so called a “a geldyng or a mare”) remains a major figure for studies of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, it is useful to address him directly. Despite the attention he has received, few critics consider how the Pardoner relates to the Fragment of the whole, which always pairs him with “The Physician’s Tale.” Indeed, this fragment of the Tales can be seen as exploring how trans body parts are divided and subordinated to produce wholeness in society. This narrative and genre of embodiment continues in post-medieval forms, such the documentary film The Transformation (1995), a story that reduces operations and scars into examples of “eunuch” centered salvation theology from

Mathew 19:12, “some are born eunuchs, some are made that way by men, and some makes themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.”123

While often disregarded as a useful model for the composition of confessional literature in the Middle Ages, Chaucer’s contemporary and friend, John Gower, provides a useful look at the dialectics of private and public personas at play in confessional texts and how this tension structures the production of dysphoric figures through his Confessio

Amantis (1390s).124 Gower explores how confessions enfold personal and corporate stories together to explore notions of social collectivity, choice, and responsibility.

Importantly, Gower frames the lack of public confession as a danger that threatens lives

122 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 123 “Matthew,” Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Vulgate): Holy Bible in Latin, 18-20. (Stuttgart, Germany: German Bible Society, 2007). 124 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). All quotations are taken from the online vols. 1 and 2, 2nd ed.: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/peck-confessio-amantis-volume-1. 67

with suicidal ideation. The dialectic and stakes of private and public confession continue in contemporary trans literature, including the tragic but important archive of transgender suicide notes. Framing such notes, such as Leelah Alcorn’s final posts to her blog,

Transgender Queen of Hell, in the tradition of trans confession articulates, like Gower’s

Confessio, an examination of social ills and a call for social reform.125

Just as post-medieval trans literature exists in a continuum with medieval texts, the late Middle Ages inherited or modeled its genres from prior periods. Alive during the

1390s, Margery Kempe later composed a so-called auto-hagiography, seemingly to justify herself as a saint. While scholars remark on her transvestism and transition from the identity of mother to virgin, few have commented how this section of the narrative seems particularly influenced by earlier hagiographies of trans saints such as Saint

Marinos who surrendered a life as a married woman for one as a celibate monk. Such narratives of exemplary persons inverting the image and habit of the genders assigned to them by society continues until today. The Last Time I Wore a Dress (1998), by Daphne

Scholinski, represents just such a memoir or auto-haiography that follows the model of

Kempe and Marinos by inverting the social value assigned to the image and habit of trans persons.126

Pilgrimage translates the politics of bodies into the transversal of narrative maps.

The Travels of John Mandeville (1360s-1370s) participates in social debates that bind certain bodies (e.g. trans, intersex, disabled) with sites, monsters, and wonders to be seen

125 Jenny Kutner, “Transgender teen Leelah Alcorn’s death ruled a suicide — mother threw away handwritten note,” 30 April 2015. www.salon.com. After Alcorn’s death, her parents deleted her note and Tumblr account but not before the message was widely copied via news sources and other blogs. The entirety of Transgender Queen of Hell was saved by digital archivists and is available via Leelah Alcorn, “Transgender Queen of Hell,” The Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. www.web.archive.org/web/20150101040547/http://lazerprincess.tumblr.com. (accessed 2 January 2017). 126 Daphne Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a Dress, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). 68

but ultimately excluded from the shared space the road. The study of pilgrimage narratives has lacked consideration of the confinement and liberation of trans bodies.

Pilgrimage stories continue into post-medieval travel narratives, such as in the mountain scaling of Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999), a text that reshapes social maps that keep certain bodies in exile while making sites where pride may reclaim them.127

Just as this project shows how Medieval Studies are pivotal in shaping later theories and politics, it also seeks to update and extend Dinshaw’s 1999 work on medievalism and transgender issues to political and theoretical issues of great concern today in 2017. This project insists that a theoretically-nuanced approach to medieval culture and contemporary post-medievalism is necessary to reclaim and extend forgotten histories and embodiments for contemporary fields that often set narrow temporal limits on trans lives. Contemporary transgender theorists may ignore the Middle Ages due to unfamiliarity with the pre-modern literary and cultural contexts, including medical and theological history. However, this project maintains the importance of Medieval Studies in shaping conversations about trans identity across time. Medieval literary texts produced the histories, tropes, and tools for articulating transgender identity. Both medieval and contemporary scholars can combat the erasure of transgender histories and bodies by examining critical notions of existing in a continuum across time and change.

While this study is informed by the most recent in transgender and Medieval

Studies, with notable influences from other fields such as disability and queer studies, and the 1990s serves as a theoretical ground in large part because of ideas that began to be developed in the decade that have been underused by later studies. In particular,

127 Clare, Exile and Pride. 69

leading scholars continue to cite Sandy Stone’s essay, “the Empire Strikes Back: a

Posttransexual Manifesto,” (1993) as a corner stone of Transgender Studies, wherein the former music executive put forth an ambitious proposal to look at a larger, divided, and largely erased history of transgender from the creative lens of genre. In turn, Stone’s work on gender and genre owe a great debt to the recent publication of an upstart in feminism and LGBT studies, Judith Butler, as well as the insights of poststructuralist

Jacques Derrida.

The center of gravity around 1390 and 1990 helps cement this study as engaged in historical specificity, substantiating a critical field of trans historical genres and not merely transhistorical generalizations. The project is not to paint a picture of all of transgender history from the Middle Ages until today but to look at how literature in the fourteenth (early fifteenth) and late twentieth (early twenty-first) gesture towards one another, the one anticipating developments in genres of embodiment and the other recalling the historical moments fossilized in its bones that contributed in making modern transgender what it is becoming. Thus, while this introduction aims to offer a broad theory, methodology, and call to study premodern transgender literature, the following chapters will flesh out the historical and literary specificities that compose four genealogies in the vast archive of trans genres of embodiment.

4. Chapter Overview:

Chapter 1: Exempla of Transsexuals

Christus Medicus in The Canterbury Tales and the Transformation

Transgender has been used as an example to construct or deconstruct binary notions of gender, but little attention has been paid to how trans bodies reconstruct the narratives by which they are transformed. While progress narratives are useful to provide forward thrust to tales from the medieval past, numerous figures challenge the progressive linear approach to the body and to history. Chaucer posed such a challenge in the exchange between the tellers in Fragment VI of The Canterbury Tales. In this fragment, the Physician and Pardoner enter into a dialectical exchange on surgical violence and the partitioning of lives so that others may progress into the future.

A genealogy of surgery can be traced via the scar tissue of exempla through medieval Europe and beyond, demonstrating that the violence of laying hands on another is not accidental in the evolution of surgery but congenital to its cultural work. Since the era of Classical medicine, surgery has operated by coding certain bodies as “the parts”

(that which is discarded), while coding others as “the whole” (that which is preserved).

By the late Middle Ages, medical, legal, and spiritual surgeries were inextricable, working in congress under “Christus Medicus” (Christ as Physician) or “oure soules leche” as the Pardoner names Him.128 Drawing on the cures and teachings of Jesus, such as Mathew 18:9, “if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away,” medicine and theology used narrative exempla to excuse acts of laying hands on another to enforce the supposed health of a person or society.129

First, I begin by establishing how the Physician opens Fragment VI with a tale from the classical authorities by which he derives his medical knowledge and thesis: if you have a problem, cut it out. The Physician’s Tale ends with the beheading of Virginia

128 Chaucer, 916. 129 “Matthew,” 18. 71

by her father in order to keep her honor intact, after a prolonged debate concerning the management of gendered power through various forms of violence against women’s bodies. When Virginia’s body, the exemplum of chastity, is threatened by rape, Virginus takes a blade to his daughter’s neck. The premise follows that if the integrity of a woman’s spiritual wholeness is threatened, a solution is to cut her body to pieces.

The Physician’s thesis is countered by the Pardoner’s recollection of divided bodies in his description of his job, selling relics, and in his Tale, an exemplum on Greed ending in three mourners stabbing each other in the back after the death of a friend. The

Pardoner’s relics, and Tale, may do no good for those unrestricted by normative barriers of love, because they may not need the Pardoner’s counter-thesis: if you have a problem, let it scar. By bringing the discarded from a forgotten site of burial to the social status of relics, scarred fragments of the body and society are allowed new life-giving narratives.

This chapter concludes by demonstrating how the Pardoner’s reincorporation into the pilgrimage body sets the stage for later Christian appropriations of trans bodies as

“eunuchs” who stitch together histories such as in The Transformation. This film documents the life of Sara, who, after contracting AIDS on the streets in New York, converts to born-again Christianity and adopts a masculine identity, Ricardo, before he dies. While the preacher, Terry, offers Ricardo as an exemplum of an eunuch, a man who sacrificed his body and his past to save a future for her soul, his past as Sara nonetheless actively persists throughout the narrative like an open wound.

Chapter 2: Confessions of Dysphoria

Corporate Sin in Confessio Amantis and the Writings of Leelah Alcorn

Why turn to the medieval confessional narratives to understand transgender bodies? Psychiatric diagnoses (e.g. gender dysphoria) remain as critical markers of contemporary trans bodies, eliciting confessions of disorder in exchange for systematic support. Understanding these medical narratives as confessions allow us to look back at how pre-modern contexts lead to this exchange of diagnosis and resources, while also requiring attention to historical conventions of mental disability and narrative. Medieval disability scholars argue that pre-modern diagnoses of mental illness cannot be thought apart from religious models that considered sins as inextricable from community life. A critical aspect of confessional narratives is that conditions which in the 21st century would be defined as individual, in medieval thought were inextricable from corporate sins in a way more like schizo-analysis than psychoanalysis and its psychiatric relatives.

I argue that the presentation of trans bodies in medieval confessional literature bears critical similarities to narratives demanded by medical doctors in the 21st century.

In both cases, the personal changes of the body are cast in terms of a confession of a diagnosable (medieval) sin or (modern) disorder, in order to elicit social assistance. Using

Judith Butler’s “Undiagnosing Gender,” I show that although confessions are supposed to reveal a hidden truth, systems demand that trans bodies “agree to falsify” themselves by becoming master genre writers.130 I then turn to John Gower’s medieval tales of dysphoria, suicide, and sex change, situated within a fictional frame of a confession of pride and sloth in Confessio Amantis. These tales diagnoses gender indeterminacy as a social madness, “un-confessing” gender disorders as material and social constructs.

Gower’s Confessio Amantis offers the revised Ovidian narrative of Narcissus in his section on the deadly sin of pride. Gazing into water, where he “Wene / It were a

130 Butler, Undoing Gender. 288. 73

womman that he syh,” Narcissus becomes “most bejaped in his wit” through the madness of gender dysphoria, despairs and dies (I.viii.2363). This looking at the self in the water reflects an entre into the reflection of Narcissus, a dysphoria that, because of a lack of support, ends in suicide. Narcissus falls in love with his own diverse perfection which he perceives as female, and this trans desire and death are emblematic of the division of unity as the “the vice of alle dedly sinne,” that must end in death.131

Gower’s tale of Narcissus offers a contrast with Iphis’s sex change “into a man” in the section of Confessio addressing the sin of sloth. The unrequested change is made by divine powers after Iphis, born as a girl but raised as a boy, marries a girl. While the marriage would have not been reproductive, thus slothful, the crisis and resolution are not in Iphis’s control. This silence changes our understanding of the diagnostics of sin by casting bodies as instruments in conflicts of social and material powers. The body will ever be made of mutable elements existing together in a diverse social system.

This chapter ends by considering how the individual and the corporate body interrelate in the twentieth-century work by Daphne Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a

Dress: A Memoir (1997). While Scholinski conceded to a psychiatric confession of

“gender identity disorder,” based on definitions of transgender as a form of “narcissism” and “schizophrenia,” to call on professional medical support in her gender transition, the weight of the pathology and responsibility fell on her shoulders as she was made to spend a million dollars to fund her own three year confinement in a mental institution.

Chapter 3: Hagiographies of Transvestites:

Imago Dei in the Book of Margery Kempe and The Last Time I Wore a Dress

131 Chaucer, “General Prologue,” 1009. 74

In this chapter, I study how medieval hagiography produced transvestites as embodiments of the Imago Dei and Imitatio Christi.132 I examine Vita of St. Marinos, one of the oldest trans saint lives (a saint assigned female at birth but assumes a male identity later in life), for how hagiographers reframe isolated trans youths as images set apart in

God’s Creation, their transitions functioned as extreme cases of Christian Baptism and the Resurrection. Then, I read selections from the Book of Margery Kempe to demonstrate how the protagonist frames herself through ministries and white robes as embodying the Imago and Imitatio of a trans saint. In the last section, I trace the genealogy into its modern form in the trans biography of Dylan Scholinski, where the trans man reclaims the time spent isolated against his will as a girl in a mental hospital for daring to follow his Imago Transvesti.

This article arises in response to patriarchal traditions. Following Stephen J.

Davis's excellent review of the critical tradition in "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex"

(2002), the academic attention on trans hagiography reveals a wide acceptance of the existence and effect of the genre of trans saints and trans hagiography, yet in ways that undermine a trans historical project.133 In the first case, trans saints are read as the psychological and psychoanalytic symptom of a repressed patriarchy that at once desires and rejects femininity in patriarchal spaces. On the other side, feminist readings of trans hagiographies read trans saints as women doing men’s jobs, the inevitable resistance to a system that excludes and subjugates of women. Yet both cases look at the environment of the trans saint, at the men or the women, and not at the trans subject as a thing worth

132 Amy V Ogden, “The Centrality of Margins: Medieval French Genders and Genres Reconfigured,” French Forum, 30.1. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 8. 133 S. J. Davis, "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men," Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 10 no. 1, 2002, pp. 1-36. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/earl.2002.0003.15 75

interrogating in its own right. Furthermore, nearly all readings of trans saints reduce the figure to their dead name assigned at birth gender.

Yet contrary to modern expectations, the transvestism of saints was not something to be explained away or excused or overcome. All this is more than saying that a transvestite hagiography merely includes transvestites, rather the transvestism became a central mechanism in the working of the holy writing. To demonstrate this, the chapter begins with an examination of a version of the Life of Saint Marinos that would have been in circulation throughout the late fourteenth century. This model is then compared and contrasted with the Book of Margery Kempe, describing a mother turned virgin, a text already recognized for its hagiographic influenced but not yet to be established as reflecting and continuing a tradition of trans saint’s lives.

In the final section, I follow the genealogy of trans hagiography into trans memoir, which I establish as a cultural heir exhibiting the key features of the genre, particularly Imago Transvesti and Imitatio Transvesti, although in more secular forms. I focus on the Last Time I Wore a Dress by Dylan Scholinski, written on a period of his life when he was known as Daphne and held within a mental institution. Like Marinos’s monestary, Scholinski’s incarceration in the hospital puts him in direct and sustained opposition to the norms of the Imago Mundi (worldly image of gender) and enforced enactment of Imitatio Mundi. The book functions as an autohagiography (much like

Kempe) narrating his life in a way that demonstrates how these struggles sharpened and structured his resolve to embody and live out a transgender life.

Chapter 4: Pilgrimages of Hermaphrodites

Loca Sancta in the Travels of John Mandeville and Exile and Pride

In this chapter, I study how demarcated holy places (“Loca Sancta”) and shared public space work in pilgrimage narratives to orient and disable trans and intersex lives. I focus on the Book of John Mandeville’s description of the history and geography of “the

Isle of Amazons;” which may be understood as a trans people transitioning away from patriarchal models of gender while retaining ties to the patriarchal world, as evidenced by the land bridge connecting the Isle and continent. I contrast this with “the Isle of

Hermaphrodites” model of gender that poses such a threat to patriarchal power that they are imagined as divided from the continent. Next, through Clare’s modern pilgrimage in

Exile and Pride, I conclude how the trans travel narratives warn readers that even as we move toward integration we must remember those who remain in the margins.

History structures itself in space as well as in time, as pilgrimage narratives attest.

The definition of place, relatively stable categories of location, is critical for reading trans bodies because it has historically worked to confine trans or intersex bodies on the margins. “Intersexed, transsexuals, and people who don’t conform to gender norms” create category crises that are often combatted by constructing places of exception (freak shows, islands, prisons, medical theaters) where they are contained and observed.134 In turn, the practice of associating bodies and sites of exclusion as points of interest spurs travels, maps, and tales of “monsters” on the margins of the bounded normate world.135

Travelers on the other hand exhibit the privilege of mobility while losing some of their place specific belonging in exchange for a certain air of worldly hybridity.

Medieval artifacts such as the Hereford Mappamundi (world map), a visual representation often invoked by medievalists as positioning a prescribed pilgrim

134 Clare, 96. 135 Ibid., 71. 77

destination, Jerusalem, in the center while relegating hermaphrodites to the margins, on an island near India.136 I argue that narrators in pilgrimage stories often exhibit their social mobility to maintain distance from the limits of place set on problematic bodies.

This chapter begins by considering how the pilgrim narrative of John Mandeville establishes a model of place that puts non-gender binary bodies on the margins of his world map. After supposedly visiting the Land of the Amazons and then the Isle of the

Hermaphrodites, however, his sense of body and space begins to break down. The narrator is overwhelmed by the experience of interconnected difference, before presenting himself to Rome as marked by the diversity of the world he traveled.

This chapter concludes with a modern pilgrimage narrative by Clare who further theorizes how metaphors of place and narratives of travel work to contain trans, crip, and intersex bodies on the margins. Traveling between the margins to the social center of the city, Clare asks, "How could I possibly call my body home…” writes Clare, “Without queer bodies? Without crip bodies? Without transgender and transsexual bodies?"137

Encountering the margins makes these excluded bodies present in the lived space of the observer. As a conclusion to this work of Trans Literature, this reflection by Clare reminds all such readers and composers of the field to remain ever vigilant to those not given a place at the table, those stories that have been silenced, and those questions that have been ignored or set aside for now, which call out as genres of embodiment worthy and necessary for future consideration of the past.

136 P. D. A Harvey, Mappa Mundi: the Hereford World Map, (London :Hereford Cathedral & the British Library, 1996). 137 Ibid., 10. 78

Chapter 1: The Exempla of Transsexuals: Eunuch Dicta and Facta in Fragment VI of the

Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) and the Transformation (c. 1990)

This chapter concerns the construction of trans bodies as exempla, or examples, that use the facta (facts) of the body to demonstrate the dicta (doctrines) of gender. As a genre, exempla are necessarily rhetorical. By narrating facts within the frame of specific doctrines, the significance of the facts is defined and the effect of the facts is controlled.

The potential for bodies, lives, and histories to be cut up and made into examples of cultural dicta sustains the operation of exempla across time. There is a tendency for oppressive systems to frame vulnerable or broken subjects with narratives that reinforce their social supremacy. A cisgender system has a tendency to either exclude trans narratives or else use transgender subjects as examples of the need for cisgender systems.

Effective exempla convince readers of the strong association between the facts and doctrines. Over time, these associations become naturalized so that encounters with certain facts, such as vocal tone or skin complexion, compel certain reactions. One of the most common compulsions is to fix or preserve these associations when facts are presented in ways that contradict the prescribed doctrines. Non-binary bodies are forced into a binary gender. Men and woman that engage in illicit sexual encounters are physically disciplined. Trans men and women that assert a great degree of influence must be subordinated to the cisgender patriarchy. Effective exempla can rhetorically function

across different media, so that certain bodies can be read as male, female, eunuch, or transsexual in text, image, or video. Exempla take on different forms across time, ranging from pictures with labels and explanatory blurbs to documentaries where video is presented with voiced over narrations. As a result, different people from different places and different times can find themselves rhetorically positioned to follow cisgender norms.

In choosing to address exempla as a genre of trans literature there is an unavoidable element of trans-historicism given that the form of narrative exists through the centuries, however this study does not attempt to survey the evolution of exempla through the ages so much as it works to assert how the structure functioned in the late

Middle Ages, circa 1390, and then to assert and define how the structure continues to function in contemporary trans literature, circa 1990. The latter section boasts the benefit of being identifiable to Transgender Studies because it uses the language of queer culture.

Those familiar with the film in question, the Transformation, require less clarification as to how the film relates to transgender and more clarification as to how it relates to medieval exempla. Conversely, the former section boasts the benefit of being identifiable to medieval genre studies because it fits within a long conversation over the play of genres in the various Canterbury Tales. Those familiar with Chaucer require less clarification of Fragment VI’s exempla and more clarification with the text as a part of trans literature. Such is the double labor of working to bridge two fields of scholarship that are often unfamiliar with each other, trans and Medieval Studies.

As a result, this chapter aims at being thoroughly medieval and thoroughly modern, doing justice to both decades six centuries apart. Yet the goal is to tie the fields together, not merely speak to one and then the other. What should arise in the

consideration of Chaucer is the conclusion that to understand its medieval exempla, one must really bring to bear the tools sharpened within Transgender Studies. Likewise, to understand how and why modern trans film functions as it does, a familiarity with the long traditions of genre and religion that are being invoked is essential. At this juncture and for some time, moving toward a medieval Transgender Studies requires a strong understanding of both medieval and Transgender Studies apart and together.

This leads into the pressing question of terminology and identification. For the purpose of this study what is “an eunuch,” what is “a transsexual,” and how do they relate to one another? The physical form of an eunuch’s body varied as did the methods of his manufacture, for certainly eunuchs as a form of castrate were brought into being through some form of castration. Indeed, as will be explored, even this can be contentious as scripture contends according to its own definitions that there are those who are born eunuchs. As a result, eunuchs might be considered a part of the diversity of life produced by natural (non-human) forces. With care to the spectrum of eunuch and trans bodies, the particular bodies of those eunuchs so named by the literature or criticism will be detailed.

As a whole, eunuchs were men who had their bollocks removed, usually against their will. The goal was frequently to sterilize the man so he could not reproduce. This made eunuchs useful sex slaves for lords who did not want their wives impregnated by the staff. Non-slaves might be castrated as punishment. Other castrates, sometimes called eunuchs but also called castrati, became fashionable singers in church choirs. What ties all the varied castrates together is a shared position in a distinct social class of men, forming a distinct gender with conventional forms of embodiment and culturual roles, which developed over the medieval period but which also continue into the modern era.

Transsexuality as a term arises in the twenty-first century for another diverse group of persons who generally undergo some form of surgery in order to transition their public identity from male to female or female to male. In the case of transsexual women, some form of “castration” may be included during surgeries to reconstruct the genitals, marking them as or alongside castrates. Such transsexual men may share other physical similarities to castrates through a like inability to impregnate those they penetrate and pending the use of hormone supplements, share similar vocal ranges. Those transsexuals who do not pass often find themselves placed in a similar distinct gender class. Some, as in the case of Ricardo from the Transformation are named eunuchs by their community.

In this chapter, I argue that beyond the cultural and physical similarities between eunuchs and transsexuals, what runs across the historical differences is the wider generic discourse that connects them. While necessarily considering the historical distinctness of the subjects and texts, this study concerns a genre of trans literature that functions across time. As will be shown, while the names and particularities of the surgical technologies change, throughout these changes exempla exhibit an enduring literary and social function. For this reason, while a medieval eunuch and modern transsexual may be called different names by their contemporaries, both exist as trans in the sense that they are products of trans literature. Whether the transsexual identifies with eunuchs, the genre of narrative that frequently structures her life story is the eunuch exemplum. For the purpose of this study, as embodiments of specific trans historical genres, they are trans figures.

Thus while it is unlikely that a surgeon performing a sex change operation in the

20th century has read Peter of Abelard, he and his publication on the transsexual are dependent on modified versions of the exemplum methodology that incites him to lay

hands on another’s body, cut it up to affirm his dicta and authority in the natural sciences.

Medieval exempla use the removal of the eunuch’s bollocks as facta that embodied the sexual abstinence of monks, refusing a part of the body just as they refused sexual practices. Later, modern medical examples use the removal of the transsexual’s bollocks as facts that embody the reordering of gender norms. Ironically, the monks and the doctors who control the story of the eunuch and transsexual were often those who enacted the surgeries. Across time, those who controlled the dicta were also those who produced the facta to their specifications. For all their historical differences, eunuchs and transsexuals are both made subjects of such operations and embodiments of exempla.

To accomplish this argument, the chapter is divided into three sections. First, the generic qualities of exempla will be defined. Then the relation between the narrative structure and the rhetorical framing of trans bodies will be established. In the process, exempla will be shown to have a social function as well as a narrative function. Dicta become materialized in the world through the organizing and control of bodies. These bodies are then represented as facta that justify the deployment of doctrine’s power. One medieval text, Peter of Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum, will ground this trans genre within the Middle Ages, then and one modern text, Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender, will demonstrate how these generic functions continue to operate centuries later. The specific example from Undoing Gender will also gesture to how trans genres of embodiment and literature are also cooperative with the machinations that structure and narrate intersex bodies. While understanding themselves according to distinct terminology, eunuch, transsexual, and intersexual, exempla binds all together within a wider and older system of gender production, discourse, and control.

Second, the construction of trans bodies as exempla will be explored in Fragment

VI of The Canterbury Tales. The two tales that constitute the fragment present different forms of exempla and their relation to embodied gender. The Physician’s Prologue establishes the speaker as a medical authority, expert in the doctrine of gender. The subsequent Tale presents an exemplum on virginity, where a girl finds herself caught in between the competing claims of her father and suitors over the rights to her body.

Fearing the loss of control over his daughter, especially her virginity, the father decides to use a blade to cut off her head. The severed corpse becomes the material embodiment of virginity, following doctrinal commands never to engage in sexual relations. The second part of Fragment VI then responds to this conclusion. The Pardoner’s Prologue presents the other speaker as the embodiment of a life cut up and ordered by authorities. Chaucer speculates that he is either a castrate or a female-bodied person presenting as a man in the

Pardoner’s Portrait. Then in the Prologue, the repeated references to blades and cut flesh continue the theme of a severed body. This is emphasized when the Pardoner presents the basis of his income, cut up pierces of animal flesh that he sells as relics. Subsequently,

The Pardoner’s Tale demonstrates how those who have been forced by dicta to become docile facta can be reclaimed for other meanings. While dicta tend to control facta, the

Pardoner playfully shows that the material facts of bodies exert a greater degree of power in the relationship. As a result, "men like Chaucer's Pardoner," writes Joseph A. Mosher,

"contributed largely to bring the exemplum into disrepute."1 In other words, there rests in

Fragment VI the dangerous possibility of facta to disassociate themselves from the definitions asserted by pre-determined dicta and find other senses for their lives.

1 Joseph Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England. (NY: The Columbia University Press, 1911). 84

The third part of the study follows the mechanisms of exempla into the twenty- first century, which despite historical developments continues the core literary and social function of the genre, especially as it applies to trans bodies. Indeed, the modern exemplum of the eunuch gathers much of its authority through its roots in the premodern past. The example of the castrate may have been more contested and nuanced in the day of Abelard or Chaucer than in the day of Butler, where the meaning of eunuchs are taken as established doctrine and then applied transhistorically to modern facts. In particular, I examine the Transformation, a documentary on the life of Sara, a trans woman subsisting on the streets of New York who consents to be renamed and reclaimed as “Ricardo” by a

Born Again Church that offers care in the wake of a HIV/AIDS diagnosis. To examine how eunuch exempla continue to work centuries after Chaucer, I begin by examining the

Christian man in charge of the ministry, Terry, as a counter-part for the Physician, an authority who uses the facts of a trans body in order to substantiate his doctrines on gender and sexuality. Then, I examine Ricardo as a Pardoner figure that uses the exploitation of his body to generate surplus enjoyment, meaning, and power for himself.

1. Exemplum as a Genre of Embodiment

A. Definitions and Histories

“Sepe humanos affectus aut provocant aut mittigant amplius exempla quam verba” (Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words), declares Peter of Abelard in the opening line of his Historia Calamitatum. Written in 12th century France, Abelard’s text recalls the author’s life after a violent castration that left him bodily and spiritually desolate.

Seeking to reclaim his physical and social power, Abelard presents his scarred body as an exemplum, claiming that the hearts of the people are more soothed by the narration of material facts than by dicta alone. While existing prior to the medieval period, the exemplum rose to prominence within medieval society and literature both for its effectiveness in use and easiness in construction. Joseph A. Mosher defines an exemplum, "as a short narrative used to illustrate or confirm a general statement.1"

Exempla have two parts: the dictum (the principle) and the factum (the narrative, image, or body used to evidence the principle). Exempla enforce authoritarian power dynamics where particular bodies are presented as facta that naturalizes the prescribed dicta.2

1 In his definitive book, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England (1910). 2 Exemplum filled a wide variety of roles depending on the kind of facta used: "(1) to furnish a concrete illustration of the result of obeying or disobeying some religious or moral law; (2) to give proof or confirmation of the truth of an assertion; (3) to arouse fear in the sinful or to stimulate the zeal of the godly; (4) to make clear the meaning of some abstruse statement; (5) to revive languid listeners, evoke interest or laughter; (6) to eke out a scant sermon by 'farsing' it with tales;" see: Mosher, 8. 86

The decision of Abelard to reconstruct his body through the technology of the exemplum signals a movement in the genealogy of the genre and the gender of castrates.

While exempla were gaining popularity in Western Europe in the twelfth century, they would not make a substantial impact in England until the early thirteenth century.

Castration was used in the English penal system, yet eunuchs were not prominent. As a result, castrates were chiefly presented as a product and tool of discourse. English literature would receive the concepts of eunuchs and exempla as already cooperating together in a system of producing and managing bodies through narrative. In this way, as

Larry Scanlon, observes in Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum

3 and the Chaucerian Tradition, “[t]he exemplum is at once discursive and material.”

Abelard's linkage of the exemplum as a form of narrative and the castrate as a form of embodiment is not incidental, rather by working together they reconstructed lives to fit within societal definitions of gender and genre.

As a religion of the book, i.e. the Bible, why would Christianity find itself turning back to worldly examples pulled from lived experiences, particularly those of castrates?

In brief, dicta were found less effective on their own then when combined with facta, especially among populations with diverse and/or lacking understandings of scripture.

During the push for evangelization by friars in thirteenth century England, "the exemplum rapidly became a prominent element of sermons," writes Mosher. "This was due largely to the fact that these men began an appeal to the masses. For this purpose, cold, pedantic arguments and scholastic subtleties were futile; the people must be

3 Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33. 87

interested.”4 The adoption of exemplum was a systematic acknowledgement of the need for clerical dicta to cooperate with the masses and also was a subtle but significant sign of the power of the facta.5 In other words, facta were used as reproducible, disposable, and interchangeable operatives in the narrative that could be added and changed in different circumstances to sell the dicta of authorities to the masses. Yet the better the factum, the more specific and effective it was to a particular community, the less interchangeable it was. An exemplum narrative became so powerful because it was the right details for the right community, much like how an eunuch who could best enforce the laws of a lord was the best men for the job, yet by possessing such a particular gift also became more than a mere replacable instrument. Through their construction and use, eunuchs and facta became operators of power in their own right.

This dependence on contingent, potentially unruly lives to serve as facta opened up concerns that castrates and other exemplary bodies might use their power to tell other stories besides prescribed dicta. Noting this fear, exemplum scholars challenge the presumed dominance of dicta over the narratives and bodies they present as their facta.

Because of the prior depends on the latter, to be understood and proven, facta demand as much scholarly attention and to be seen as a cultural force that either cooperates with or resists dominant authorities. The contingency of the relationship between dicta and facta, clerical authority and the figure narrated, led to the supposed termination of the exemplum during the Protestant Reformation; further leading to the presumption that the exemplum is a distinctly medieval genre. Protestant critics of the medieval past and the

Roman Catholic Church’s authority argued that the scriptural principles of Christianity

4 Mosher, 13. 5 Mosher, 13. 88

had become tainted by the worldliness of facta.6 As part of a break away from the form and content of the medieval and Catholic Church, a call came in the Early Modern period to return to ahistorical scriptural dicta without the unruliness of historical example.7

“For most the most part, twentieth-century scholarship has failed to recognize the exemplum’s specificity as narrative,” writes Scanlon.8 The exemplum is not a recognized aisle in modern bookstores or websites. Few modern authors approach the writing desk with the explicit task of composing exempla. Yet, while there is a certain lack of familiarity with the exemplum as a literary genre, it does not necessarily follow that exempla do not continue to be made and used. In many respects, the example remains fundamental to modes of modern rhetoric and knowledge categorization. Examples are used within stories and modern narratives continue to function as exempla. Bodies are still presented to the public as exemplary and trans narratives are still presented as examples of moral or immoral character. The trouble is in seeing the genre and the lives it orders as processes that adapt and appropriate available texts and contexts. “We cannot define the exemplum formally,” writes Scanlon, “until we free ourselves at least somewhat from the modern predispossion to separate narrative from entirely from its ideological function.”9 The practice of yoking matter and meaning together in the form of an example is a practice of narrative, if not a name, that remains powerful in the modern era. The yoke of the example remains, although it may be too big to notice.

While the shift away from the sermon exemplum led many scholars of exempla to declare its death at the dawn of the Reformation and modernity, the secular public

6 "Toward the close of the fourteenth century a strong official sentiment against the type existed,” notes Mosher, “though actual prohibition was yet deferred;" 18. 7 "[T]hey had long since become associated with facetiae, jests and secular tales," Mosher, 19. 8 Scanlon, 4. 9 Ibid. 28. 89

exempla would be on the rise in natural philosophy texts, case studies and illustrations.

The example, with its demand for evidence to collaborate any claim, later became key to history and natural science, signaling the rise of knowledge based on facts rather than the recitation of dicta. Because modern medical science did not arise ex nihilo but adopted the rhetoric of medieval genres like the exemplum, over time it would carry with it and develop the form of rhetoric for use on later gender divergent communities. Based on the scientific principles of empiricism and evidence, scientific laws of nature or medical doctrines are made dependent on the rhetoric of the case study or other such examples.

While often hailed as a defining modern scientific methodology, the rooting of theories in material facts was a rhetorical practice with a long tradition in sermon exempla. The facts

(and what constitutes a fact) in a religious and medical treatise may differ radically but the rhetorical moves are much the same. Indeed, the development of a genre of composition, exempla into the example or case study, cooperated with the development of cultural ideas and habits around the gendered bodies that are used in service of these narratives.

To understand how exempla have determined, by their use of dicta and facta, the cultural forms available for trans bodies, the role of Christus Medicus must be briefly considered. While medieval exempla have been distinguished into sermon and public forms, they show signs of remaining inextricable across time due to a knotting together during the 13th and 14th century under the sign of the Chritus Medicus, Christ as

Physician.10 While one drew on scripture and the other on Greco-Roman sources, both

10 We can see both reflected in Fragment VI of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where the Pardoner, a member of the lay clergy, frames his exemplum with a sermon while the Physician, a secular medical doctor, draws on classical material for his exemplum. 90

are rooted in Latin religion and medicine.11 Physicians of the soul and body were equally concerned with making invisible principles visible through the work of exempla. The cultural work of exempla is to show an abstract principle or effect using a concrete body: chastity becomes sterility by the materiality of the castrate. The association between a castrate’s physicial sterility and a virgin’s social value became another way exempla reconstructed bodies and lives according to a dual medical and socio-religious purpose.

B. Christus Medicus

The medieval exemplum as a genre cannot be considered separately from its religious and medical context. A key figure that represented the intersection of these discourses in the Middle Ages is the Christus Medicus. Understanding exempla’s relation to Christus Medicus, especially in cases concerning eunuchs and other castrates, is integral in connecting individual texts and experiences to wider medieval doctrines. To answer the questions “how did exempla arise out of medieval culture?” and “how did exempla affect society?” it is useful to consider a significant example presented by a trans castrate figure: Peter Abelard and his Historia Calamitatum. His book offers a clear instance of the facta of personal life and the dicta of society working together to construct an exemplum with explanatory power as well as social lessons not only for castrates but all genders, men, women, virgins, and eunuchs. As medieval social machinery, exempla enforce the dicta of gender on the material facta of diverse people. The surgical logic of sacrificing the particular part for the ideal whole is inherent in the genre of the

11 "De Naturis Rerum is, as may be remembered," writes Mosher, "a compilation from such sources as Solinus, Cassiodorus, Aristotle, Pliny, Vergil, Lucan, Martial, Bernard Silvester, Ovid, Boethius, St. Augustine, Juvenal, the Bible, ancient history, traditions, mythology, and contemporary superstitions." "The practice had been born of foreign, not native impulse," writes Mosher. "When the revival of the exemplum came, and use of the type was extended beyond the sermon, foreign influence was again responsible. As has already been stated, the coming of the friars to England gave a great impulse to the popularization of moral and religious literature, but before that time the exemplum in England was spreading in the Latin works of men who had mingled with Continental churchmen;" 54. 91

exemplum; one which produces trans bodies as exemplars of this exchange. Here, as elsewhere, virgins and castrates share inverse relations (pre- and post-operation) to the reconstruction and resignification of the body, especially skin. Already parted and partially removed into a denied future or past, virgins and castrates span presence and absence, part and whole, pre- and post-sexuality. Society punctures the virgin and castrate in different ways, stitching them up with social meanings written on the skin.

Bodies physically defined by their skin as a point of entrance as well as resistance come to function socially as mediators, co-operating with the sharp-machines that exert power on them while bringing them into contact with lives often separated by sharp distinctions.

Why does society construct12 virgins and castrates as examples of the healing power of Christus Medicus? Scholarship on skin demonstrates that medieval surgeons may have had “pre-sexual” virgin bodies in mind when surgically manufacturing and valuing “post-sexual” castrates.13 Kathryn Reusch notes that castration manufactures soft tissue “includ[ing] soft smooth skin… lack of body hair… following a female shape.”14

Medieval humoralists would have been aware of the production of soft smooth skin was a result of castration, a fact which modern scientists would similarly attest to hormone

12 Eunuchs were constructed and valued for more than what was between their legs. Castrates, like women, and other feminine phlemic bodies were bonded by physiological traits formed in the skin due to a lack of heat from the testes. “Every individual had a characteristic physiology or an innate temperament that persisted through secondary modifications caused by natural processes, such as aging, changes in environment, or habit (although these too affected humoral balance in the shorter term). This characteristic physiology could be identified through external signs such as body type, hair and skin color and texture, and degrees of hairiness.” See: Elspeth Whitney, "What's Wrong with the Pardoner?: Complexion Theory, the Phlegmatic Man, and Effeminacy." The Chaucer Review 45.4 (2011): 357-89. 13 Roger Freitas argues that the purity and security of sexuality suggested by fair smooth skin reinforce the social value of eunuchs and may have helped motivate their production. “The literature, art, and historical accounts of the period confirm that, whereas now masculine eroticism is epitomized perhaps by firm muscles, a “healthy” tan, and maybe even an unshaven face, the earlier period prized a soft body, pale skin, and smooth cheeks. Roger Freitas, "The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato." Journal of Musicology 20.2 (2003): 196-249. 14 Kathryn Arc Reusch, "Raised Voices: The Archeology of Castration," Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, Larissa Tracy ed., (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 92

changes.15 “The root cause of the beardlessness of the eunuch,” argues Elspeth Whitney, echoing the mind of the medieval surgeon, “is not the loss of the testicles per se, but primarily the cold constitution produced by that loss, which prevented the transformation of residues into hair and closed the pores of the face.”16 Virginal women and castrates are supposed to share such hormonal/humoral registers and skin qualities.

If a medieval genealogy of castrate exempla can be traced through the scar tissue on the skin, one can read in it the work of laying hands on another to enact Christus

Medicus, to socially and sexually fix society.17 Since the era of Classical medicine, surgery operated by coding certain bodies as “parts” (that which is discarded), while coding others as “wholes” (that which is preserved).18 By the 14th century, the post-op castrate body had collected a range of cultural practices and meanings that owe much to

Abelard's Historia Calamitatum.19 In the Historia, Abelard considers his castration by political opponents who laid hands on him as criminal punishment.20 In the Roman and

15 Freitas notes many of these secondary sexual characteristics, reflecting those of a virginal woman, including and in addition to the skin as a product of the manufacturing of the eunuch’s body. “The destruction of the testes before puberty creates the condition of eunuchoidism, in which the male secondary sexual characteristics are not expressed: The penis remains small; beard growth does not occur; axillary and pubic hair follow a female rather than male pattern, as does the distribution of body fat; and of course the larynx does not grow. In addition, as mentioned above, the proportions of the body are sometimes upset by the lack of the hormone that arrests bone growth,” Freitas, "The Eroticism of Emasculation," 226. 16 Whitney, "What's Wrong with the Pardoner?” 357-89. 17 “Emasculated men, usually described incorrectly as eunuchs, can now be found among transvestites, transsexuals, and other members of various sects … Some who consider themselves transsexuals in the West, although they have actually become castrati, extol this operation as a liberation,” see: Piotr O. Scholz. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History, John A Broadwin and Shelley L Frisch trans. (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999). 3, 234. 18 Gary Taylor, Castration: an Abbreviated History of Western Manhood, (New York: Routledge, 2000). See also: Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286. Also cited in Tracy, Larissa. “A History of Calamities: the Culture of Castration.” Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. 5. 19 For Latin see: Peter Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. Ed. T. McLaughlin. By J. T. Muckle. Vol. XVIII.1956. For English translation see: Peter Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum," Medieval Sourcebook, Henry A. Bellows Trans, (Fordham University, 1999). 20 Because older laws dictated that rape, infidelity, or sodomy could be punishable by death, the alternative of castration was seen as a merciful development. Numerous scholars discuss both the use and resistance to the punitive use of castration in European law. See: Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 287-289; as well as: Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 19-28. 93

Byzantine empires, eunuchs were constructed mostly of a slave class.21 While castrate slaves did not form an evident part of Abelard’s French and English culture, records show castration as a punishment for a host of crimes.22 This punitive act sustained associations with those subject to another's will, whose liberties and body are curtailed. 23

Regarding sexual and reproductive freedoms, an enslaved or criminal eunuch was regarded as an exemplum of a post-op, post-sexual body. In his Historia, Abelard considers his castration as just such an end to a kind of sexual and social agency. "What path lay open to me thereafter?” asks Abelard, “How could I ever again hold up my head among men, when every finger should be pointed at me in scorn, every tongue speak my blistering shame, and when I should be a monstrous spectacle to all eyes?"24 Abelard struggles to see how he will productively operate in society at all after his castration. The shift into becoming post-sexual is in a very real sense an end to his life as a normative male. Physically and socially made "eunuchus qui castratus est," Abelard is exempted from key masculine activities, marked by the scars on his skin as an exemplary body. 25

21 Adopting by Byzantium from the Greco-Romance, when various Muslim states claimed the region, the practice of utilizing eunuch servants were adopted and spread throughout conquests in Asia and Eastern Europe. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,198; as well as Shaun Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, (N.Y.: Routledge, 2008), 60-65, 119. 22 Peter Abelard’s castration has been the topic of numerous articles and chapters. See: Bonnie Wheeler, “Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession,” 107-128; as well as, Yves Ferroul, “Abelard’s Blissful Castration,” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler ed. (N.Y.: Gardland Publishing, Inc., 2000). 23 The job of enslaving and surgically producing eunuch servants, however, largely fell to Christians, particularly in monasteries, who collected, castrated, and sold eunuchs. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,198-199; see also: Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 284-290. 24 “Qua mihi ulterius via pateret! qua fronte in publicum prodirem, omnium digitis demonstrandus, omnium linguis corrodendus, omnibus monstruosum spectaculum futurus.” For Latin see: Abelard, Peter. "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." For English translation see: "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." 25 The work of these operations on and through these slaves moved around the Mediterranean encouraging the spread not only physical surgery but social practices aimed to erase old sexual, national, and religious identities. See: Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 203-214, 232; see also: Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 60-67, 119. 94

The physical and social effect of castration readable on the exemplum of the skin cannot be underestimated. Abelard's new life fits in associations for a post-sexual life.26

To be a post-sexual castrate was in a sense to no longer exist within the commerce of community life; to become a non-entity. Reflecting on one medieval understanding of

Christus Medicus, Abelard considers the implications of Leviticus and Deuteronomy for eunuchs, "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord."27 In thie vein, the life of a castrate is supposed to be sexually, spiritually and socially over, even while he still lives.

What makes Abelard’s testimony useful for the study of medieval trans literature and genres of embodiment, is that while it begins as an example of negativity and lack,

Abelard uses the operations of his body and words to reclaim fragments of his post-op life as distinctly productive. "Scarcely had I recovered from my wound,” recollects

Abelard, "when clerics sought me … They bade me care diligently for the talent which

God had committed to my keeping, since surely He would demand it back from me with interest."28 For Abelard, the proposition at hand, introduced to him by the Clerics, was the idea that castration was not an end to life, but an entrance into "eunuchus non Dei," providing unique "talents" and social value to castrates co-operating with the mechanisms that formed them. Rather than surrender his body as a passive object of social discourse,

Abelard claims power over tools that touch and enfold him. "Therein above all,” writes

Abelard, “should I perceive how it was the hand of God that had touched me, when I

26 Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 12-13. 27 “Non intrabit eunuchus, atritis vel amputatis testiculis, et absciso veretro ecclesiam Dei." For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." 28 “Vix autem de vulnere adhuc convalue, cum ad me eonfluentes clerici tam ab abbate nostro quam a me... attendens quod mihi fuerat a Domino talentum commissum, ab ipso esse cum usuris exigendum.” For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." 95

should devote my life to the study of letters in freedom from the snares of the flesh."29

Identifying with the liminal operations of skin, Abelard turns the exit from a life supposedly fixed in nature into an entrance to an exemplary spirituality.30 He pushes back against the snares of knife and flesh that made him operate in a trans-sexual position between genders, flesh and spirit, part and whole. The machine that lays hands on him is no longer the violent arm of justice but the empowering touch of Christus Medicus.

Marking this move is critical to later trans readings of Chaucer and the Transformation.

The medieval concept of Christus Medicus, Christ as Physician, premises that by the instruments of violence and destruction examples of new life arise. Christus Medicus gained prominent force in the writings of Augustine of Hippo. In his Exposition on Psalm

85, Augustine writes, “He [God] knows by what treatment to cure you; He knows by what cutting, what burning to make you whole.”31 In “the Concept of ‘Christus Medicus’ of Saint Augustine,” Rudolf Arbesman writes, “[a]s the human physician is only apparently cruel because his cutting and cauterizing produce helpful pains which bring about the restoration of bodily health, thus God allows martyrdoms to rage for the salvation of souls. Moreover, as physicians employ like properties in the cure to counteract the properties of the disease, for instance, checking heat by a greater heat, thus

God destroys death by death.”32 Christus Medicus insists that operations that have done harm should not be discarded. Citing Tertullian, Arbesman writes, “criticizing God for

His operations and dispositions is like finding fault with a physician's instruments

29 “ob hoc maxime dominica manu me nunc tactum esse cognoscerem, quo liberius a carnalibus illecebris” For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." 30 Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body,” 87-106; see also: Ferroul, “Abelard’s Blissful Castration,” 129-150. 31 Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 85.9 (PL 37.1088), quoted in Arbesman, “the Concept of ‘Christus Medicus,’” 22. 32 Arbesman, “the Concept of ‘Christus Medicus,’” 6. 96

because they cut, or cauterize, or amputate, or tighten.”33 Seen within Christus Medicus, the technologies of the knife are themselves not at fault for being used for destruction.

There are positive, healing ends, these operations may make. In a tract on John the

Evangelist, Augustine writes, “Who is the Physician? Our Lord Jesus Christ. Who is our

Lord Jesus Christ? He who was seen even by those by whom He was crucified.”34 For

Augustine, and later Abelard, Christ is not only a doctor of the wounded but is himself wounded. It is by the broken that the broken are recollected. This brokenness in medieval art marks Christ in crucifixion as exemplary.

Ironically, like Christ, those who have been subject facta to the dicta of social operations in the past are turned into exempla that perpetuate such social operations on themselves and others in the future. Further reflecting on the power and position afforded to him by his castration, Abelard begins to assert himself as a medium for controlling the sexual formation of others. Abelard writes, "In truth, that which had happened to me so completely removes all suspicion of this iniquity [lust] among all men that those who wish to have their women kept under close guard employ eunuchs for that purpose.” 35

Abelard plays upon an etymological as well as social genealogy of "the eunuch" as guardians of women and marriage bed. “[E]unuch derives from the ancient Greek,” writes Gary Taylor in his Abbreviated History of Castration, from the words “meaning

33 Ibid. 34 “He was seized, struck with fists, scourged, spat upon, crowned with thorns, suspended upon the cross, died, was wounded by the spear, taken from the cross, and laid in the sepulchre. That same Jesus Christ our Lord, that same exactly. He is the complete Physician of our wounds.” Augustine, John the Evangelist, Tract. 3.2f. (PL 35.1396f), quoted in Arbesman, “the Concept of ‘Christus Medicus,’” 13. 35 “Adeo namque res ista omnem huius turpitudinis suspitionem apud omnes removet, ut quicunque mulieres observare diligentius student, eis eunuchos adhibeant.” For Latin see: Abelard, "Historia Calamitatum and Letters 1-7." Medieval Studies. For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." 97

‘bed,’ especially ‘marriage bed’” and “to hold, keep, guard.”36 Through the narrative of exempla, those subject to operation enact Christus Medicus and become a part of ongoing operations to control others and enforce doctrine.

In medieval as well as modern contexts, the decision to co-operate with Christus

Medicus is not made with unfettered free will, but represents a form of contingent personal resistance to a system from which a body cannot extricate itself. Voiced in the description of Abelard’s life, the post-sexual castrate and pre-sexual girls and boys often find themselves sharing the same spaces physically and socially. Abelard writes, "Such men, in truth, are enabled to have far more importance and intimacy among modest and upright women by the fact that they are free from any suspicion of lust."37 This opens up a point of empathy and co-operation between sexually managed lives, allowing them to potentially reclaim erased pleasures and agency stolen from them by other forms of

Christus Medicus: knives, medicines, doctrines, laws, and gender norms.

Across time, exempla of eunuchs offer troubling opportunities and divisions.

Castrates are abused by the system then used to abuse others. The doctrines that are supposed to save lives and souls operate at the expense of sacrificing and subjugating the facts of the body in which they reside. It may be hard for a virgin to have sympathy for the eunuch that is at once her guard and her watcher. Likewise it may be hard for the eunuch to sympathize with the woman who is at once his ward and his master. This tension acts across historical divisions of gender as well. Transsexuals who have had their genitals reconstructed may cringe at having their story or their operation connected with

36 Taylor, Gary. Castration, 33; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 6. Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati, 232. 37 “Tales quippe semper apud verecundas et honestas feminas tanto amplius dignitatis et familiaritatis adepti sunt quanto longius ab hac absistebant suspitione.” For English translation see: Abelard, "Peter Abelard: Historia Calamitatum." 98

medieval castration and eunuchs. Yet despite differences in identity and context, modern transsexuals have found the material facts of their bodies presented as examples that substantiate coercive doctrines of gender. Like medieval eunuch exempla, the modern transsexual example operates to control women and diverse non-binary genders.

C. Medical Examples

The modern transsexual has been made an example of many truths. Our modern world is so pervaded by the logic of the example that the critical work of the exemplum is generally forgotten beyond medievalists. Yet, because of scientific empiricism and postmodern subjectivity, we might hardly imagine knowledge without particular examples.

The method of theorizing and then producing concrete evidence is a medieval generic practice that developed into the early scientific method and archive. Indeed, early twentieth century studies such as "Pyschopathia Sexualis with Special Reference to

Contrary Sexual Instinct," "Psychopathia Transexualis," and "Transsexualism and

Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Samto-Psychic Syndromes," utilize visual and narratives to illustrate trans bodies. These case studies serve as a form of scientific exemplum that produced the transsexual as a proof of medical principles of definition.

While the method presumes the universality of the truth being evidenced, the transsexual would not exist as a concept of public discourse without material specifics of bodies.

As with medieval eunuchs, this is scientific exemplum is written and readable on the skin. To understand how trans bodies were and are products and operatives of the public exemplum, we must therefore understand how dicta become written on the skin

through what Judith Butler calls "the technology of the knife."38 Skin does not have a neutral relationship to the knife, nor is it passive when tools cut across, burn, or penetrate it. This moves castration from a subtractive to a productive, yet violent act. To show the power and resistances of “sharp machines,” Butler close reads the body and life of David

Reimer, as described in As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto,39 as an exemplum on operations, where "malleability… is violently imposed. And naturalness is artificially induced."40 By applying Butler's theory of the reconstruction of transgender and intersex body, we better understand the long genealogical relationship between the operators of sharp-machines and trans exempla they worked to embody.

To show how narrative serves ideologies of gendered embodiment, we can read

Butler’s presentation of Reimer life as a trans/intersex exemplum employed to construct natural appearing skin and a sense of wholness. Identified male at birth, Reimer underwent a surgery on his penis to alter his foreskin, which was burned off when the doctor “elected to use not a scalpel to cut away [the] foreskin, but a Bovie cautery machine. This device employs a generator to deliver an electric current to a sharp, needlelike cutting instrument, which burns the edges of an incision as it is made.”41 After the accident marked Reimer’s skin as not normatively male, doctors encouraged surgery to re-naturalize the body as a girl, making “a rudimentary exterior vagina using the remaining scrotal skin.”42 The parents agreed and David became Brenda. The use of the

Bovie machine and transsexual/intersex protocol is represented as unusual, but reflects an impulse implicit in technologies of the knife, a modern Christus Medicus, where

38 Butler, 187. 39 John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: the Boy Who Was Raised A Girl, (NY: Harper Perennial, 2000). 40 Butler, 188. 41 Calapinto, 12. 42 Ibid., 54. 100

operations cut away gender non-conforming parts while cauterizing the skin to assert a naturalized wholeness. Indeed, the division of bodies and erasure of the past has become signatures of trans narrative. In the 1950s, doctors developed the language of pre- and post-operative in what Sandy Stone describes as part of a clinical “strategy of building barriers within a single subject.”43 As genitals underwent operations to bring that body in line with the prescribed gender, clinic’s “charm school” taught transsexual and intersex persons to continue to expunge parts of their history that did not fit into models of natural gender.44 The doctors brought in transsexual women to teach Brenda to be feminine. Here the “transsexual” form of life is replicated as a dicta of its own, a naturalized genre.

Once marked by and for a trans genre of embodiment, Brenda was then used to substantiate dicta on the naturalness of feminine and masculine characteristics in others.

She was made to train her brother for “natural” sexual relations through “mock coital activities.”45 Made to present herself naked for study, Doctors examined her body, “with its small stumplike protrusion under the skin and its apparent scarring.”46 This was published as proof of effective operations that naturalize female gender. While praised as a post-op transsexual, the marks of artifice were most praised when invisible, counterfeiting pre-op virginity.

After years as a transsexual and a girl, later in life Reimer’s decided to seek operations to reclaim his body and his story, to become physically and socially male.

“David,” writes Colapin, using Reimer’s reclaimed masculine name, “underwent surgery to create a rudimentary penis. Constructed of muscles and skin from the inside of his

43 Stone, 225. 44 Ibid., 227. 45 Butler, 185. 46 Calapinto, 94. 101

thighs, the penis was attached to the small stump of remaining penile corpora under the skin.”47 In this line, the title of the book on Reimer’s life, As Nature Made Him, suggests the primacy of Nature determining the form of a body’s gender. Yet again, the post-post- op Reimer is supposed to reflect the dicta for natural pre-op forms of gender: male or female. Framing these transitions in terms of pre- and post-op, highlight the ambiguous and fluid medical and cultural significance of operations. In the late twentieth century,

“post-op” became a common term for a transgender person who has undergone bottom surgery to “fix” their gender; they are post-operation.

The designation of “post-op” at once signified being medically fixed, as if by a modern Christus Medicus, but also signaled a cultural anxiety over the surgical artifice that constructed their gender; a tension that exempla worked to releave. The trans post-op body supposedly functioned more naturally but was less like the body nature gave them.

Conversely, the pre-op, pre-operation body, was closer to the gender society deemed as naturally given but was medically considered broken, ill, or monstrous. Because of this conflict, at the time, the holy grail of such “sex change operations” (now more commonly called “gender affirming operations”) was that the post-op body would be considered as natural the pre-op body but without the problems nature imparted. It was the monstrosity of nature and of surgery that was to be covered over by the artifice of the surgery; a modern Christus Medicus that at once kills and saves.

Reading against the grain of such genres of erasure, Butler’s framing of Riemer’s life functions explicitly as exempla on trans skin, drawing readers to look at castration as signifying more than naturalized or absent knowledge, to consider the physical as well as the biopolitical reconstructions of the trans operative body. Butler asks, "is the surgery

47 Ibid. 184. 102

performed in order to create a 'normal-looking' body after all? ... mutilations and scars that remain hardly offer compelling evidence that this is what the surgeries actually accomplish.”48 The physical and social operations of being "mutilated" and "scarred" function to justify becoming artificially "normal" looking – as Nature made him (or would have made him). It is a paradox and a double bind revealing that the Christus

Medicus in the sharp machines that unmake and make naturalness itself.

For castrates, medieval eunuchs or modern transsexuals, "[m]alleability… is violently imposed,” writes Butler, critiquing assumptions that becoming post-op is ever an essential telos, “[a]nd naturalness is artificially induced."49 Castrates cannot be made to unproblematically signify a fundamentally unfixed form of embodiment or time. Nor can cis masculinity and femininity be taken as fixed natural forms that are retained across time, whether in a personal or collective history. Gender expression as a set of outward signs shifts as cultural meanings and norms change. Gender identity as an internal sense of self can be relatively stable but will grow and shift as personalities develop. These forms of gender may seem divorced from the materiality of the body, yet as expression occurs at the level of how culture touches us or we touch culture through what we put on our bodies, or as identity is challenged or restricted based on how we feel within our own skins changes as bodies change. There is no absolute divide between mind and body, body and culture. In one way or another, all bodies become produced as a result of the operations where skin touches, folds, and cuts across genres of embodiment.

While rejecting a transsexual identity, Reimer exemplifies a critical trans mode of resistance. It is the call for those operative within the apparatus of sharp machines, “to

48 Butler, 187. 49 Ibid., 188. 103

begin to articulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured and reinscribed body.”50 Whether a pre-op boy, naturalized girl, transsexual, or post-op man, scars made Reimer into an exemplum of the operations of sharp-machines, pulling flesh into systems of power and resistance, using his skin to make and redefine his body.

The operations of the sharp-machines that construct the trans body as a particular example can be understood in three moves: (1) the instability of general principles of sexual difference, (2) the subordination through physical surgery and social securitization that dangerous material facta under authoritative dicta, and (3) that the scared and discarded fragments of these machines might reclaim the power they possess as instruments of social operations by recollecting and reconstructing narratives. In this way, trans bodies move from becoming docile bodies and claim a position as operatives given to them through reclaiming the narratives that make them exemplary bodies.

Eunuchs likewise are exemplary bodies, as defined by Scanlon, “a person who serves as an example becomes exemplary precisely by transforming his or her actions into a moral narrative”51 This move towards co-operation recognizes that trans bodies are always intermeshed in the social operations of sex and the ethical responsibility to the discarded lives of the past, the parts that are their remains, and the fragments of their stories.

Two persons within the same time and place may be castrated in very different ways, one by surgery and one by accident, and not actively identify with one another. Yet the social discourses that make meaning of their bodies connect one another within shared narrative mechanisms. The eunuch and the transsexual both find themselves taken

50 Stone, 49. 51 Scanlon, 34. 104

up by the physical and social sharp-machines who make them “trans” in similar ways for similar goals. Whether or not they share an identity, they share a genre of embodiment.

By understanding the exempla of eunuchs as a genre of trans embodiment, we can better historicize the construction of the modern transsexual as an example of the medical and religious doctrines that govern gender then and now.

2. The Canterbury Tales

A. Introduction: Fragment VI

In order to understand the foundations of eunuchs as medieval exempla, the

Pardoner from The Canterbury Tales is taken both as a prominent example of the literary and social norms of the period and as a key figure in Medieval Studies of gender and sexuality. Thus it is necessary to first consider the way in which the Pardoner has been framed as an eunuch. This is especially pressing because of how the Pardoner as eunuch has been made to represent a diverse range of non-normative genders and sexualities without serious consideration of the trans social and literary operations at work in the text. In “The Pardoner’s (Over-)Sexed Body,” Robert S. Sturges knits together an expansive literary review of scholarship on Chaucer’s Pardoner through the relation of different readings from Mathew 19:12.52 Various scholars53 argue for the Pardoner to be

52 Sturges, “The Pardoner’s (Over-)Sexed Body,” 35-46; see also: Robert P. Miller, "Chaucer's Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner's Tale," Speculum 30.2 (Apr 1955): 180-999. 53 Jeffrey Rayner Myers, "Chaucer's Pardoner as Female Eunuch." Studia Neophilologica 72.1 (Aug 2000): 54-62. 105

"eunuchus ex nativitate," a sterile, hermaphroditic, feminine body by nature.54 Others, based on the suggestion that he is a "gelding," regard him as "eunuchus qui castratus est," either physically constructed as a castrate, or socially constructed as an outcast.55

Readings of the Pardoner as "eunuchus non Dei" focus on the Pardoner's real or feigned surrender of his body and meaning to God or else to a nihilistic lack and nothingness.56

How is it that Medieval Studies fixated its readings of trans operations associated with the Pardoner through exemplary narratives of eunuchs, particularly Matthew 19:12?

A historiography of Fragment VI demonstrates that literary criticism is implicated in the diagnostic mode where the critic is the analyst, continuing the work of medicalizing sexual operations that cut off the past from the present, parts from wholes, and cisgender readers from trans texts. This tradition stems from the text where the Physician’s

Prologue and Tale frames the exempla of Fragment VI with the dicta of Christus

Medicus. Indeed, the medical and spiritual drive of Christus Medicus towards erasing the past to resurrect a sense of the present’s naturalness coopts both medieval and modern readership. “By following the standard exegetical principle of interpreting the letter of the

Old Law in terms of the spirit of the New,” writes Miller, authorities transhistoricize the material facts of trans lives, making them into metaphors for the salvation of a natural

54 Scholars such as Whitney describe the Pardoner as naturally feminine based largely on the description of his skin. “Effeminacy might be suggested by both anatomical disabilities, including missing or defective testicles and blocked pores in the penis or facial skin, or physiological problems, including impotence, nocturnal emissions, the generation of female children, and the inability to grow a beard, or more generalized markers, such as soft, abundant flesh and pale skin and hair.” Whitney, “What's Wrong with the Pardoner?” 357-89. 55 Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 186. 56 Robert P. Miller, "Chaucer's Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner's Tale." Speculum 30.2 (Apr 1955): 180-999. 106

wholeness from fragmented histories.57 Then as now, “the Old Law was literal, while the

New was to be understood according to the spirit.”58

Before an account can be given of the way that the medieval Church and modern medievalists have used Matthew 18-19 to frame and manage castrates as exempla of fixed gender and sexual diversity, a brief exegesis is needed to establish how the scripture has allowed and contradicted its uses to support the subordination of sexualized bodies.

Under “Christus Medicus,”59 or “oure soules leche” as the Pardoner names Him, 60 medical-religious discourse draws on Christ’s cures and teachings, as in Matthew 18, “if your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than to have two hands or two feet and be cast into the eternal fire.”61 This doctrine could excuse laying hands on another if justified as promoting personal or social health.62 Despite prohibitions against deforming the body, castration becomes “permissible mutilation if used to save the whole person.”63 Testicles and more are cut off in what begins as a cure for illness or wounds but becomes a way of controlling a person’s sexual potential.64 This is yet another exemplum of how material facta become reframed with new dicta through the persuasiveness of narrative.

Nonetheless, not all exempla are created equal. Sometimes doctrines so twist facts as to alter the story being told and our understanding of that narrative. This is what

57 Miller, 183. 58 Miller, 183. 59 Rudolph Arvesmann, “The Concept of ‘Christus Medicus’ in St Augustine,” Traditio. Vol. 10. (N.Y.: Fordham University, 1954). 1-28. 60 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 916. 61 “The Gospel of Matthew 18:9,” The Holy Bible: New American Standard Bible, (New York: American Bible Society, 1991). 62 Mathew Taylor, Castration, 72; Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 9-10; Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 282-283; Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, 68-82; Scholz, Eunuchs and Castrati,159-164. 63 Kuefler. “Castration and Eunuchism,” 286. Also cited in Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 5. 64 Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 5-18. 107

happened over the history of eunuchs representation in medieval and modern religious studies. Out of Biblical accounts of castration and marginalization arose the eunuch as a central figure of an integrated, subordinate, and chaste Christian. As will be shown, while tradition has dictated that Matthew 19 follows Matthew 18 in affirming literal and metaphorical castration, the scripture itself suggests a more complicated model of living in communion with division. It is critical that Christ’s words on eunuchs in Matthew follow directly after his teaching on cutting apart one’s body to save the whole in chapter

18, as Christ stresses the importance of reclaiming one’s body, even from nature. 19:12 is not complete until eunuchs reclaim operations enacted on and through them.65 Matthew

18 is followed by a meditation on forgiving those who have done violence against you and Christ’s words on eunuchs in 19 follows the apostles’ griping that if they cannot freely cast off wives (like they might other parts of their body) it is best not to marry. In

19:12, Christ invokes eunuchs as a hermeneutic not of lacking or discarding parts of the self but recollecting the corporate body with all its scars. 66 The distance between what the text says of eunuchs and what the medieval or modern understandings demonstrates how the tradition of exempla has transformed the metaphorical and social meaning of castraes.

The tradition of reading trans bodies as exempla reaches a critical point in 1926, when Curry considers the Pardoner through 20th century physiognomy, a eugenic science.

By reading physical characteristics of the Pardoner, “every line of the face, every shape and color of the eyes, and any tone of the voice,” Curry methodologically cuts apart his body to fix its hidden meaning and potential in the natural sciences. Through this eugenic process, Curry frames the facts of the Pardoner’s body through his transhistorical dicta:

65 Matthew 18-19. 66 Matthew S Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Vern L Bullough and James A Brundage ed., (N. Y.: Routledge, 2000), 280. 108

“[The Pardoner] carries upon his body and stamped on his mind and character the marks of what is known to medieval physiognomists as an eunuchus ex nativitae.”67 This assertion of a medical pathology arising from an “unfortunate birth” defines this natural eunuch as a “physically and morally isolated” deviant that “preys upon” a society that is more genetically wholesome. 68 Subsuming the Pardoner’s facta into the dicta of a transhistorical Nature, Curry suggests a justification for the assault of the supposed eunuch by connecting it to the sharp-machines eugenics would arrive at in the Holocaust.

Once again, while medieval eunuchs or modern transsexuals may not directly relate to other violent modern operations, nonetheless they find themselves abused and used by the social mechanisms and the literary narratives that shape their meaning.

Following the rise of sex change operations and medical exempla on transsexuals, in 1955, Robert P. Miller critiques Curry’s Pardoner as a public exemplum based on “the

Book of Nature or God's Creation - the data of sense perception” that eschews the critical other medical authority, “the Bible - which offered the unperceived data of revelation”69

Presenting Curry’s eunuch as medical facta and pivoting to a reading of scriptural dicta,

Miller follows a medieval tradition of framing eunuchs through exempla. By affirming the synchrony of medical and divine authority, Miller invites modern readers to perceive eunuchs through the lens of Christus Medicus. Miller accomplishes this by picking up the nascent themes of the dual forms of exempla and the “eunuchus ex nativitate” of

Matthew 19:12 as always already operative in modern scientific readings of eunuchs.70

67 Curry 59. 68 “Being an outcast from human society, isolated physical and morally, he satisfies his basic instincts by preying upon it,” Curry, 70. 69 Curry, “Chaucer’s Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner’s Tale,” 180. 70 “In the light of the division in Matthew and the exegetes, the "natural eunuch," or the eunuchus ex nativitate, treated by Professor Curry in his discussion of the Pardoner is not, for the purpose of significant characterization, as pertinent as the opposition between the two states of spiritual eunuchry. (184) 109

In the tradition of dicta drawn out of the supposedly more spiritual eunuchs sits the contingency of operations that separate parts from wholes.71 By making eunuchs narratively useful, exempla gave eunuchs a powerful position within Christian doctrine and in the physical church. “The eunuch according to the Old Law is prohibited from entering the church of the Lord,” observes Miller. “[U]nder the New Law he is given a place within its walls.”72 This process heavily uses the exemplum to make the material facta of castration work towards the spiritual dicta of the Church. “Castration or circumcision by the word of God,” writes Miller, “is equivalent to cutting away the vetus homo that the novus homo might live."73 Connecting both in the technology of the knife, faith is not only like medicine, but surgery becomes a part of Church life for the eunuch.

The eunuch is made “whole” and safe by a willingly leaving behind parts of his body, meaning, and social power. Here, sex is once again used to manage property.

While eunuch exempla work to assert the Church as established positive entity and the eunuch as its lacking subject to be remade, the authority’s power hinges on his trans exemplum’s capacity to socially and sexually engage with the established facts of a world of gender diversity. “The spiritual eunuchs,” the new wholesome man supposed to be resurrected by castration, writes Miller, “are those who, by an act of will, lead the life of chastity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”74 The Church cooperates with eunuchs to make operatives, “for the Kingdom.” Rather than functioning as a lack or annihilation, castration becomes a medical, spiritual, and narrative operation of eunuch- making and kingdom-making. “The Pardoner thus makes of the Church a kind of

71 “The second class distinguished in Matthew is, in fact, often considered as both literal and spiritual eunuchry,” Miller, 184. 72 Miller 183. 73 (186). 74 (183). 110

medicine show,” writes Miller, “and will promise to multiply earthly and material things, a functions irregularly appropriate to the particular type of sterility he represents.”75

Framed by Christus Medicus, operatives use their bodies to sell tales to secure physical and social capital for the Church. Exempla may encourage readers and later scholars to regard eunuchs as dependent on the Church, yet a careful examining of the texts demonstrate how this is often a narrative inversion of power. Eunuch facta are used to justify religious dicta as much as (and at times more than) the material facts of castrates’ lives require Church doctrines to tell them what they mean. Instead of reading heaven as a kingdom that accepts and tolerates the eunuch –so long as he behaves— we might read the narrative the other way around with the eunuch being the maker of the kingdom. If the names of eunuchs are written on the walls of heaven, perhaps it is because they built them. From such a view, the eunuch is a producer and not only a product of the Church.

Reading the history and literature of eunuchs from the trans perspective of the castrate in many ways runs against traditional readings. While nascent in older historicist and theologically oriented studies, the introduction of queer theory at once continued the elision of trans eunuch stories at the same time as it brought us closer to them. In

“Eunuch Hermeneutics,” Carolyn Dinshaw, like other queer theorists, uses psychoanalysis to read castrated skins as exempla of a lack, absence, or partial objects that deconstructs gender but also moves away from material operations of the body.76

Eunuchs here become a signifier of a lack in embodiment.77 In Getting Medieval,

Dinshaw develops her reading of the Pardoner as signifying a partial body, but continues

75 (188). 76 Carolyn Dinshaw, "Eunuch Hermeneutics," Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 1989). 156-84. 77 Will Stockton. "The Pardoner's Dirty Breaches: Cynicism and Kynicism in The Canterbury Tales." Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comed, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2011). 111

to stress the castrate through a hermeneutic of unknowing.78 While the fairness and smoothness of skin may suggest purity and absence, as products of piercing and cutting skin, scars remain to narrate the costs of making and securing sex. As queer theory knows well, the inability to sexually reproduce does not discount the bodies or the activities as being productive. Skin touching skin brings forth a host of significations beyond those controlled and legible by heteronormative frameworks. Other operations and readings that come into being, when eunuchs and their environments, texts and readers, rub up against each other. Thus, the queer critical work on the Pardoner opens space for Transgender Studies to make critical interventions. Following Dinshaw’s

“contingent” reading of enfolding intimacies, there is room for an extension of this work towards material trans operations, from fragmentation to recollection.79

The contingency of eunuchs, the potential for alternative readings of exempla, suggests that he might embrace the discarded parts of his embodied narrative and find new doctrines from the same facts. “This eunuchry,” Miller writes of the cooperative eunuch, “is also the result of an act of will, but of an opposite act in that this man, in full knowledge of the bona et utilia, chooses the worse part.”80 Miller’s language emphasizes two things: that castration is partition, it makes parts, and that the socially useful (i.e.

“good”) part is deemed a whole while the resistant part remains a part and is discarded.

What is dangerous about the eunuch is that his submission is dependent on his will and power as an operative. He is feared as a double operative. “In the second class of eunuchs it places those false religious who deceptively put on the guise of religion, but in reality

78 Dinshaw, "Good Vibrations: John/Eleanor, Dame Alys, the Pardoner, and Foucault." Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999). 100-42. 79 Dinshaw, "Touching the Past,” Getting Medieval. 1-2. 80 Miller 183. 112

are not chaste: the wolves in sheep's clothing."81 A wold in sheeps clothing is often how the Pardoner is described by less charitable readers. It might also be said that he is a non- man (gelding or mare) in men’s clothing, a part presented as a whole. Thus the Pardoner embodies a dangerous self-consciousness of his Tale’s and body’s contingencies. He has been narratively reconstructed and may chose to reconstruct himself as he will.

A dangerous eunuch, such as the Pardoner, is he who identifies with the fragmented and discarded parts. “Instead of cutting himself off from evil works, he cuts himself off from good work.”82 This type of powerful and resistant eunuch identifies with the rejected part and is supposed to be rejected in turn as partial man. Given a place in the

Church, doctrinally and physically, the eunuch may use his powerful position to enact operations other than those dictated. “The eunuchus non Dei - the perverted, or perverse, churchman,” writes Miller, “is he who, according to Deuteronomic law, non intrabit in ecclesiam Domini.”83 In other words, if Christ’s words in Matthew 18-19 are not meant to promote chastisement and a rejection of parts of the Church but rather an embrace of all parts in the body of Christ then it means all eunuchs remain dangerously contingent.

Read through its operations, “by nayles and by blood,” the exempla of fragment

VI opens up medieval debates on surgical violence and what forces can claim control over the form of a body’s gender.84 The Physician’s exemplum on chastity presents

Virginia’s “lilie whit” body, painted by Nature, as being (se)cured from violent sexuality by a knife to her throat. Facing the potential of one kind of forced penetration altering a virgin’s naturalized body, the tale argues that it is better to carve out a part of nature’s

81 Miller 184. 82 Miller 184). 83 Miller (184). 84 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 288-289. 113

wholeness than let it change. This bloody medical exemplum is then inverted by the

Pardoner’s words. Marked by skin “as smothe it was as it were late shave,” the “geldyng or a mare,” the Pardoner serves as a counterpart for Virginia.85 The Pardoner reanimates butchered bodies through the openly artificial power of relics and words, a co-operative recollection of divided bodies in the description of his relics, suggesting a counter-thesis: if society gives you wounds, make them into scars. Recollecting discarded parts, the

Pardoner gives the fragments of bodies and society new, if scarred, life-giving narratives.

A critical trans reading of medieval exempla need not introduce new facts but demonstrate how the material bodies and conditions might suggest other doctrines than those legible to cis-normative reading practices. These alternatives may not have occurred to all medieval readers, although it might have occurred to the trans ones.

Likewise, these readings do not discount the intention and work of traditional readings of castrates, although certain doctrines and assumptions may need to be set aside in order to consider social and narrative operations from the position of those in the middle of them.

In particular, the predetermined dicta that eunuchs and castration signify a lack must be abandoned in order to look into the dark facts of fragmented lives and see the life.

B. The Physician's Portrait

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer demonstrates throughout the ability to be duplicitous; in one voice to speak the traditional dominant doctrines and in another speak subversive facts that disturb the presumed security of any one meaning. When sections consider the regulation of gender and sexuality, it is not surprising that the author

85 Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 691. 114

presents competing voices in the form of the Physician and the Pardoner. Too often, readers jump to the Pardoner without fully considering his context as counterpart and counter-argument in the fragment. In key respects, the Pardoner’s Tale does not do all it can without what comes before it. In Fragment VI, the establishment is represented by the figure and narrative of the Physician. In the opening lines of the fragment, the medical doctor presents himself and stresses the naturalness of his authority, as well as the innateness of his secular dictum of wholeness. “With us ther was a Doctour of Phisik,” writes Chaucer, “In al this world ne was ther noon hym lik,/ To speke of phisik and of surgerye, / For he was grounded in astronomy” (VI.411-414).86 The oneness of the

Physician is his relation to the eternal, bestowed on him through his ability to speak true dicta. Through astronomy, his authority over "magic natural" is taken as high as it can go without moving into the super-natural. His dicta of the body has the authority of natural fate. “Wel koude he fortunen the ascendent / Of his ymages for his pacient,” writes

Chaucer (VI.417-8).87 The Physician’s knowledge of nature –particularly the medical images, or visual exempa— gave him discursive power; i.e. he speaks really well about medicine and nature, which therefore validate his actions (however damaging and full of artifice they may be) as valid and natural, as well as socially and financially fortunate.

The Physician is then notable for being a surgeon whose authority is based on mostly secular texts and images that form an archive of premodern medical exempla.

Unlike modern medicine, medieval physicians, especially surgeons, were not necessarily associated with the academy, book learning, or professionalism. It was not until the

86 Chaucer General Prologue, VI.411-414. 87 Ibid. VI.417-8. 115

development of universities that medicine shifted towards “a body of book learning.”88

The Physicians keeps to his classical natural science writers, but not the Bible. Among the authorities by which the Physician claims power are a god of Medicine, astronomers,

Arabian physicians and commenters on Aristotle, translators of ancient Greek medical texts, French physicians, oxford professors of medicine and, of course, Hippocrates and

Galen.89 Despite these classical sources, Chaucer notes that the physician represents the medicalization of the exempla, "His study was but little on the Bible."90 A skilled reader and storyteller, the Physician then is familiar in the public exempla of medical manuals, contrasting the Christus Medicus of sermon exempla.

The Physician's portrait positions him as embodying the truth of accepted dicta, the naturalized foundations that presuppose any particular factum. In stating that “He knew the cause of everich maladye, / Were it of hoot, or coold, or moyste, or drye, / And where they engendred, and of what humour,” Chaucer establishes the primacy of causes over effects (VI.419-421).91 From this base cause diverse kinds of effects are

"engendered." The facta of humors can be read back to derive the dictum of nature. “The cause yknowe, and of his harm the roote, / Anon he yaf the sike man his boote,” writes

Chaucer (VI.423-4).92 From this knowledge of natural dicta, the Physician could claim

88 The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800. Lawrence I Conrad, Michael Never, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear ed. (NY: Cambridge University Press: 1995.) 164. 89 The Physician cites many classical sources: "Well knew he the old Esculapius / And Dioscorides and eke Rusus," (God of Medicine, Physician and Botonist, and Rufus Ephesus, Physician); "Old Hippocras, Hali and Galen" (Greek, Roman medical writers, and 11th c Arabian astronomer and commentator on Galen); "Serapion, Rasis and Avicen, Averrois" (Arabian physician and 10th century commentator on Aristotle); "Damascene and Constantine / " (Arabian Greek reader, Saracen translator of classic texts); "Bernard and Gatesden and Gilbertine" (French contemporary of Chaucer, Physic prof of oxford, and 13th c writer). 90 Chaucer, General Prologue, 438. 91 Ibid., 419-421. 92 Ibid., 423-4. 116

control over the particularities of bodies. Because wholeness is presumed as dictum, it exists before and after the particularities of the body.

The primary dictum in the Physician's Tale is directed not at young women but at the authorities that claim ownership of their bodies. “Ye fadres and ye moodres eek also,” addresses the Physician, “Though ye han children, be it oon or mo, / Youre is the charge of al hir surveiaunce, / Whil that they been under youre governaunce.”93 The moments when the Physician turns aside in his tale to moralize are not directed at virgins but parents and governesses. The primary charge is proper governance of young women.

This power relationship is executed in the typological medical fashion of making the invisible visible: surveillance. The dictum of governance makes itself visible through the repeated cutting away of potential sexual works. “Beth war,” warns the Physician, “if by ensample of youre lyvynge, / Or by youre necligence in chastisynge, / That they ne perisse” (VI97-9). 94 Dicta reveal their dependency on facta by the need for repetition and the anxiety around neglecting the production of constant sexual states. It is only through repetition that the dicta produce a sense of permanence and naturalness. This threat to the natural order of the patriarchy becomes an excuse for increased securitization.

The first recitation of the exempla’s dicta is given to be fathers, who most closely embody the doctrines of the patriarchy. Mothers and governesses, like eunuchs, join in as operatives of the patriarchy when the direct authority cannot be present. “Under a shepherde softe and necligent,” warns the Physician, “The wolf hath many a sheep and lamb torent” (VI.101-2).95 Throughout the Physician's Tale, women are frequently compared with animals owned by the male authorities. Men are supposed to be closer to

93 Chaucer, VI.93-96. 94 Chaucer, VI., 97-99. 95 Chaucer, VI., 101-102. 117

the form of logos, while women are associated with the matter of the body. By the norms of the Physician's instruction, the properly governed person is when the body follows the mind, as the woman follows the man. It is then the patriarchy's job to monitor women and to establish operatives among women to enact the will of authority. Yet if the danger is located in the body (or woman) it is better to cut it to pieces than let it endanger the mind.

The address of the exempum’s dicta to governesses stresses women as the contingent facta to the patriarchy’s doctrines. The Physician frames his address to “This mayde, of which I wol this tale expresse, / So kepte hirself hir neded no maistresse,” establishing women in a lower and contingent position under the dicta of the patriarchy

(VI.105-6). 96 The term “lordes doghtres” is stressed in the initial lines and repeated in the next.97 The young women are understood as (and only as) property of their fathers.

Likewise, the two couplets twice remind the women that they are “set in governynges” or "set in governing" (VI.76). Their station and their actions only have power insofar as they operate the dicta of the patriarchy. The dictum is also framed as limitation. The governesses must “ne taketh of my wordes no displesaunce” and “thenketh… oonly for two thynges” (VI. 75-6). Insofar as the governesses enact power in the system established by the dictum, they cooperate in castrating their potential power and embodiment. They become defined by the failure and limitation of their bodily facta in relation to the authority of the patriarchy’s dicta.

Through the recitation of doctrine, the Physician establishes two types of gender for women, "only for two things," the pre-sexual and the post-sexual. “Outher for ye han kept youre honestee, / Or elles ye han falle in freletee, / And knowen wel ynough the olde

96 Chaucer, VI., 72-74. 97 Chaucer, VI., 75-76. 118

daunce” (VI.77-79).98 These two states are both embodied and performed. The post- sexual women have submitted to the frailty of their bodily condition. Honesty figures as a property that may be lost and marking a fall into "olde lyf, "the " olde daunce " and the

“olde craft.” With age figuring so strongly in defining the post-sexual woman, there is a sort of natural state and dictum in it. The post-sexual may mimic this state by executing another cut to their sexual ontology, “forsaken fully swich meschaunce / for everemo”

(VI.80-1).99 Giving up sex, the post-sexual reflects the nature of pre-sexual virgins.

According to the Physician's dicta, cutting out parts of the body and social practice, such as suggested in Matthew 18, show how sexual mutability can reproduce wholeness.

While the Physician seems to voice his exempla candidly, the facta he presents anticipate the disturbance of the doctrines they supposedly uphold. The paradox of preserving the whole by cutting it to pieces, or preserving eternity by enforcing further change, sustains an anxiety that is displaced onto the castrate. This encourages a doubling down on the docile yet dangerous post-sexual operative to police the pre-sexual body.

“For everemo; therfore, for Cristes sake,” speaks the Physician, “To teche hem vertu looke that ye ne slake” (VI.81-82).100 Like the eunuch, the post-sexual woman is considered powerful but dangerous because they represent the ability of sexuality to emerge at any moment. If she changed not once (into a sexually active woman) but twice

(into a chaste woman), she may change again. Yet despite mistrusting her, the system depends on such contingent co-operation. By submitting to the eternal law (of Christe) of fixed chastity, the post-sexual can be an effective liminal tool for securing the virgin's chastity. “A theef of venysoun, that hath forlaft / His likerousnesse and al his olde craft,”

98 Chaucer, VI., 76-79. 99 Chaucer, VI., 80-81. 100 Chaucer, VI., 81-82. 119

says the Physician, comparing the post-sexual woman to a reformed thief, “kan kepe a forest best of any man” (VI.83-5).101 Marking the sexual woman as a thief reflects how the patriarchy treats the female body, especially her chastity, as a possession. When a woman claims her own sexuality, she is unlawfully laying hands on a man's property. Self-possession is cast as stealing one’s self away from its proper owners: men.

Comparing a virgin's body to a hunt animal, "venison," the Physician suggests that the crime of female sexual liberation should be handled in a similar manner; as a poacher. In extreme cases, such as the poaching of the King's deer, the punishment for stealing is death, “[f]or whoso dooth, a traitour is, certeyn” (VI.89). This punishment echoes the throat cutting that will operate on Virginia's body. In this way, the Father becomes a King and his daughter becomes both his animal and her own potential thief.

As a thief, her betrayal would constitute an act of treason to his headship. “Of alle tresons sovereyn pestilence / is whan a wight bitrayseth innocence,” says the Physician (VI.91-

92).102 A woman's free sexual operations then is not only a danger to their physical or spiritual health but an act of treason against the law of the Patriarchy; a danger that must be cut out to secure the docility of the pre-sexual and post-sexual. “Now kepeth wel, for if ye wole, ye kan,” says the Physician (VI.86).103 While narrating its dicta with the authority of nature, the sentiment, “if you will, you can,” brings readers to consider the importance of operators in maintaining the mechanisms of power. Although he is subject to the same cages that govern gender, the post-sexual functions like a gamekeeper of virgins. Those captured in the machines of governance become the machines operators, maintaining the dominance of certain doctrines over the material facts that frame them.

101 Chaucer, VI., 83-85. 102 Chaucer, VI., 91-92. 103 Chaucer, VI., 85-86. 120

This is a useful tactic in a system that claims sexual divisions between men and women.

Men want to be held separate from women but cannot effectively control them except by being with them. Thus the responsibility falls to operatives who have lost the distinction of proper manhood or double-operatives who can manage the cage from within it. Facta must internalize the dicta, so that doctrines are implicit whenever facts are invoked.

In this way, an exemplum is itself an image of the cages it creates with doctrines boxing in the life of facts. The reflection of a eunuch and a post-sexual woman serving as guards of the bedroom is not accidental but reflect a wider system of power that marks certain bodies as exemplary as a way of turning them into another instrument to monitor other vulnerable bodies. The threat of death and damnation become a deadly cut that reminds the potentially dangerous post-sexual that she may become one of those disposable parts that need to be removed to preserve the health of the whole. "Looke wel that ye unto no vice assente,” warns the Physician, “Lest ye be dampned for youre wikke entente” (VI.87-8).104 Despite claiming ignoranance of spirituality, the Physician's dicta repeatedly returns to the rhetoric of the sermon exemplum, placing Nature in the position of God, in order to appropriate the language of salvation, damnation, and fixed authority.

The Physician’s literary, social and medical operations hinge on fixing the proper order of bodies; the bodies being taken as examples that provide facta to reinforce the authority of the surgeon’s dicta. In effect, he is a conservative in his treatment of literature, society, and medicine, although he uses all of them to fixe sexual difference through the construction of exempla to reinforce the rule of dicta over facta, “treated as a binary structure, which involves the simple deference of present to past.”105 The power of

104 Chaucer, VI., 87-88. 105 Scalon, 38. 121

the chaste woman and eunuch over virgins is inscribed in the logic of lords over eunuchs,

Fathers over daughters, and ancient dicta over present facta. The Physician’s Tale reinforces the dicta as the ever-present Law of Nature. With the firmness of eternity, the

Physician’s dicta defy others to find new doctrines for the facts presented, be they the

Pardoner or trans Medieval Studies.

C. The Physician’s Tale

“The Physician's Tale” begins with a challenge, “Lo! I, Nature, / Thus kan I forme and peynte a creature, / Whan that me list; who kan me countrefete?” (VI.11-13). 106 The claim that Nature is a master artisan is not unusual in medieval literature, but it is provocative coming out of the mouth of a medical doctor. While physicians are students of nature, compiling and passing down knowledge about bodies and their humors, this knowledge is primarily employed in the fight to battle the natural forces of disease and mutability.107 Fixed around a defense of virginal skin, the Physician presents the co- operation of natural and surgical authorities constructing and reconstructing Virginia’s gender and sexuality. “In hire,” the Physician diagnoses, “ne lakked no condicioun”

(VI.41.)108 An exemplum on pre-sexual states, “the Physician's Tale” presents the preservation of Nature's unblemished and pre-penetrated skin as justifying the operations that cut her flesh and end her life.109 As will be explored with the Pardoner, skin becomes

106 Chaucer, VI., 11-13. 107 Whitney, "What's Wrong with the Pardoner?” 357-89. 108 Chaucer, VI., 41. 109 The Physician’s language evidences the intermeshing of medical and religious terminology for sterility, emphasizing that she was whole both in body and in spirit, “As wel in goost as body chast was she, / For which she floured in virginitee / With alle humylitee and abstinence.” Chaucer, VI., 45. 122

a fact that will be read like a text in order to derive its doctrinal meaning. For Virginia, her body is claimed as facta for the dicta on virginity. Yet virginity will be treated less as a quality in the life or body of the woman but as a part in the father’s possession of her.

The management of the virgin is a social prerogative. If she is to be an exemplar of virginity, as her name promises, the supposedly natural state must be enforced through the exertion of her father and community. In this way, the Tale follows the Prologue in establishing exempla as much as a genre of social operation as it is a literary genre.

In the physician’s exempla on the doctrines of gender and sexuality, a key signifier of Nature's artistry is the virginal whiteness of pre-sexual skin. Virginia, the

Tale's exemplary body, is marked as a "mayde of age twelve yeer... In which that Nature hadde swich delit. For right as she kan peynte a lilie whit, And reed a rose, right with swich peynture / She peynted hath this noble creature" (VI.30-4).110 The repetition of the

Middle English words for paint, painting, and pigments draws readers to pay careful attention to the construction and colors of Virginia's skin. "Lilie whit” and “reed a rose,"

Virginia’s skin is painted the color associated with virginity, white, as well as the color of sexual activity and violence, red.111 It is critical that her skin is not compared with works of art but products of Nature. Virginia's skin is untouched, forever pre-sexual, between

"eunuchus ex nativitate" and "eunuchus non Dei,” secured by and from the sharp- machines of intercourse and violence that may de-paint her fair humored body.

According to the doctrinal logic, the maiden's gender is readable in the facts of her skin as one might read the meaning of paint on a canvas. Nature claims that no one can counterfeit or best her painting skills, "Pigmalion noght, / though he ay forge and

110 Chaucer, VI., 30-34. 111 Like eunuchs, women’s cooler phlemic humors made them naturally more “pale, hairless skin; limp, light-colored hair.” Whitney, "What's Wrong with the Pardoner?” 357-89.357-89. 123

bete, Or grave, or peynte" (VI.14-5).112 Not even the Gods’ craftsman can beat Nature's power of painting skin, nor "Apelles" or "Zanzis" who she dares "to grave, or peynte, or forge, or bete, if they presumed me to countrefete" (VI.16-8).113 These exemplars represent exaggerated versions of human artists, whose skills at manipulating bodies are set in opposition to the authoritative work of Nature. "For He that is the formere principal," says Nature, citing God as the supreme shaper of forms, "Hath maked me his vicaire general, to forme and peynten erthely creaturis Right as me list, and ech thyng in my cure is” (VI.19-22).114 Each created thing is subordinate to Nature’s painting and

"cure" (i.e. control) as the second highest authority after the author and savior of all things, Christus Medicus. This slippage between terms for the natural and artificial, however, suggests the simultaneous making and unmaking of Nature's "cure." The facts must continually be made to correspond to the assigned dicta of gender ideals.

Throughout the exempla, there is a preoccupation with the terms “forme” and

“former” at the same time that the Physician is demonstrating his literary authority by citing a litany of authors and texts. In other words, the right of Nature to govern the body is the right of an author over the text that she has composed according to her natural laws.

Even in creating what is largely a visual exemplum of Nature’s authority, she reflects an author writing by the genre’s literary form and function. Alterations to the authorized text are then a kind of literary counterfeit, passing off another’s work as Nature’s. Already the implicit condemnation of trans bodies, perhaps indirectly aimed at the Pardoner whose gender embodiment and gender expression are read by some as expressing a pattern of lying and forgery, invites the Pardoner’s counter-point. This casts students of natural

112 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 14-15. 113 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 16-18. 114 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 19-22. 124

philosophy, such as the Physician, as the true authorities to rectify unauthorized alterations to the form of the body; once again mirroring in secular garb the rhetorical position of priests as the true and proper readers and transmitters of the Word of God.

This further explains why a Physician would appropriate the craft of storytelling exempla in a public mode. The Physician is an artist authorized by Nature.

Implicit in the Physician’s statement of his authority is a contention with and against others who might make a similar claim. He has the right to determine the meaning of facts and set doctrine, at the expense of other would-be-authorities. The drama of the

Physician's Tale arrives with a team of assailants competing over who has the right to lay hands on Virginia body and through the sharp-operations of sex and/or violence to determine the humoral state of her skin. Convincing the courts that she is an escaped slave and that her father, Virginius, must hand her over to them. Fearing the loss of control over his daughter and wanting to protect her pre-sexual state, Virginius opts to cut off her head rather than hand her over to enslavement and rape. Virginius's decision follows the surgical principles of the Christus Medicus that physicians enact through technology of the knife: sacrifice the part to save the whole.

While reflecting the relation between dicta and facta, it is important to note that the laying hands on a free person and using rhetorical strategies to make that person into a slave has more than incidental relations to the Physician’s practice of surgery and his

Tale. Seizing a person against their will into slavery has been justified time and time again by claiming to cure them of some ill in their nature. This is a danger and a contradiction with which medical science and surgeons in particular have long wrestled.

How is it that cutting into a body, enacting violence over it, even pacifying it to make it

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more docile to the manipulations of the surgeon, can be justified with an act of healing?

The meeting of these two practices: forcing a body into slavery and into a surgical cure are embodied in the historical treatment of virgins and eunuchs. As cited in the narrative of Abelard, a Lord would claim rights over certain men as slaves and have them castrated as eunuchs. In cases where the castrate was not a slave, they were often disenfranchised through claims the subject violating some law, legal or spiritual, particularly sexual in nature. In turn these eunuch slaves would be forced into sexual relations with the ladies of his house as a measure of sedating and securing their sexuality.

In this instance of the example, once the legal dispossession of his daughter (and her pre-sex body) is immanent, Virginus follows Abelard by securing her spiritual purity by dividing it from her flesh. Confessing that such surgery should only be performed in dire circumstances, Virginus coerces Virginia to accept his decision to cut apart her body.

“O gemme of chastitee, in pacience / Take thou thy deeth,” he entreats her, “dyen with a swerd or with a knyf” (VI.217).115 Laying hands on Virginius's neck, the site where he will soon put a blade to her body, Virginia begs to him as she would to a doctor, “[i]s ther no grace, is ther no remedye?” (VI.236).116 Calling for alternatives, Virginia invokes

"grace" and "remedye," both represented by Christus Medicus, to circumvent Nature’s determination of her body as naturally devoid of sexual power and resistance. While her father (and the Physician) want Virginia is cast off her body (as in Matthew 18) and surrender herself to become a signifier of chastity and constancy (as in Matthew 19), the exemplum fails to make her cooperate. Facts do not affirm all doctrines.

115 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 217. 116 Ibid., 236. 126

It is perhaps not surprising that spiritual “grace” would fail in the Physician’s

Tale, leaving Virginia to attempt physical and social resistance against the sharp- machines of paint-brush and knife blade that secure her as a perpetual virgin. Virginia asks, " to compleyne a litel space; / For, pardee, Jepte yaf his doghter grace For to compleyne, er he hir slow, allas!" (VI. 238-241).117 Even at the level of the line, space and grace are rhymed together and constitute the quantum of agency that Virginia might be able to exert over the cure (control) of her body. Matching deed to word, without waiting for a response, Virginia swoons, challenging her father to operate on her without her will. The gambit is effective and Virginia is able to assert and protect control over her body. This resistance remains so long as she has the power to remain vulnerable. The

Physician and his Tale cannot use Matthew 18-19 to justify its deadly operations if its subject, Virginia, is not willing or able to cooperate.

When alternatives and resistance proves insufficient, Virginia turns to co-operate with the sharp-machines that will at once control and compel her mutability. When

Virginia rises and prays, “Blissed be God that I shal dye a mayde," she claims power over the impending operation and re-inscription of virginity in her body (VI.247-8).118

Although Virginia is denied ownership over her embodied gender, painted on her skin by

Nature and repainted by her father's blade, by thanking God for dying a maid, Virginia claims a degree of authorship. She co-operates the technologies of the knife pressed against her skin and enacts agency through them. "Dooth with youre child youre wyl" she tells her father and surgeon (VI.249-50).119 Blessing her death, Virginia takes a liminal position of power between a passive pre-op body awaiting operation and post-op body

117 Ibid., 238-241. 118 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 247-248. 119 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 249-250. 127

receiving it, between "eunuchus ex nativitate" and "eunuchus non Dei,” at once the subject and object of the surgery, exerting power and resistance on both sides.

When the violence of cut apart lives cannot be carved out of stories, then operatives who cannot extricate themselves from the story can yet call out the injustice.

Presenting herself to her father, "she preyed hym ful ofte that with his swerd he wolde smyte softe” (VI.252).120 Virginia takes ownership over the surgery that will end her life and controls the manner in which it will cut her skin and part her head from her neck.

Virginia’s existence is enmeshed with the brush and the blade that "forme and peynten" her body. The Physican and his Tale does not let her escape. Yet like Reimer and

Abelard, through co-operation, the victim exerts agency on these sharp-machines.

Although Virginia did not have a choice of the cure, she has "no grace or remedy" to alter the course, she claims some "space" and "grace" where agency can be enacted and presents it “to the kingdom.”

D. The Pardoner’s Prologue

The Physician’s Tale ends with a mess of blood and scarred broken bodies, presenting a thesis that the Pardoner will counter in the doctrine that the sharp-machines operated by Nature and in the defense of natural forms dominate and divide all material facts into the binary of parts and wholes. Represented as a sliced and fragmented body –if the Chaucerian narrator’s supposition of him being a gelding is to be believed— the

Pardoner is presented in such a way as to be identifiable with Virginia, another body straining against the limits of sexual control. Going beyond what Virginia could enact,

120 Chaucer, “The Physician’s Tale,” 252. 128

however, the Pardoner presents a counter-thesis through physical and social reconstructive operations of his relics: that those bodies discarded as parts may be recollected and reconstitute new exemplary forms of life. Thus through a critical trans reading of the Pardoner, we see in Fragment VI how Chaucer offers not only a second counter-natural exemplum on gender but also a different way of engaging with the genre.

While neither the Pardoner nor Virginia necessarily would or could agree to this co-identification yet the discourses that frame their bodies as existing in a state of dangerous gender and sexuality also position them as subjects of the knife. The operation of sharp-machines on the two bodies connect them within a trans genre of exemplary embodiment; i.e. they exist between and across the violent mechanisms of gender regulation to serve as messages for those who hear their bodies narrated. As with transsexual bodies centuries later, diverse lives can be made to share a similar position and form through the mechanisms of exempla. Yet a difference does arise between one’s inability to shape the direction of her story and the other’s ability to narrate his own exempla, allowing a limited degree of freedom to choose which facts will be interpreted by which dicta; an ability which is checked when the Pardoner is threatened into the same silence that Virginia experiences at the end of her life. However resistance may be found in a critical trans approach to medieval exempla, depainting the work of Nature comes with no small risk of retaliation at the hands of her authorities.

While critical attention has been given to the speculation of the Pardoner's gender,

"I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare," few scholars have considered the skin operations which leads directly to this conclusion. "No berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have,"

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narrates Chaucer, "As smothe it was as it were late shave" (I.689-691)121 This rhymed couplet draws readers to seriously consider the Pardoner's skin as a signifier and physical product of being either "a geldyng or a mare." Why compare his smooth skin to a "late shave?" There are other possible references for smooth skin, but the invocation of a

"shave" underlines the operation of a blade on the body; producing virginal skin either by a "shave" to the face or a "shave" in the form of castration. Thus it is possible that the

Pardoner merely keeps clean-shaven, yet Chaucer clarifies that not only "no berd hadde he" but "ne nevere sholde have." This shows an awareness of how skin and hair, soft- tissues, are not only the resulf of the artistry of Nature but are also products of surgical intervention.122 Modern science affirms how reconstructing genitals can have system wide effects that are visible at the level of skin. And indeed, by the fourteenth century, medieval people were also aware of the effects castration had on the soft-tissue.123

Castrates develop less body and facial hair than non-castrates.124 The skin is smoother.125

Castration also produces a high voice and thin frame.126 Thus for all the boasting about the unique qualities of virginal Nature, the unnatural technology of the knife has the dangerous power to alter and resist the work of Nature's paintbrush.

121 Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 689-691. 122 The Pardoner’s skin reflects Virginia’s skin due to a shared humoral register due to a lack of testes and sexual heat which gives them both “pale, hairless skin; limp, light-colored hair.” See: Elspeth, "What's Wrong with the Pardoner?” 357-89.357-89. 123 Numerous debates on circumcision continued throughout the Middle Ages and after, as noted by Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism,” 184. 124 Kathryn Arc Reusch, "Raised Voices: The Archeology of Castration," Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages. Ed. Larissa Tracy. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013). 36; See also: Roger Freitas, "The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato," Journal of Musicology 20.2 (2003): 196-249. 125 Freitas, "The Eroticism of Emasculation," 226. 126 Elspeth notes that other secondary features, besides skin, can also arise from the lack of heat and dryness produced by testes and associated with sexual agency, including, “Light-colored hair and pale skin were commonly seen as indicative in classical medical literature of a phlegmatic temperament,” as well as “a high, languid voice.” Elspeth, "What's Wrong with the Pardoner?” 357-89. 130

In and outside of Fragment VI, the ability to change what Nature has painted is radical because changes in facta suggests a wider ability to change or reassign the dicta of bodies; even, one might surmise, the doctrines that bind certain bodies to certain genders.

This is a dangerous power for the Pardoner to claim. Yet claim he does through the subversive narration of discarded refuse as relics. This is not to say that the relics necessarily need to offer the abilities promised because as with the Physician’s exempla, there is power in the Pardoner’s rhetorical use of them with even wider implications. Yet even if the relics did function as advertised, the operations of sharp-machines that physically reconstruct bodies (e.g. cut an animal body into pieces or heal a sick cow) necessarily demand social reconstruction to make sense of these changes. For the

Pardoner, this social effect is produced through the narratives that enfold the relic’s matter with meaning, as the smooth words of his "wel affile tonge" co-operate with the fragmented material facta of his and other bodies (I.712).127 These words wrap around and redefine relations to the body parts in question so that “Relikes been they, as wenen they echoon” (VI.349)128 Regardless of what former wholes and parts they have been, the discarded parts have become remade and reclaimed, treated now “as wenen” they are relics. Scholars note how the Pardoner's relics suggest fragmentation but what remains to be emphasized is how narration of these relics co-operate with the Pardoner’s body to produces a smooth sense of wholeness.129 How is it that a person who is candid that his relics come from questionable origins, like him, convinces others to buy into him and his works? How does he reveal fragmentation yet produce a sense of wholeness? How does candid artifice counterfeit Nature's virgin smoothness? What if “Pigges bones” can be

127 Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 712. 128 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 349. 129 Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 131

made indistinguishable from a saint’s when reframed as a relic? (I.700).130 Such a power is exemplary insofar as it is it claims the authority to re-narrate the relation between the material facts of bodies (such as their origin) and the doctrines that they represent. A gelding or a mare might, through the application of an agile tongue, some relics, and an effective exempla, be taken as a Pardoner able to assist others in such a transition.

At the risk of violent reactions from his audience, the Pardoner openly fabricates exempla that transform fragments of dead animals into relics boasting spiritual importance and power. Beyond the super-natural effects promised by his relics, the real power of the Pardoner may be his words. By the ability to produce his own exempla, he is able to re-narrate fragmented, scarred, and discarded bodies to become holy bodies that in turn physical and socially produce a sense of re-claimed, artificial wholeness.131 One particular exemple of this relic work may be considered to demonstrate how this works.

Of the Pardoner's many relics, he spends the most number of lines preaching on the efficacy of a part of slaughtered lamb, "a sholder-boon" from "an hooly Jewes sheep"

(VI.350-1).132 First, promises the Pardoner, for those who "taak of my wordes" and physically place the shoulder-bone in a well, live-stock pierced by "any worm, or worm ystronge" and washed in the water will be made "hool anon" (VI.350-7).133 While worm could refer to a snake or parasite, in any case it suggests the unwanted entrance of the body by an “ystronge” invader; i.e. illness, knives, or “worms.” The physical power of the shoulder-bone and the Pardoner's words washes over the body, covered the marks on

130 Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 700. 131 For an excellent historical examination of relics see: Carolyn Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. (N.Y. Zone Books, 2011). 132 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 350-351. 133 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 350-357. 132

the skin where the supposed natural impenetrability of the body is broken, in order to remake the fragemented flesh into a smooth surface, "hool annon."

The second boast the Pardoner makes of the bone is that bodies penetrated or punctured by disease, "of pokkes and of scabbe, and every soore" if they drink of the well shall "be hool" (VI.357-360).134 Here the Pardoner enfolds the scars caused by technologies of the knife with those touched by disease outbreaks that fragment bodies and society, like illness and treachery does in his Tale, suggesting the physical and social scars of the plague in London. The disease, in producing these wounds on the skin, reveals the porousness of the body and society that allowed the plague to pass through it.

Making the skin "hool" from these "pokkes" and curing the "scabbe" of unwanted penetration smooths over the history of dangerous ecological contingency. The facts of the body are disassociated with disease and re-associated with health.

The third boast made of the bone is that if listeners "keep eek what I [the

Pardoner] tell," then the bone will multiply the number of whole bodies in society. "If that the good-man that the beestes oweth... drynken of this welle a draughte…His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie" (VI.358-65)135 While the literal benefit of the relic may be extraordinary enough, the metaphorical relevance to other discarded bodies points towards the Pardoner’s wider rhetorical trajectory. The power of the relic, however fantastical, is a movement that inverts social valuation from wholes existing at the expense of fragments to a system wherein one may freely observe that wholeness exists because of the presence and power of fragmented bodies. If one drinks in the words of the Pardoner’s artificial wholeness and reclaims butchered bodies from the refuse of

134 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 357-360. 135 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” 358-365. 133

society then the number of recognized wholes will multiply. Applying such logic to

Virginia, one does not need to kill her in order to preserve her virginity if society can redefine the doctrine of virgins to include those who have been penetrated against her will. Alternatively, doctrines of gender could be changed so that the woman could determine if and how she remains a virgin. In any case, a change in doctrine can open up greater flexibility for which facts are able to claim which association and be able to change the material state of facts so that bodies (like Virginia’s) may remain whole.

Attending to the rhetorical movement of exempla and not merely the content demonstrates the great deal of power the genre offers. Those who claims the authority to author an exemplum thus enact influence over how facta and dicta are assigned or relate.

When this authority is wrestled away from established authorities, such as Nature or patriarchs such as the Physician, there can be an explosition of dangerous conflict in the name of preserving norms. Operatives may rise up to defend Nature's primacy and naturalized systems of sexual wholeness, using other sharp-machines, from narratives to knives in order to save strict distinctions between man and woman, part and whole.

Threatening the one who may very well reorient the power of the sharp-machines, the Host of The Canterbury Tales hears all that is said then refuses (and turn into refuse) the wholeness of the Pardoner's body, relics and words as counterfeit (VI.925-6).136 "Nay, nay!" cries the Host, "Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech, / And swere it were a relyk of a seint, / Though it were with thy fundement depeint!” (VI.946-50).137 Remade bodies are not fundamentals painted by Nature, claims the Host, but rather are de-painted

"fundements," to be refused by any normative reader as shit. If the Host’s reading has its

136 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 925-926. 137 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 946-950. 134

way, the Pardoner’s skin may yet resemble Virginia’s scarred body, after the Host threatens to ensure that the stories of the virgin and the castrate share similar ends.

This argument is another feature of the dialectic of exempla that Chaucer explores. For all the radical possibility of the Pardoner’s words and relics, the Host’s complaint against artifice echoes Nature's challenge and warning for anyone to attempt to counterfeit her work. The revaluation of discarded parts as constituting wholes in their own right may be rejected by a wider audience. Parts remain parts. Refuse is refused.

Painting becomes depainting. "I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond," says the Host,

"In stide of relikes… Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; / They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!" (VI.952-5).138 Like many who reject the reconstruction of trans bodies, the Host threatens the Pardoner with yet more violent sharp-machines: castration, and a refusal of reclaimed, re-narrated, and reconstructed bodies. Chaucer here seems to warn that the power of reconstruction operates both for the making and unmaking of lives. Thus, for better and worse, the Host confirms that any whole may become a refused part. Wholeness then is not itself a naturally fixed state but requires the constant operation of surgical narrative to produce a sense of virgin whiteness and smoothness that will always be de-painted by the blood, refuse, and scars it produces in the process. 139

Many have found this ending bleak. Is there any hope in the operations and scars of the Pardoner? While scholars argue that the Pardoner’s silence at the threat against his body is a sign of passive absence, this may be an active opening up the body’s

138 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 952-955. 139 The insistence on lie/truth, real/unreal distinctions depends on the ahistorical belief that things properly remain what they are, animals stay animals, humans are human, just as women are women and men are men; or else falls into progressive binaries that assert the final shift between natural and manufactured bodies. See: Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, 74-75; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 127- 133; Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 119-159; and Stockton, Playing Dirty, 97-118. 135

vulnerability in order to pressure others co-operating with sharp-machines to remake and reclaim scarred bodies and relationships. Submitting to the Host’s sharp words and knife, the Pardoner compels the Knight’s help. “Namoore of this, for it is right ynough!” cries the Knight, “Sire Pardoner, be glad and myrie of cheere; And ye, sire Hoost, that been to me so deere, I prey yow that ye kisse the Pardoner” (VI.960-8).140 In this context, the

Knight has the social authority to defend the Pardoner but also the physical power gained from his own co-operation with sharp-machines in “mortal batailles” (I.61).141 One reading may allow that the Pardoner is silenced by rhetorical violence and is a victim of abuse like Virginia. Yet as there exist forms of resistance in Virginia’s death and final silence, there are ways of reading the Pardoner’s muteness as enacting a degree of power.

Choosing non-violent resistance, the Pardoner, like Virginia, bears the facts of his vulnerable body, challenging others to recollect a sense of solidarity with refused bodies, to know that any body may soon be the target of an unjust doctrine and a cutting knife, and to call out, “Namoore of this, for it is right ynough.”

By making of himself a silent exemplum, the facts of the Pardoner’s vulnerability and scars remind the knight, and the readers, of the countless bodies caught on either side of the bloody operations of sharp machines. Power flows not through the erasure of scars but through the open making and unmaking of the skin, revealing the dangerous instability of all lives — enfolding transsexuals, castrates, virgins, geldings and mares in a shared position of vulnerability and resistance. Whether it is Reimer’s body under the knife of doctors, Abelard’s under the knife of his enemies, Virginia’s under the knife of her father, or the Pardoner’s under the knife of the Host, skin as an exemplum offers

140 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 960-968. 141 Chaucer, “The General Prologue,” 61. 136

forms of resistance. By not simply denying the trauma of sharp-machines but accepting some level of vulnerability, these bodies connect to the agency of those around them in ways that put pressure on the system that makes and unmakes them.

We may wonder if the power of skin operations must always be violent. This concern brings the kiss of peace concluding the Pardoner’s Tale into sharp relief. The moment, “they kiste,” the relationship between the aggressor and the victim changes

(VI.968).142 No longer is one body active and the other is passive, but both exert some (if unequeal degrees of) power and resistance against each other as their bodies and agencies co-operate. The encounter of lips on one another’s bodies emphasizes that the skin of either body is not purely smooth or sealed but full of porous openings through which the inside and outside enfold. It is at such openings that eunuch and wives, geldings and mares, may meet. It is at this point of intercourse that the Host’s body touches and receives the Pardoner’s body and visa versa. While the tension that led to the violence may remain, their “neer” co-operative relationship will guard them, as Christ taught husbands about their wives in Matthew 19:12, because neither can easily part with the other and retain unscarred wholeness.

E. The Pardoner’s Tale

The Pardoner inverts the expected order of exempla but demonstrating how a single factum can perform multiple different dicta. The body can even be made to testify contrary facts to the dictum it is supposed to exemplify. "Thus can I preach against that samè vice / Which that I use, and that is avarice," explains the Pardoner. This meta-

142 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” 968. 137

commentary on exempla is not merely a satire on the clerical estate, but also a response to the surgical logic that the Physician's tale puts forth: where a body is supposed to have a single particular meaning and where it is better the sacrifice the integrity of the body (or the facts) in order to preserve the supposed infallibility of the dictum. "Thus spit I out my venom under hue color / Of holiness, to seemen holy and true," admits the Pardoner. In particular, by presenting himself as the factum for every dicta, the Pardoner demonstrates how the exemplary trans body is a powerful operative that might exploit an exemplum and not just be a product of its violent operations.

The premise that a single body can take on many forms and meanings demonstrates that rather than dicta controlling facta, facta are needed to produce dicta. In other words, rather than sex, gender, or parts being determined by naturalized laws, rather these wider notions are products of the constant production and reproduction of these particulars. "Then tell I them examples many a one / Of oldè stories longè time agone," brags the Pardoner of his diverse storytelling talents, “For lewed peple loven tales olde / swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde” (VI.437-8).143 The destabilizing truth that it is the facta, the exemplary bodies and stories, that hold the power to impart dicta is an uncomfortable reality that many preachers of sermon exempla knew too well. This would lead to the Reformation decision to add to the destruction of the sermon exemplum because dictum and written authority should be enough on their own without depending on the dangerous inconstancy of particular examples. One body might be used to tell many different stories, even ones that contradict the authorities moral and sexual ideals. It is like vice selling virtue, the mutable producing the eternal. “By God, I hope I shal yow telle a thyng / that shal by reson been at youre likyng,” admits the Pardoner. “For though

143 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.437-8. 138

myself be a ful vicious man, / a moral tale yet I yow telle kan, / which I am wont to preche for to wynne” (VI.457-61).144 Introducing readers to the facts about his life, the physicality of his body and his relics, before he moralizes or gives his tale, the Pardoner demonstrates how meaning is produced as a secondary effect rather than as a first principle. A vicious man might tell a virtuous tale. Indeed, it is the particularity and the mutability of the body that makes it seductive and interesting enough to grab the audience's attention and drive home a moral.

The Pardoner does not land on a single dictum, he is not interested merely in contraries or in parody, rather he is a master transformer and storyteller that flaunts his ability to produce many different meanings from a single example. In his prologue, the

Pardoner claims to be concerned chiefly with Greed and many have read this as the chief sin embodied by the Pardoner and his estate. “For I kan al by rote that I telle. / My theme is alwey oon, and evere was: Radix malorum est Cupiditas,” confesses the Pardoner as he admits to his own greedy cons (VI.332-4).145 By claiming the greed implicit in his ministry, the Pardoner unveils the conceits of the Physician. The “theme” is a constant dictum, “yet and ever was,” even as the details, the facta, change. Virginity is a theme that may be embodied by Virginia or someone else, including the reader or the reader’s child. These “themes” or dicta are often bigger, expanding across more places and times periods than any one particular life that is framed as factum in an example.

Choosing Greed as a theme demonstrates how sins often function more like dicta, more systematically reaching out to more and more rather than being personally tied to any certain facta. Sins cut across, entangle, and connect lives that may not have any personal

144 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.457-61. 145 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.332-4. 139

intent or choice in the matter. Framing sins as a narrative theme pushes this further. Thus, readers of Fragment VI may be able to see the sin discussed as not only a feature of society but narrative. Sin can be discursive. Sin can structure how we tell stories, understand meaning, and order our lives. A set of persons, like transsexuals and eunuchs, may find that time and again the facta of their lives are used against their will; caught as they may be within persistent and monotonous narratives of sin.

The pattern of the Pardoner is to take a dictum, like Greed, present it as infallible and constant, then offer a variety of facta in an exemplum which evidently might have multiple meanings. At the end of his tale, the Pardoner lists the multitude of possible morals that the exemplum suggests. “O cursed synne of alle cursednesse! / O traytours homycide, O wikkednesse! / O glotonye, luxurie, and hasardrye! / Thou blasphemour of

Crist with vileynye / And othes grete, of usage and of pride!” rails the Pardoner (VI.895-

99).146 As with Greed, the Pardoner makes an exemplum out of himself for these other sins as well. “Al sholde hir children sterve for famyne. / Nay, I wol drynke licour of the vyne / And have a joly wenche in every toun,” confesses the Pardoner of his own drunkenness and gluttony (VI.451-3).147 These sins are not necessarily of his choosing.

The Pardoner, so named and defined by his job, is not unusual in his profession, being

Greedy or enjoying drink. The Pardoner became a pardoner within a system of standards and procedures that allowed for and normalized certain behaviors. He enters the identity by not only putting on the habit (i.e. clothes) of a Pardoner but the habits as well. Indeed, the drunkenness demonstrates that he exists under the influence of alcohol much like he exists under the influence of professional, gender, and discursive norms. Unlike others

146 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.895-99. 147 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.451-3. 140

who may hide bondage to the bottle, sin, or social stigma, the Pardoner flouts the many mechanisms that bind him, abuse him, and use him. In the Pardoner all the sins and oppressions seem to live and operate together. The Pardoner is not in control of himself in many ways, yet he gains agency by showing the many ways he lacks control.

The dictum on Greed is quickly multiplied once the Pardoner gets into his Tale, requiring many asides where he introduces dictum on the sins of Gluttony, drunkenness, gambling and swearing. Each of these are full of mini exempla which he lists. "In Hooly

Writ ye may yourself wel rede: Agayns an oold man, hoor upon his heed,” states the

Pardoner before launching into a series of examples from scripture, including Lot and

Herod, as well as many others from non Biblical sources like Seneca (VI.742-3)148.

Likewise, the Pardoner expands upon the many examples of the sin of Gluttony, preaching a brief sermon dictum against the sin. “O glotonye, ful of cursednesse! / O cause first of oure confusioun! / O original of oure dampnacioun,” cries the Pardoner before setting off on a narrative about Adam and Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit

(VI.498-500).149 Then again, the Pardoner sermonizes on the ills of swearing before launching into examples of this sin. “Now wol I speke of othes false and grete / A word or two, as olde bookes trete,” says the Pardoner, adding yet another moral to his tale and nesting yet another series of mini exempla within the exemplum of his Tale (VI.629-

30).150 By the end, the Tale has too many meanings, too many dicta.

Like the dicta of sin and their many facta, the Pardoner's body may also be used as an exemplum for too many different social ills and identities. This is not accidental. As will be shown, it is in the power of the storyteller to use facta to produce dicta, rather than

148 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.742-3 149 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.498-500 150 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.629-30. 141

the other way around. The detaching of The Pardoner's Tale and body from any one meaning enfolds diverse possibilities together into a message on the essential mutability of material facts. This message contradicts the Physician's Tale that concerns the fixing of a body's sexual meaning as a supreme importance and the work of medical authority to defeat mutability; mutability The Pardoner's Tale flaunts. This multiplicity of meaning – allowing for choice in what a body or narrative means— is evident from the Pardoner’s first appearance in the General Prologue. There, the portrait of the Pardoner offers a variety of facta but without a single fixed dictum to make sense of it all. The portrait recounts the facts that the Pardoner had, “A voys…as smal as hath a goot” and “No berd… As smothe it was as it were late shave” (VI.688-690).151 At this point the narrator has an opportunity to provide a commentary that gives an explicit explanation that will frame these facts. The narrator acts on this opportunity but highlights the artifice of the choice by offering multiple explanations that highlight the fact that there is a choice in how or what dicta are applied. The narrator says, “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare”

(VI.691).152 The “or” here is critical. Virginia was not given as much contingency when she is forcefully made into an archetype of virginity. Indeed, the transness of the

Pardoner may be understood as the diversity of genders he may embody or choose. This diversity and choice is a trans literary style continued throughout the Pardoner’s Tale; choices in the meaning of embodiment that stretch beyond two binary options.

The Pardoner's Tale contrasts monolithic doctrines or the fixing of embodiment as a story about a futile mission to kill death. Existing in the same context of the Physician and Pardoner, both made rich by the plague, the drunk revelers in the Pardoner's Tale

151 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.688-690. 152 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.691. 142

swear to defeat mortality after they hear that a friend has died by a touch of the Black

Death. Telling the story as a metaphoric encounter with Death, a boy recounts the friend’s demise, “[t]her cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth, / that in this contree al the peple sleeth,” narrates a young boy. “And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo, / and wente his wey withouten wordes mo” (VI.675-8).153 Death brings about silence, says the boy. This may be a factor in the flurry of words that arise to decry the quiet Death.

Mutability in this case signals not only death and change but also functions as a force of division, smiting wholes into fragments: bodies and communities. The dicta, the the wholeness of the group, is now dead, yet the parts, its members and material facts remain. In response to this shattered wholeness, the remainder of the Reveler’s come together to try to recollect a sense of oneness that is accomplished by an oral oath, a dicta. This dicta works to hold the remaining parts together despite change and death.

“Ye, Goddes armes,” cries one of the rioters. “I make avow to Goddes digne bones!... we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth” (VI.692-99).154 The promise, for a time, pulls together the remaining fragments of the community into a new whole. "We thre been al ones,” narrates Chaucer as each of them swears an oath, “to lyve and dyen ech of hem for oother” (VI.696-703).155 Bringing together disparate material remains into a spiritual whole reflects the dicta that the many are subordinated or discarded for the sake of the one. The important thing is not one part or another, the foot or eye, but the health of the whole; although whole bodies cannot exist without parts. As will be explored in the breaking down of this union, there is an ongoing tension between parts that want to remain parts and the dictate that they sacrifice to sustain the whole. By this moment, the

153 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.675-8. 154 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.692-9. 155 Ibid., VI.696-703. 143

tension is but suggested by their words. In the making his vow, the Reveler enacts the process of tearing apart God (the ideal of wholeness) through his words. “Many a grisly ooth thanne han they sworn, / and Cristes blessed body they torente -/ Deeth shal be deed, if that they may hym hente!” promises the rest of the Revelers (VI.708-10).156 This rhetoric of swearing aimed at preventing mutability causes more division and change.

If the Reveler's mission to fix mutability at any cost represents the Physician, then the old man the Rever’s encounter after making their oath, the one who desires Death and points the way signifies the Pardoner's lesson that the only permanent thing in Nature is change. “Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf,” says the old Man. “Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf, / And on the ground, which is my moodres gate, / I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, / And seye `Leeve mooder, leet me in!” (VI.728-731).157 The desire for death is much like the man’s desire for youth. It is the escape from enduring in the remains of a changing world and a changing body. “Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn! / Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste?” he asks mother earth.

“Mooder, with yow wolde I chaunge my cheste / That in my chambre longe tyme hath be,

/ Ye, for an heyre clowt to wrappe me!' / But yet to me she wol nat do that grace”

(VI.732-7).158 Unlike the Revelers who enjoy their embodiment and so want the control to preserve it, the old man feels fragmented in his flesh and desires change. Yet this desire goes without answer. While mutability cannot be stopped, not even death provides an absolute end. As the Rever’s oath demonstrates, there are always remains, remnants.

The Pardoner's Tale ends with the victory of fragments over those surgeons who seek eternity by the edge of a knife. Like Virginius in the Physician's Tale, the Revelers

156 Ibid., VI.708-10. 157 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.728-31. 158 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.732-7. 144

lay hands on each other’s body and stabs (literally and metaphorically) to preserve their own wholeness. The ending arrives after the old man directs the party to a pot of gold, which he calls “Death.” There the Revelers find the stash of gold, which prompts them, like the Physician and Pardoner, to seek wealth at the expense of others’ lives. While each dies in different ways, one by poison, another by a literal a knife, all are caught within the act of stabbing one another in the back (VI.830).159 Each makes the executive decision, like a physician or Virginia’s father, to take the body and life of another into their hands to profit their purses and their dicta; be it patriarchal stability or personal wealth. This raises a problem inherent in the logic of surgery: if the part is sacrificed for the sake of the whole, who gets to determine who or what is the part and who or what is the whole? Each follow the surgical machine to its logic conclusion: every part choses themselves as the whole and sacrifices everyone else.

In this, we find the counter-exempla that the Pardoner tells and embodies. The

Physician works to establish himself as an authority that by God and Nature can define wholeness as a dictum that subordinates and sacrifices the facta of parts. The Pardoner in turn speaks on behalf of those subordinated bodies –the castrates, the transsexuals, the eunuchs, the relics, the rogues, and the virgins— to insist that parts have more agency in determining their own meaning and might choose other than the dicta assigned to them.

Importantly, by positioning himself among those subject to sharp-machines, accepting some of the facts and themes ascribed to him by society, the Pardoner demonstrates how trans bodies may be at once be operated on by the system and become the system’s operators.

159 Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue,” VI.830. 145

3. The Transformation

A. Introduction: Two Examples

Centuries after the Physician and Pardoner faced off in a storytelling contest, modern medical and religious authorities continue to make a new brand of eunuch exempla from a new brand of castrates: transsexuals. Yet these cultural descendants of the medieval genre of embodiment do not merely repeat the old structures of gender, they utilize the flexibility of transformation espoused by the second Tale of Fragment VI.

Modern authorities no longer merely want to restore human nature, they want to be able to change the nature of human facts and doctrines in order to make examples of them. In many ways, it is the same medieval system only the modern version is now more flexible.

Because of advancements not only in surgery but in the media of storytelling, authorities not only want to use eunuchs to control eternity but to help them control transformation.

In the 1990’s, an Evangelical Born Again Church reached out to a homeless trans and queer community living in the space where New York City keeps its street salt for the winter. After seeing the condition of the trans community in a documentary called

“the Salt Mines,” Terry, the head minister, said to his church members, "Let's take them some sandwiches and see if we can help them."160 This act of charity is not a perfect gift, but comes with conditions. Taking advantage of the vulnerable position many of the drag queens, gay men, and trans women found themselves in due to poverty and disease, Terry promised to make their lives whole again, give them homes and medical care, if they would submit to religious authorities that would cut apart their mode of embodiment and

160 Aikin and Aparicio. 146

redefine them as modern day eunuchs. In the case of Sara, the church would document her transformation into “Ricardo” on film as a kind of modern day exemplum, where the factum of her life would be sacrificed to the dictum of Terry’s Christus Medicus.

How is it that modern medicine and scriptural exegesis cooperate in exploiting of the trans body? "Jesus said in Matthew 19:12… ‘some are born eunuchs, some are made that way men, and some make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’" paraphrases Terry.161 "What he is speaking of is that there are people who are born without the desire for the opposite sex [i.e. born asexual], but that doesn’t mean that they are same-sex motived [i.e. born with a desire for the same sex]. Satan says you are man, woman or gay. God says that you are man, woman or eunuch." By unpacking Christ's words in Matthew 19:12 as they operate in the Transformation (1994) between Terry and the newly born again Ricardo, we can see how exempla physically and socially construct trans bodies across time as tools to control changes in gendered embodiment by what

Judith Butler calls "the technologies of the knife" and what readers of medieval genre might call the eunuch exempla.

"If you go back into Church history," begins Terry, "there is nothing that is in the

Bible that isn’t covered."162 Through this first dictum, Terry justifies his authority as rooted in a typology that spans millennia. Many 21st century historians draw a strict division between time periods, ancient, medieval and modern, implicitly or explicitly distinguishing eras based on perceived shifts in paradigm; often marking a distinct

Christian (Roman Catholic) period and the humanistic (Protestant) period in the West.

Yet these academic distinctions, motivated by a certain rejection of the religious, the

161 Aikin and Aparicio. 162 Ibid. 14 7

medieval, and the Catholic, are not wholly recognized in faith communities. Churches, in a sense, act as living relics by recognizing continuity in the experience and existence of faith rather than asserting an absolute before and after. This insistence on constancy is a function of Christus Medicus who repairs fragmentation, even death, rooted Himself in a timeless eternity rather than temporal demarcations.

A powerful effect of modern day biblical exegesis like Terry’s, often based in the healing and sustaining power of Christus Medicus, is that it creates its own narratives of exemplary continuity and change between medieval eunuchs and modern transgender.

This exegesis functions through an extension of analogy. Two distinct persons, groups, or events are brought together through a master metaphor. In this case, biblical men are associated with today’s men, women with women, and eunuchs with gay or trans people.

This argument depends on an assumed continuity of cisgender men and women across time. “Of course we are men like they are men,” it supposes; assuming a transhistorical cisgender constancy. The difference of the eunuchs extends this taxonomy. The relations of identification in the first two cases are supposed to carry over to the third. Gay and trans bodies will be understood through the transhistorical exempla of eunuchs.

The result of this narrative of constancy is the assertion of authority. As eunuchs were commanded, so too are trans bodies to be managed. This is the heart of the typology and exempla in society. The distinct facts of different bodies are defined and suppressed by a transtemporal dictum. For Terry, the Transformation functions as a modern day exemplum on the new eunuchs: gay men and trans women. In particular, basing the story of Ricardo on a biblical understanding of history, interpreting him as a minister, the documentary constitutes itself as a kind of sermon exemplum. If the exemplum is to be

148

effective in establishing Terry’s authority, it needs to erase the voice of Sara (the female identity of the Salt Mines) and subjugate the voice of Ricardo by presenting Sara’s trans experiences as the facta of Satan and Ricardo’s submission as a divine dictum. From a medieval Augustinian perspective, Sara’s life is made akin to nothingness, while Ricardo is rooted in the eternal being and futurity of Christ’s saving operations. 163

Yet throughout the Transformation, Terry’s eunuch exemplum is co-opted by the multiplicity of fragmented voices issuing across time from Sara and Ricardo. A key reason for the presentation of alternative storylines in the film is the subtle but intentional work of the documentarian, Susan Aikin. Shortly after the publication of her film on the

Salt Mines, Aikin decided to return to tell Sara’s story and despite apprehension, knew that incorporating Terry would be a necessary part of the exercise. The church would get a born again exemplum and Aikin could sew other stories by emphasizing the particularity of the facta of Sara life in the Salt Mines and Ricardo’s new life in Texas. In effect, Aikin would not greatly alter Ricardo’s future but she might give Sara’s past a voice in the recollected history. The competing temporalities of the documentary are part of the stakes of the Transformation, with all parties fighting over the narrative as

Sara/Ricardo’s life nears a terminal end. HIV and poverty may have dictated the circumstances of life but in the end an indeterminate legacy turns the film into a battle for the trajectory of Sara/Ricardo’s narrative afterlife.

B. Eunuch Dicta

163 But Terry is no medical doctor and has no training in psychology. He is a preacher who grounds his authority in the Bible, his interpretation, and his charismatic ability to persuade. 149

“Let’s talk about Ricardo,” says Terry at the film’s opening, over a black-screen, introducing the preacher as the primary narrator, the source of the dicta that will grab hold of Sara/Ricardo's body in order to narrate it into an exemplum on eunuchs in the

1990s. “Let’s talk about Ricardo,” he repeats as the film cuts to him sitting in a white room, on a white couch with a photo-album in hand.164 As if acknowledging this absent presence, the scene ends by fading back again from the white room into a black-screen announcing the film’s title. This movement from white to black plays with notions of death and heavenly light. These spaces suggest that Terry is speaking a metanarrative dicta from outside of Time. Terry's principles are associated with scriptural dicta, a priori, and then the body is produced as facta to demonstrate it. The "talk about Ricardo," depends on showing and looking as key to the operations of power. It also depends on laying hands on Ricardo's body in order to grab him and shove him in people's faces.

Wrestling with the splitting of these two forms of the exempla by the 1990s, Terry works to turn Ricardo, understood as a “homosexual” or “transsexual” back into an eunuch. Through Ricardo, Terry works to recombine a medical discourse and religious discourse, locating the medical authority with Satan in order to hold up the scripture as the true heir to Christus Medicus. Public and sermon authorities function as different dicta that differently frame the facta of the eunuch body. This is the necessary turn in an exemplum where the dicta must give way to the power of the facta. Yet in all these cases, the authority of nature, religion, or medicine is exterior to the body it defines. In turn, the exemplary bodies are called upon to present themselves as facta for the Christus Medicus, to mark themselves as incomplete bodies and handing over control to authorities that will cure and save them. This is the formula that the Transformation enacts, following a

164 Aikin and Aparicio. 150

certain interpretation of Matthew 19:12, wherein people reconstruct their lives, “make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom.”

"First of all, you can probably focus on this," Terry says opening up his photo- album, on the right a picture of Sara and on the left a picture of Ricardo.165 "Find

Ricardo in here, so everyone is on the same page. This is Ricardo. When I met Ricardo he was Sara." Holding Sara and Ricardo's images as illustrative facts, Terry sets himself as the authority of the exemplum that will not only be verbal but visual. He orders the engagement, tells the audience where to focus, and defines the terms. "The thing that makes him unusual," says Terry, "he is enormously charismatic. He attracts people. He has power. He has presence. He has a personality."166 Terry positions himself as the authority but he needs Ricardo as factum in order to provide the physical "presence" that attracts people to his message. For medieval audiences, examples were highly persuasive, but for modern audiences steeped in scientific empiricism and materialism, the physical facts of an eunuch are indispensible to keep these Christus Medicus operational.

In order for the eunuch to be a proper operative, operations cut out parts of their body and history, to make them fit into the Church’s sexual regulatory operations. As such, Terry must renarrate Ricardo’s history to contain and cut down Sara’s presence.

"Ricardo was there on that first night [the Church visited]" Terry recounts.167 "Sara," he corrects himself. "Sara was there on that first night." This slip is significant. It places

Ricardo before Sara. This is a narrative that Sara’s history will be used to collaborate when the film cuts to her in an interview discussing how she lived as an unhappy man,

Ricardo, in Cuba before traveling to New York to live as a woman. Ricardo is the

165 Aikin and Aparicio. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid. 151

origin and the ending, while Sara is an interruption in the middle. "There was something missing,” Terry says of Sara, “He never knew what it was to be a man.” In the minister’s exemplum on euncuhs, Sara becomes the non-masculine part that is always already cut away. In the story an eunuch, Sara is lacking and castrated from birth, a pre-op subject for Christus Medicus’s reparative operations.

Ricardo’s latent “power” and Sara’s lingering “presence” in the film, however, remains dangerous to authorities and narratives that try to contain them. Holding images of Ricardo in his hand as he narrates the film, a mise en scène figurative of material dependences, Terry asserts the dominance of his dicta to frame and authorize the facta of the eunuch’s life story. Positioning himself as Christus Medicus, a kind of surgeon, Terry excuses his laying on of hands around trans images and bodies by establishing a Sara as existing in a state of crisis of gender that requires him and his ministry to resolve. The poverty of trans women, the physical need for nourishment and medical care, becomes evidence of the supposed lack of meaning that comes from living without the dicta given by the Church’s structure. This is especially true in cultures, medieval and modern, based on a “Gospel of Wealth” or “Prosperity Gospel” where financial success or failure is supposed to reflect degrees of God’s favor and wholesomeness.

Given the power of physical facts, the transformation of material circumstances is then key to defining Sara’s life as constituted by a lack of resources and sexual wholeness, then positioning Ricardo’s post-op life as existing on the side of social fulfillment. This is done in part through the insertion of flashbacks to choice interviews with Sara from the Salt Mines. “I couldn’t wait to come [to the US],” says Sara in one talking head, “but now I am sorry I came. Because here if you have no money you are

152

nothing.”168 The nothingness that Sara references is the absence of power and presence that Terry’s money provides. Thus, despite the promise of the United States as “the land of the free,” because she is denied material resources, Sara is not free to live as she will.

As Sara says these haunting words, the screen freezes and the distinct voice of “Ricardo” from another scene speaks over the image. In a frozen moment before the change, we see the woman who is supposed to be “nothing” in this place linger as if to affirm that she remains an absent presence throughout the film.

Indeed, a persistent irony of the eunuch transformation narrative is that its post-op

“power” (Ricardo) is dependent on repeatedly invoking the “presence” of a supposedly erased and empty part of the pre-op past (Sara). In this, nothingness reveals itself not to be a state of non-being but rather the result of continual emptying to divide undesirable parts from the desired whole. Because nothing and being, part and whole, past and present are all operations in the same sharp-machine, the difference is not ontological but functional. While remaining intermeshed, the prior is made to be the unseen background to the latter’s foreground. This exchange is evident in when the film catches up the voice of Ricardo in the post-transformation time and space, where the still of Sara is replaced by the actively swaying Ricardo and the subtitle “Ricardo” appears on the bottom of the screen. “Dallas, Texas” appears on the screen as it pans over a dark room with dark furniture, where a Terry’s church thanks God for bringing Ricardo (into being) there.169

Through the ritualized operations of Chritus Medicus, Sara is made “nothing,” the missing something, to serve as a background for Ricardo’s thingness. Despite the dark enclosure that remains around them during the prayer, Terry calls the place where he

168 Aikin and Aparicio. 169 Ibid. 153

brought Ricardo out from “a deep and dark hole.”170 This is where Sara worked the streets at night as a prostitute, injected drugs and hormones. Then, as later, she becomes a

(penetrated) hole for the sake of her survival, but here she does so for pleasure as well.

Sara’s location is indeed deep, as blood, semen, make-up, salt and semi-tangibles like love and community saturate each other, leaving traces of them in her blood. It is a dark space, relegated to the margins, taken off the street until the night work.171 It is this place, in the form of HIV/Aids that Sara carries deep in her body even as she migrates to Texas, remaining as the haunting material cause for Ricardo coming (into being) there.

While Christus Medicus’s authority depends on asserting the essential naturalness of the post-operative trans body, the exemplum needs to continually show the scars of the operations in order to evidence its power. There is a kind of double-meaning when Terry stands beside his church with Ricardo, thanking God for his transformation, praising,

“You have stuck him in the devil’s face and you have said, ‘look what I can do.’”172 The words are telling. The material facts of Ricardo’s new body and circumstances are perpetually being shoved in the face of Christians so that Terry can effectively tell them

“look what I can do.” Rather than merely disturbing established gender discourses, the materiality of the trans body grounds scriptural rhetoric in a sense of physical realness.

Rather than hiding the fault lines of reconstructed gender, the scars of trans bodies are showed off as a tool of social control, even as they offer their own forms of resistance.

170 Ibid. 171 Despite this failure to establish closure, once and for all, enclosure appears to be a pivotal desire for both Terry and Ricardo. Becoming sick from Aids, Ricardo appears anxious to exist in the supposed closed systems of church, house, and care. McRuer notes that Ricardo’s environment is particularly closed-off and he is almost exclusively shown indoors, in houses, in Church or in a hospital; McRuer 116-119. 172 Aikin and Aparicio. 154

B. Eunuch Facta

"Now what's really important is that you need to practice your English," the preacher tells Ricardo in a ministry planning session.173 "You see, I can tell people what you went through, but you went through it, you lived it. You see what I'm saying? I can tell them about it from my point of view but it's not as good as you." While Ricardo already speaks Spanish, echoing his history as Sara, Terry insists that in order to be a proper facta for his Texan, Christian message, Ricardo must be made to speak his words in English. As in many exempla, a concept is defined in advance and then a material fact is grabbed hold of to embody the doctrine as an example. The body is foreign to the

English language of “eunuch” or “transsexual” yet by cooperation takes on its shape as it is made readable and as it comes to articulate itself by the expected forms of the genre. 174

This means the body must be inscribed with verbal language (English scientific terms) as well as visual language (male clothing).

By conceding his need for Ricardo to tell his own story, Terry admits the subversive aspect of using exempla that threatens to invert the power dynamics of their relationship. The examplum depends on the inarticulate material facta of the trans body to ground its dicta, yet also needs it to speak back the dicta, the Word, the Logos, Christus

Medicus, that frames and forms it. This agency is nonetheless contingent. The trans body exerts its power by co-operating with the authorities making an example out it. As a part

173 Ibid. 174 Whereas most of his interviews occur in his Cuban Spanish, Ricardo uses the English terms "homosexual" "transvestite" and "drag queen" for sexuality and trans embodiment. Even by the 1990s, the scientific term "transsexual" was still fighting for legitimacy and use in the public, while another scientific terms, "homosexual" and "transvestite" were being considered expansive enough to include a wide variety of embodiments. Indeed, the trans body seemed to be so elastic so as to be able to pivot between a wider variety of exempla on both gender and sexuality. 155

in the operation of sharp-machines, the choices of the facta are dependent on how they meet with their associated dicta. Thus agency is not free, but contingent. It arises at the point of the meeting, the contact between the bodies and authorities, even alone the violent edge where authorities work like a knife pressing against the skin of the trans body to carve into its flesh the doctrines of the exemplum.

By using exempla as operations in social discourse much like how physicians use surgery in medical discourse, the sacrifice of Sara is at once physical and narrative. In one direction, the story of the eunuch cannot be told without the exchanging of finances and material resources. First, Ricardo needed to be brought on board. But moving

Ricardo takes further exchanges. "Ricardo, as soon as they actually sign over the deed to the land to us,” says Terry, referring to a facility he is buying to house more trans converts to his mission, “we are going to be traveling to raise money for the buildings.”175 After Ricardo’s transformation, Terry has tapped a certain stream of resources that need to replenished and expanded if his operations are to continue. More space and more money are going to be needed for Christus Medicus to keep working his supposed miracles on new converts. More converts are necessary, given that Terry was able to convince Ricardo to join him primarily because he took advantage of Sara’s vulnerable physical and financial position after finding out she was dying of HIV. This need for more and more money draws readers back to consider Chaucer’s Pardoner who confesses that Greed, the need for more and more money, drives his work for the Church.

Terry’s Greed craves the money Ricardo raises. The Church produces the eunuch—as a form of trans embodiment— to fulfill various socio-economic purposes. The eunuch and

175 Aikin and Aparicio. 156

his story are sold as examples to be consumed by a public, building up the authority and the financial resources of the Church that produces and uses him.

In another direction, the movement of money and bodies are dependent on the effectiveness of the story that Terry dictates and Ricardo evidences. “You," says Terry pointing at Ricardo, "are coming with me so you can tell it from your perspective."176

The authority he has as a preacher is itself contingent on the continual co-operation of storyteller and audience, preacher and layperson, dicta and facta. Terry cannot move around without Ricardo. This is why it is critical that Terry gets Ricardo on board.

"Understand?" Terry asks, "You are going to be traveling all around the United States to tell people where you came from and help us raise money for the buildings.

Understand?"177 The repetition of the question, "understand?" functions at first as an assertion of authority, as the speaker of the dicta. Second, this insistence also shows his need for Ricardo to consent his power, as facta. In an exemplum, the authority needs to be understood and so it must be demonstrated by embodied narrative. The eunuch is the embodiment of this example and—in respects to the care of food and housing, medical and spiritual needs—his body is then dependent on what the Church gives.

It is perhaps too easy to paint Sara's life on the streets as free and uninhibited.

Yet it was physical and social operations already acting on Sara that drove her into the hands of Terry's Church. “HIV affected [Sara/Ricardo’s] mind,” recounts one of his trans friends in an interview. “He grew afraid of dying alone on the streets. The Church was the only way out.”178 Although HIV changed the game, Sara had long been trained to trade her body for what she needed. She traded her skin as a sex worker in order to gain

176 Ibid. 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid. 157

the currency to exercise some limited control over her body: paying for food, clothing, hormones and heroin; each operating between violence and pleasure, need and choice.

Once again, the modern trans eunuch echoes the situation of the medieval.

Abelard is castrated by the Church he comes to serve; the Church who begs him to serve.

The Pardoner seems more independent but his profession and body would be in danger if not for the church documents he holds out to authorize his body. The Pardoner risks his body at the hands of those such as the Host in order to tell his Tale and ply his trade in benefit of the Church. That the work benefits each of these eunuchs is not hidden in their stories. Rather, what is implicit but not always confessed, is how their work serves the

Church organizations that frame and exploit their trans bodies. The bodies on the ground are not only the operatives that tell the dicta of the Church, they embody the facta that give example of the authority. The dicta controls but the facta sells and is sold.

The power of facta is one of translation and embodiment. Those who embody exempla do not just repeat the dicta in the same form in which the doctrine was written, if that was the case than the dicta would be sufficient on its own, but they use the materiality of the trans body to re-present the doctrine in other modalities. Terry does not just need people to hear about Ricard's transformation but to see material facts. For this, he not only needs Ricardo to work for him, he needs Sara. "We are going to send out a brochure - do you remember Sara?" Terry says to Ricardo showing him a picture of himself as he appears now.179 "This is going to be what's on the other side," he says pointing to a picture of Sara. "That's going to blow people away." For Terry's exempla in the Transformation to work, he needs to show transformation. That means that he does not simply need any body. Terry’s cis male body is not sufficient. Nor is Ricardo’s body.

179 Ibid. 158

He needs the trans body to repeatedly perform its trans-formation. The new whole, the eunuch, needs the part that is cast away by the authority, to enact power. Sara must be repeatedly killed in sacrifice and resurrected to give Terry authority as Christus Medicus.

In an example of how systems like the eunuch exemplum work to be self- sustsaining and self-justifying, the power and material resources that Terry uses Ricardo to procure, in turn buy Ricardo’s cooperation. "To me this is like a dream. I am a poor man. The poorest of the poor," admits Ricardo. "When I was a transvestite, people would say to me ‘Sara you are so beautiful.’ But they didn’t know how hurt I was inside; how much I wanted a home… But now I feel rich… rich in love. I’ve always had love, but life has been so hard on me."180 Ricardo is rich now, to which he adds, “rich in love.” Far from being an abstract, transcendent belief in a cosmic force, Ricardo’s love is manifest in the riches that brought him off the street, given to him by Terry and his new wife,

Betty. Ricardo’s new life comes into being out of this exchange of properties. Sara’s love and beauty are sacrificed to buy Ricardo new kinds of love: a home and finances.

“I’m not a fanatic,” says Ricardo in an interview, sitting comfortably in a plush chair and warm sweater. “I just love the way God loves me.”181 Nowhere in the documentary does Ricardo claim that he fully gave himself to the church, although he participates in it. He says that God participates in him through the care he is given. He does not say he loves God (or His Church), but how God loves him. Across in the exemplum of the eunuch, sharp-machines reveal the contingency of parts and wholes, dicta and facta working together with the promise of mutual benefit. As an embodiment

180 Ibid. 181Ibid. 159

of eunuch exempla, trans bodies exist in between dicta and facta yet never fully deployed or belonging in either, always keeping one foot in the door and one foot out the door.

Yet, what is this love that sustains the life holding Ricardo in this eunuch position? Is it only the energy of an exploitative system? Or is there something life affirming –something all too human— in the marriage of dicta and facta that powers the operation of sharp machines? Despite the church’s exploitation of Christus Medicus’s dicta and Ricardo’s facta, the dangerous contingencies that Terry views as a threat and tries to contain, are embraced by Betty who offers a different approach to love than either eunuch or pastor. “Betty, there can be nothing between us,” Ricardo recounts saying to

Betty.182 “Because I was a transvestite for many years. I even have breasts still. And I am

HIV positive.” Ricardo is well aware of the precariousness of his life. Parts of his life, particularly being HIV positive, mark him as a percieved threat to social wholeness. The potential life and love from Ricardo and Betty's bond would and could only be terminal.

“Are you sure you don’t mind my being HIV positive?” Ricardo asks Betty before the wedding, stressing the danger of sharing properties, including body fluids.183 Betty embraces the facts of his life and is open to sharing her resources, allowing Ricardo to affect her with his love. They do not have frequent sex, Betty admits. When they do, she comes into some form of contact with Sara through the lasting material and social effects of hormones, heroin, HIV, and years living as a woman who had sex with men.

While not “transgender” in her own identity, insofar as she binds herself to

Ricardo his vulnerability becomes her vulnerability and Betty shares in trans experiences of rejection and subjugation. When the couple goes to get married, they are told, “you

182 Ibid. 183 Ibid. 160

can’t get married in the church."184 When asked why they are being turned away the church tells him, “because of your past.” “We all have a past,” Ricardo replies. “Don’t you guys say that Christ cleanses us of our sins?”185 Like a surgeon cutting away parts of the past, baptism is supped to act as exemplary ritual (i.e. a ritual of example binding the material cleansing facts of water and the spiritual dicta of purification) where the material washing in water signifies the spiritual dicta of being “born again.” Despite baptism’s ecumenicalism between different denominations, Catholic and Protestant, as well as transhistoricism, medieval and modern, the material facts of trans bodies allow for public challenges to the dicta; i.e. what “you [Christians] say,” of Christus Medicus’s power to mark an absolute separation of before and after, part and whole. Opening the body of

Christ to the facts of Ricardo and Betty’s love means cooperating with all parts of them, even the parts the Church wants to forget but also use, fix but also resurrect.

Contingency stresses precariousness and uncertainty because it acknowledges that truth is not absolutely in either the eternal, lasting dicta or the immediate, mutable facta.

Rather, contingent operations and co-operation function through the contact of different genders, matters, beliefs, and temporalities. The life and love Betty and Ricardo share is not fixed, but formed and reformed by the transforming contact between persons, past and present, and their mutual contact with Christus Medicus. “Now everything is fine," worries Ricardo, "but if I get sick... I hope you won’t abandon me in the hospital then.”186

Ricardo’s concerns with Betty’s love stress that the products of cooperation cannot be known in advance. “I know," Betty replies. " But I love you and I want to be with you!”

Embracing uncertainty, the contingent facts of Betty’s embodied “faith” and “love” are

184 Ibid. 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 161

distinguished from Terry’s rhetorical dicta. By her continual contact, Betty asserts that she is not a docile part of Terry's exploitative operations, but a co-operative with Ricardo.

In contrast to these critiques and abuses asserted by absolute all or nothing dicta,

Betty a radically positive and transformative examplum of love, the activity of continually stitching together the disparate facts of different moments and embodiments.

"Love is not just something that just happens in the beginning,” says Betty. “Love is something that continues to grow. But love is not just something that’s a feeling either.

Love is a commitment … that means when things aren’t going well you are still going to be there."187 Change, whether it is the shift from Sara to Ricardo, or the inconstancy of health, calls on love to sustain cooperation through transformation, constituting what

Betty calls growth. Betty recalls that they have “talked about this [love and mutability] many times” and will continue to have check-ins. This love is not a once and for all dictum, a feeling or essence that a person has or not, but a lived fact between persons requiring risk and collaboration.

In the end, the wholesomeness promised by Terry and Betty’s dicta on faith and love depends on the cooperation of eunuch facta formed and narrated to be its antithesis, the embodiments of fragmentation, inconstancy, and contingency. “I repented for my past life [as Sara]," says Ricardo narrating the Transformation’s final scene in a drive back from Texas to New York.188 "Now when I think about everything I lived I remember some of it as beautiful. Because the real truth is that I enjoyed it. That’s what I would have liked to be: a woman.” This contingency leads Ricardo to consider how he might reclaim the abandoned part of his life and return to living as Sara. Yet this change

187 Ibid. 188 Ibid. 162

would likely involve ending his life as Ricardo, as Terry’s eunuch, and Betty’s husband.

As Ricardo or Sara, the trans operative life is defined by castration, a “trans” position between separated parts of life that love might hold together if our sense of wholeness might be transformed.

Before title screens announce Ricardo’s death, his final words leave viewers with a sense of the trans life’s precariousness. “If I could still have the choice, if I could change my life right now,” says Ricardo, “even now that I have my wife and everything,

I would chose to be a woman.”189 While Ricardo imagines a free life, “if [he] could still have a choice,” he knows that the facts of his life are checked by contingency, by dictated limits set between his body and will. Undoing the change enacted by Christus Medicus is impossible, only more changes, more castrations, more cuts; perhaps in the form of film cuts that slice together lives separated by time, circumstance and operations. Sacrificing parts of his life as Sara and Ricardo as an exemplum with competing presences, the eunuch’s life stories implicate the audience as cooperative in the narrative. Choices still exist, but now shift to the hands of those who share in the eunuch’s story. All become eunuch-makers, implicated in crafting what becomes of the future of his pasts.

D. Conclusions

As a form of rhetoric, exempla assert associations between specific facts and specific doctrines so that consumers will join in the enforcement of cis patriarchal power structures. Readers familiar with the moves and history of exempla, especially those structured around trans bodies (i.e. bodies that transgress dictated gender categories) can

189 Ibid. 163

reject the naturalized cisgender doctrines that are assigned to the material facts of life.

Likewise, readers can resist the compulsion to enforce the associations between dictated facta and dicta, allowing trans persons to determine the meaning of their own lives. The benefit of allowing more slippage in the sharp-machines of gender can allow a child to live a life of gender ambiguity, a monk to fall in love, a girl to choose the manner and timing of her sexual encounters, a church administrator to find new meaning in broken, scarred bodies, and a transsexual woman to find housing, healthcare, and community without having to sacrifice who she is. Being able to recognize exempla in different forms of media and using different language is key to interrupting its passive compulsory functioning. In short, understanding exempla allows us to more ethically operate its social machinery. Tracing these connections back across time, the exempla that define our lives can connect us to a wide array of persons boasting a diversity of material facts yet bound together in a common struggle to pursue the doctrines of our own design.

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Chapter 2: Confessions of Dysphoria: Corporate Sin in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis

(c. 1390) and Leelah Alcorn’s Suicide Note (c. 2015)

This chapter concerns the confession of dysphoric bodies, wherein silenced, isolated, and depressed individuals are brought back into social discourse. In particular, this study concentrates on the public form of confession as a collective performative corrective to corporate sins as it contrasts with private forms of confession as an individualized revelation of personal sins. Corporate sins will be characterized as social mechanisms that effect systemic violence on a group or groups of people. Within this context, gender dysphoria will be reinterpreted from a personal medical diagnosis into a cultural construct that names and manages gender non-conforming bodies. Thus, confessions of dysphoria articulate the unarticulated and assumed mechanisms of abuse between binary and non-binary lives and brings the abused back into community.

Broadly defined, confession is the practice of “speaking together,” from the Latin

“con” (meaning “together”) and “fateri” (meaning “to reveal”), which started in the early

Church where publicly shared stories propelled reconciliation between divided parts of a community.328 Over centuries, the public form of confession was inverted as it became medicalized, “entailing acts of penance that were mainly or wholly private,” and stressing the individual shame of disorder and the need for privacy before an authority driven by the compulsions to regard distress as the problem of individuals.329 Despite this shift, I

1. OED Online, s.v. “Confess,” accessed October 13, 2015, www.oed.com. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1 (New York: Random House, 1972), 61-2. 165

argue a historical trajectory of public confession continues between medieval works, such as Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and modern texts like Leelah Alcorn’s suicide note.330

Too often transgender and Medieval Studies are separated by an inability to speak together, in part because of long historical practices of erasing trans histories and silencing trans voices. In one direction, Transgender Studies scholarship is yet to extend its current critical work of recognizing the social agency and subjugated voices of the premodern past. In turn, medieval scholarship needs to embrace to a greater extent how its work of allowing different voices to speak together across traditionally defined divisions of time furthers not only Transgender Studies but deepens and enriches the study of the Middle Ages. In short, Medieval Studies offers ways of reading confession, and trans theory offers Medieval Studies the tools to map modes of living in society that are genealogically connected to what would later be defined as dysphoric.

A critical trans lens transforms how we see the distinction between publicized and privatized confessions, as different forms of reconciliation dictate different degrees of integration and different levels of forced conformity. Generally, across time, private forms of confession function to mark the marginalized person as disordered and compel them to self-proclaim this mark of disorder and then go through a series of disciplinary exercises before they are brought back into the fold. Those who refuse the demands of private confessions can become subject to further exclusions and violence. Alternatively, public confessions can invert the force of discipline, as the marginalized give voice to a disorder in the community that must be named by the community and rectified if the division between those included and excluded can be reconciled. While public and

330 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). All quotations are taken from the online vols. 1 and 2, 2nd ed.: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/peck-confessio-amantis-volume-1. 166

private confessions take on distinct qualities at different times and places, leading to distinct personal and collective embodiments across history, a common language can be established for the discussion of trans confession as a genre of literature and embodiment.

Gender dysphoria is a term from the fifth edition of the DSM that frames modes of knowing and treating transgender persons with psychiatric authority. The DSM defines gender dysphoria as a division of the gender expressed by the mind of the subject and the gender society assigns to the body of that subject. Previously “transgender” has been defined chiefly through medical treatment, particularly surgery, while the “trans” (short for “transgender”) community has been increasingly defined by medical diagnoses.

While Butler critiques the way diagnosis limits trans liberty, she notes the promised benefits: “the diagnosis facilitates certain entitlements to insurance benefits, to medical treatment, and to legal status.”331 Most government agencies require a formal diagnosis and / or confirmation of genital surgery to permit the rectification of gender status on legal documents such as driver’s licenses and passports.

Trans scholarship on gender dysphoria as a social construct shows that both supporters and opponents of trans politics consider the confession of dysphoric symptoms witnessed by medical authorities as fundamental to the recognition of legitimate trans subjectivities. Butler writes that because authorities regulating trans lives are fixated on psychological definitions, those who cannot choose whether or not to be diagnosed, particularly children, are denied agency over their bodies. Butler stresses, “we ought not to underestimate the pathologizing force of the diagnosis, especially on young people who may not have the critical resources to resist this force. In these cases, the diagnosis

8. Ibid., 76. 167

can be debilitating.”332 The young can be denied access to care and community by authorities choosing for them. Diagnoses, such as gender dysphoria, are mechanisms for society to limit and control how or if a person is defined as transgender.

In order to execute this argument, the chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I consider confession as a literary and social mechanism. Both private and public confession connects dysphoric depressives and suicides to a genealogical line of cultural as well as biological ancestors. Despite differences in time and place, these antecedents experience similar conditions and are defined by similar confessional figures, such as Narcissus. Indeed, in the social mechanisms that isolate, exclude, and produce (as well as eliminate) dysphoria, trans subjects are themselves ongoing systems that span epochs, identified as trans necropolitics.333 Trans necropolitics assert that no suicide is a singular event or condition but is a symptom of the systematic wearing down and elimination of trans lives in what Lauren Berlant calls, “slow death.334”

The particular model of confession that will be studied is taken from the frame of

Gower’s Confessio. While the introduction of the text might be ignored by some as inconsequential to the tales it frames, the exchanges described within offers a useful example of public confessional writing working against corporate sins that isolate, depresses, and marginalizes individuals. By allowing this model of medieval confession to speak together with critical trans theory, readers can see that while presumption takes different forms in the medieval and post-medieval eras, cultural genealogies of anti-trans

9. Ibid., 82. 333 J.A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture. 15.1. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 334 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 754-80. 168

sentiment continues to run in the blood of patriarchies and also feminist movements, such as Trans Exclusive Radical Feminism (TERF) and conversion therapy.335

In the second section, I study two tales from John Gower’s fourteenth century

Confessio Amantis as demonstrating how medieval trans lives can come to embody specific corporate sins that demand confession. I examine “Acedia,” as a mark of dysphoria through silence and depression applied to bodies regarded as not properly

(re)productive of patriarchal systems of gender and sexuality.336 First, I examine the figures of Isis and Eros within the context of the “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” with emphasis on the shift from the Latin version of the tale about a goddess who promotes a dysphoric life at the request of the youth to Gower’s Middle English adaptation in which (without being invoked) a god intervenes and supposedly fixes the dysphoric life. By removing the dysphoric youth’s voice and agency, Gower emphasizes the systematic character of suffering caused by being managed between a dysphoric Nature represented by Isis and a subjugating patriarchal Nature represented by Eros. Next, I examine Gower’s treatement of “Presumption” as it applies to “The Tale of Narcissus” to argue that Narcissus reflects a medieval history of isolation, exclusion, dysphoria, and death in the trans community, inviting readers to critique, witness, and resist these systems in their own time. In the mirror of Narcissus, we find reflected what might be the goal of the confession, perhaps all confession: to bring those excluded and isolated by the presumptions of the world from the wood of suicide into meaningful and life-giving community discourse. As will

335 “TERF: Where the Term Comes From,” TheTERFS.com. 2011. http://theterfs.com/2013/10/11/terf- where-the-term-comes-from. (accessed August 20, 2016); see also: Kelsie Brynn Jones, “Trans- Exclusionary Radical Feminism: What Exactly Is It, And Why Does It Hurt?” The Huffington Post. 2014. www.huffingtonpost.com (accessed August 20, 2016).

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be explored in the next section, to be a dysphoric and suicidal embodiment of confession is to be an image of Narcissus, reflecting old yet unresolved necropolitics.

In the third section, I consider current day confessions of transgender through the suicide note of Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who took her life in 2015 shortly after posting a powerful parting entry on her blog, The Transgender Queen of Hell. As of the early twenty-first century, transgender began to be defined for society by the clinical diagnosis of gender identity disorder and more recently gender dysphoria. At this time, one may become medically and legally trans by revealing hidden truths before a psychiatric authority who diagnoses the subject. In wider terms of genre, this exchange defines transgender as arising from a form of private confession. Yet another form of confession exists for those unable to be diagnosed,(those who cannot afford medical care, those who fear the consequences of being diagnosed with a mental condition, or subjects who are underage youth with guardians who do not support trans identity): public confession. Today, suicide notes, obituaries, and biographies are examples of public confessions wherein trans persons address their inner truths to a wider society rather than a private authority. Theirisolation has real effects. In a 2014 report, the American Society for Suicide Prevention states that 41% of trans persons attempt suicide, with higher numbers for trans men (46%) than trans women (42%).337 Other organizations, such as the Youth Suicide Prevention Program, report that 50% of trans youths attempt suicide by the age of twenty.338 Today, to be a transgender person over twenty who has not made a suicide attempt is be a minority within a minority. As will be explored in the next section,

337 “Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults,” Jody L. Herman, Ann P. Haas and Philip L. Rodgers, ed. (Los Angelis, CA: University of Los Angelis, 2014). www.williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu. (accessed August 20, 2016). 338 “Statistics About Youth Suicide,” The Youth Suicide Prevention Program. Seattle, WA. 2011. http://www.yspp.org/about_suicide/statistics.htm. 170

to be a dysphoric and suicidal embodiment of confession is to be an image of Narcissus, reflecting old yet unresolved necropolitics.

I. Confession as a Genre of Embodiment

Genres can determine the form and function of a text. Often function follows form. Confession (speaking together) as a genre answers a problem posed by a lack of confession (a lack of speaking together). Thus, in order to understand how confession brings voices back into public discourse, it is also necessary to understand what took them out of discourse and silenced them to begin with. In this way, confession is a mechanism that can be transposed across time and place, and which can encounter different problems and produce different results. A challenge for writers such as John

Gower trying to create a model confession by which many sins can be explored and with which many different readers can become engaged is to create a context allegory by which different particulars can be seen again and again.

It is rarely acknowledged that Confessio is set in a wood of suicide. Decades earlier, Dante Alighieri wrote his Inferno in which the author finds himself alone in the woods only to be navigated out by the guidance of the dead.339 Traveling into the wood of suicide, where those who have taken their own life are silenced and locked away in trees, Dante claws at the bark, revealing that the wounds turn into mouths, allowing the suicide to tell their story and give warning, “forth from the broken splinter words and

339 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Canto XIII. Henry F. Cary, trans., (Cambridge: Harvard Classics, 1909). 11-44. 171

blood.”340 This creative discourse between the living and dead anticipates Gower’s necropolitical frame in the Confessio. In the introduction to this text, Gower writes of wandering into the woods where he will take his life if he cannot overcome isolation.

Intervening, Venus arrives and establishes a confession whereby the author is brought back to community. The product and method of this confession is the tales that follow, including a Tale of Narcissus, a youth who finds themself likewise in a very similar wood and condition.

The frame of the confession reflects the story of Narcissus, where the narrator, later revealed to be Gower, describes the work arising from the need for love. Like the youth, Gower begins as a young man fleeing into the woods, “and that was in the monthe of Maii… Unto the wode I gan to fare” (I.110). In this introduction, as in the Tale of

Narcissus, the word wood has double meanings: one, as a literal environment, and two, as madness. Both cases signal a retreat into isolation, internal life, and non-normative ways of being. Isolated, Gower expresses his suffering, “For whanne I was the wode amiddes, I fond a swote grene pleine, and ther I gan my wo compleigne wisshinge and wepinge al myn one” (I.115). In isolation, the suffering can be voiced. In any case, normative culture will not or cannot allow such a voice to be heard.

By using the image of a wood that one goes to when one is insane, isolated, and excluded from loving community, the poet plays on the word’s meanings. As a noun,

“wood” means a multiplicity, “trees collectively,”341 yet as an adjective, from the Anglo-

Saxon, “wód,” it means isolation and exclusion from a collective reason, “Out of one's

340 Dante, XIII. 44. 341 “wood, n.1". OED Online. June 2016. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com.proxygw.wrlc.org 172

mind.”342 There may be a tension between these two seeming opposites, collectivity and isolation. Yet in the combined image of a mad wood/wód, the meanings cross, reflecting what Martin De Mauro Rucovsky imagines in “Trans Necropolitics,” a mad collectivity, a discursive place of excluded truths and associations. When the wood becomes a site of confession, it demands we understand Confessio as a necropolitical collective. Unlike confession’s private form where a person rectifies themselves to a community, this wood suggests confession’s public form where the self and community are in equal discourse, literally a “con-“ (together) “-fateri” (speaking), where the wód and the wood converse.

In this way, Confessio uses the literature of death and suicide to create alternative woods, discourses by which isolated people may reclaim livable lives. In “Trans

Necropolitics,” Rucovsky argues that suicide and its literature (e.g. confession), are creative works that turn private isolation into public power. “It is death, rather than the positivity of life, what is put to work for the sake of the trans* political agenda,” writes

Rucovsky, describing, “the potential-symbolic production and regulation of necrotic bodies that have value for political capitalization (necropower).”343 Building on Achille

Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” Rucovsky articulates how suicides serve society in their woods in ways they could not if they remained within the walled towns of accepted life and love. Following necropolitics, we see how Gower scrapes at the bark of silence around the wód of suicide in order to bring the isolated back into collective discourse.

More than a mere holding device for its Tales, the frame of Confessio sets out its mission of love to connect stories and society together through ethical discourses. In the introduction to Book I, “On Love,” Gower writes, “Naturatus amor nature legibus orbem

342 "wood, adj., n.2, and adv.". OED Online. 343 Rucovsky, “Trans Necropolitics” 173

subdit, et vnanimes concitat esse feras” (Love fashioned for nature’s ends subjects the world to the laws of nature, and incites harmonized ones to wildness, I.i.). Too often love as an idea becomes a mode by which society determines how life may come into existence, how it may be organized, and conversely, who and what exists outside of love’s kingdom. Michel Foucault calls this form of making life biopolitics. Gower calls it love. By love are some brought into community life while those to whom love is denied are also denied life, and set on a path towards the wód of death. As a confession of love, the Confessio’s overarching movement is the mapping and critiquing of necropolitics.

Contrary to the exclusiveness of much biopolitics, Gower defines love as forming shared affects and associations across boundaries. “Est amor egra salus, vexata quies, pius error, Bellica pax, vulnus dulce, suaue malum,” writes Gower (Love is a sharp salvation, a troubled quiet, a pious error, a warring peace, a sweet wound, a soothing ill,

I.i.). Suicide literature falls into the trouble of trying to make sense of an act deemed senseless, wód, to revivify the dead. Admitting that such a seeming contradiction exists in the heart of love, Gower anticipates Mbembe’s work on the ambiguity of necropower,

“lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred.”344 One fears loving or listening to the suicide too much because the power they reclaim in death might draw others to it. Yet if one finds themselves in this wód, a suicide would be a key guide, just as Dante needed the dead to show the way.

The wód of exclusion functions for Gower as a necropolitical space eschewed from social discourse and yet open to alternative forms of meaning and power. Mbembe theorizes “necropolitics” and “necropower” to understand suicide as other than an absence, and to chart how environments of death are allowed and caused, “to account

344Mbembe, 40. 174

for… the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”345 While modern society struggles to discuss death in a productive way, if it is discussed at all, Gower’s confession of wódness offers a medieval genre of discourse with which to speak. Mbembe asks, “What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)?”346 To this, Gower responds by confessing the wód of suicide.

The stakes of Confessio follow the stakes of Narcisuss’s tale: love or death. If the trouble of the wód cannot be resolved, Gower will die. “So hard me was that ilke throwe, that ofte sithes overthrowe to grounde I was withoute breth; and evere I wisshide after deth,” writes Gower (I.117-9). While lovesickness can spark suicidal ideations, in medieval romances this love is often a public performance where intermediaries express concern and assistance. Yet these sufferings and suicidal thoughts occur in isolation.

There is an attempt to solve the problem alone, followed by the despair of being unable to do it alone. At last Amans begs Eros, "Now doth me pleinly live or dye, for certes such a maladie as I now have and longe have hadd, it myhte make a wis man madd, O Venus, queene of loves cure… Schal I ben hol or elles dye?" (I.127-163). The isolated Gower has lost agency over life and is left only with control over his death. Suicide is presented not as an inner madness but an escape from external circumstances of the wód.

A necropolitical approach to the Confessio’s suicidal frame demands that readers see beyond the literary trope of lovesickness or as a singular madness to honor the wód’s political force and resistance to wider social forces. While Mbembe’s necropolitics focus

345 Ibid 346 Mbembe, 12. 175

on the explosive agency of suicide bombers, all suicide functions in some way as a violent reclaiming of power and liberation, the last resort left to a person who has lost the power to live. “The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose function is, through sacrifice, to bring eternal life into being,” writes Mbembe. “The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation”347

Depleted of life, the only resort for the forgotten story is to die in such a way that it avails itself of necropolitical forces to live in through the undead twilight of story. Even if the dead only exist as “the Suicide” they can often enact more social change than in life.

For the suicide, the call to make confessional literature is like a break in the walls around the wód, like the first gasp of those buried alive or left for dead. “Whanne I out of my peine awok, and caste up many a pitous lok unto the hevene, and seide thus: O thou

Cupide, O thou Venus, thow god of love and thou goddesse, wher is pité? wher is meknesse?” (I.121-126). Too often trans desires are equated with irrational madness, wód, which is unspeakable and unknowable. The pain of the wód pulls the subject away from existing speech to feel the inarticulate speech of the body. It is telling that when

Venus and Eros arrive, they request that Gower puts these feelings into words that will be the Confessio, “Sche seide, "Tell thi maladie” (I.164). Wóds are deemed inarticulate yet through the confession of love, a literature of the suicide emerges, turning necropolitical drive towards death into an alternative form of power, meaning, and community.

However suicides and suicide are articulated, confession still needs interlocutors.

The wód need those who will listen. Gower writes, “of my maladie [Venus] bad me telle and seie hir trowthe… "Sey forth," quod sche, "and tell me how; Schew me thi seknesse everydiel" (I.180-185). Gower needs to be called on and given agency. Like Odysseus

347 Mbembe, 37. 176

feeding the dead his blood in order to give them the power to speak, the suicide in the grips of a wód’s necropolitics often needs the attention and even the words of the living to begin reclaiming language through association and analogy.348 Because the excluded often are deemed unspeakable, they lack the language to make their conditions known.

As such, the marginalized adapt other discourses for their use, be they derogatory, feminist, or medical. “What is thi sor of which thou pleignest?” Venus asks Gower, “Ne hyd it noght, for if thou feignest, I can do thee no medicine" (I.165-167). If we do not or cannot turn our complaints and critiques to society, the wód of suicide continues to grow.

Because the genre requires readers as well as writers, confession as social praxis, and the confession of suicide in particular, also demands the restructuring of society.

Having heard Gower’s complaint against her, Venus calls in the Genius to assist Gower in the creation of his Confessio. “I wot miself, bot for al this,” says Eros, “Unto my prest, which comth anon, I woll thou telle it on and on, Bothe all thi thoght and al thi werk. O

Genius myn oghne clerk, Com forth and hier this mannes schrifte," (I.192-197). While framed as a private confession, Confessio implicitly includes a reading public and an archive of non-personal stories. Unlike private confessions, one reader is not enough.

Gower’s story demands more stories. His wód calls to more wóds. This is how the frame of Confessio demands the tales that follow to fill it. Only then does Gower move from the silent, suicidal isolation of the wód to an overwhelming chorus of confession.

The chorus of confession runs throughout the tales in Confessio, and yet also echoes through centuries of texts where trans voices struggle to regain voice and power enough to name the damaging corporate sins and violent social mechanisms that depress and exclude them, sometimes to the point of death. In this way, Confessio is not only a

348 Homer, “Book XI.” The Odyssey. Samuel Butler, trans. (Overland Park: Digireads Pub., 2009). 72-80. 177

frame, but a model of public confession that at once incorporates elements and problems of private confession as well as offers alternative modes of meaning-making and speaking-together. Thus, while the next section begins with two trans embodiments of the genre, in the Tales of “Iphis and Ianthe” and “Narcissus,” the final section is located in a wood of suicide centuries later, where Leelah Alcorn finds no confessor outside of her blog, and uses it as a mechanism by which other trans voices may be brought back into and affect social discourse so as to create more livable lives. Time and again, a lack of confession compels the production of trans embodiments of confession to break the silence.

2. Confessio Amantis

A. Introduction: “Divisioun” and Dysphoria

After introducing the frame, Gower develops his ideas of exactly what is the state of non-confession that will be reconciled into community by confession: “divisioun.” To situate Gower’s Confessio as a confessional project of collecting diverse persons, texts, and disciplines in order to get them to “speak together,” it is necessary to understand how the poem introduces divisioun as a medieval form of dysphoria. For Gower, “divisioun” is the mechanism that establishes and demarcates social boundaries while also provoking certain lives to cross and embody the divide. This concept speaks to and anticipates insights from transgender and madness studies. I use Lynne Huffer’s revolutionary queer intervention into madness studies in her book, Mad for Foucault, to theorize how

178

medicine turns public discourses of madness, such as gender dysphoria, into an isolated subject for study through a list of medical terms.349 Such diagnoses for transgender historically included “gender identity disorder,” “paranoia,” and “schizophrenia,” among others.350 Huffer’s work follows Butler’s by using queer and gender non-binary cultural models in order to recontextualize the conversation on madness from the privacy of doctors’ offices and mental health institutions to the public sphere where the voices deemed to be mad, both past and present, are valued alongside those of medical professionals. As I will demonstrate, the challenge posed by this reading of Gower and trans texts is to shift from a model of gender dysphoria that looks for disorder in the person toward a critique of how dysphoria is present and generated in the environment.

While some may critique the use of such medical terms as overly determined there have been important shifts even within the psychiatric community to widen language and definitions of trans related diagnoses to better reflect insights from social models of transgender. The DSM-5 defines gender dysphoria as a medical condition that belies its attendant social pressures and denied agencies. “For a person to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” writes the American Psychiatric Association, “there must be a marked difference between the individual’s expressed / experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her, and it must continue for at least six months.”351

While the DSM focuses on the mental distress of dysphoric persons, it acknowledges that this is often a response to cultural definitions of gender imposed by society. Mentioning duration is helpful in understanding that this oppressive diagnosis is not a once-and-for-

17. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 58-61. 18. Butler, 75-101. 19. “Gender Dysphoria: Fact Sheet,” The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publication, 2013), 1-2. 179

all happening involving one individual but rather a sustained systematic issue. To receive care patients must be able to “express” the dysphoria he or she experiences. This contingency means that not everyone has the voice to counter his or her depressed power.

The DSM goes into greater detail on the contingent social aspect of dysphoria by specifically discussing the need for youths to express themselves. “In children,” states the

DSM, “the desire to be of the other gender must be present and verbalized. This condition causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”352 The DSM begins by tying agency with the ability to speak. Diagnosis is dependent on the youth being able to verbalize his or her gender. As a result, if youths cannot speak, they cannot be diagnosed with dysphoria. However, the

DSM adjoins to and expands this statement that dysphoria can nonetheless be analyzed as a feature of the environment. Rather than being the cause of a lack of power, dysphoria is the effect of being “impaired” in social and occupational functioning. In other words, the

DSM defines dysphoria as a disability that inhibits productivity, not unlike descriptions of sloth, while locating this disorder as in the environment rather than in the person.

While the modern medical definition of dysphoria is a feature of the twenty-first century, it describes a social position that isolates and silences many in the medieval past.

The “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis begins by establishing a domineering father who warns his wife that he will kill any girl child she bears. When she becomes pregnant, she fears for the life of a child if it is born a girl. In response to her prayers, Isis arrives and helps her deliver the child and present the newborn as a boy, named Iphis. Iphis is raised as a boy and when he reaches adolescence, he is wedded to a young girl, named Ianthe. In the Latin text by Ovid, Iphis and Ianthe engage sexually

20. Ibid. 180

after marriage and after a time Iphis prays again to Isis to give him a penis so he might consummate his marriage through penetrative sex. In Gower’s Middle English version, readers are told that the pair do not even kiss before Cupid arrives to transform Iphis’s body before he can ask for help.

While we cannot know what psychological events occurred inside the mind of

Gower’s Iphis, readers can analyze the circumstance described in the text. “It must be said,” claims Diane Watt, “that Iphis does not undergo any sort of identity crisis.”353 In other words, Iphis does not express any identified or desired gender, conventional or otherwise. For this reason, some may view Iphis as existing outside even modern definitions of gender dysphoria. In Gower, Iphis does not openly speak at all. Yet, as will be seen, Iphis experiences gender in a way other than what medieval society understands to be manhood or womanhood, and is impaired from important areas of functioning in both. In turning to Gower’s Confessio, readers discover a premodern confession of dysphoria, or what he calls “divisioun,” not as a privatized disease but as a corporate disorder. Indeed, this dysphoric “divisioun” as defined in the Prologue, not only frames this tension of self and society as the central theme of the Confessio, but includes all of creation.

Gower nests his tales in a series of frame narratives that relate particular life stories within wider social discourses. These frames work like nesting dolls, with “Iphis and Ianthe” occurring within a discussion of “pusillamité,” positioned within a study of

“acedia.” In turn, this discussion occurs within a confessional dramatic frame of Amans, a young lover revealed at the end to be old Gower, speaking to his confessor, Genius. A public confessional mode is suggested by the nesting subdivisions of the text, with each

21. Watt, 75. 181

particular discourse always already arising out of a wider conversation which is itself related to still larger debates. While the Prologue begins the work with a polemic on

“divisioun” and the promise that Love gives salvation, the text’s conclusion lacks resolution as Amans is denied Love’s cure, suggesting that the Confessio, a text full of tales of “divisioun,” is unable to imagine life without dysphoria.

In the Prologue to the Confessio, Gower testifies to sin as an embodiment of collective “divisioun” (or dysphoria) both of the body’s humors and the political environment and defines “divisioun” as the madness all humans share as a result of their making. “Man,” writes Gower, “[t]he which, for his complexioun / Is mad upon divisioun

/ Of cold, of hot, of moist, of drye, / He mot be verray kynde dye,/ For the contraire of his astat / Stant evermor in such debat” (Prologue, 974-80). Gower explains the madness of humanity as rooted in the “divisioun” of different kinds (“kyndes”) of bodies, a term the

Middle English Dictionary defines as its diverse composition (“the aggregate of inherent qualities”), form (“the natural form, shape, or appearance of a person, bodily part”), and

“gender.”354 While the prior definitions of “kyndes” are more familiar, the extension to gender is less commonly understood. Medieval concepts of gender extended beyond any one characteristic, such as genitals. Gender was an aggregate of many different “inherent qualities” of the body as well as well as the manifestation or ‘appearance’ of multiple social performances that could serve various functions within society. Concerning bodies, gender is both in genitals and the society that categorizes those genitals. Concerning actions, gender is both in the names and pronouns of a person and in the society that develops and assigns the language to that body. As a form of categorizing and relating bodies, the concept of “kynde” functions as a social act of marking certain aspects of life

22. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “Kinde,” http://quod.lib.umich.edu. (accessed February 8, 2016). 182

as significant while deemphasizing others. The diverse qualities enfolded into “kynde” point to the wider variety of elements in a person’s life that medieval people considered significant to gender. As humoral medicine and Medieval Studies of the elements of nature demonstrate, different forms of matter were considered gendered in different ways. Thus, when Gower claims that each body is made of many “kyndes” of matter, he is conscious that this implies that anyone’s body is an aggregate of many different

“kyndes” of gender: the feminine cold and wet qualities or appearances as well as the male hot and dry qualities.355

This emphasis on the physical composition of the body presents “divisioun” as a feature of the act and product of creation as Gower’s contemporaries knew it. Watt notes that for Gower and medieval readers, “division… is a further indication of our fallen natures.”356 Yet, fallen as the word is, reading for “divisioun” raises awareness both of a kind of madness and a kind of making. In Gower, the word “mad” appears to function both as “made” and “mad,” a pun possible in Middle English. Elsewhere in the Prologue,

Gower describes Nebuchadnezzar’s statue as composed of diverse elements, a head made of “gold” and “legges . . . mad of stiel” (P., 603-14). Later, Gower muses on whether creation could be otherwise, “if a man were / Mad al togedre of o matiere / Withouten interrupcioun, / Ther scholde no corrupcioun” (P., 983-90). This unity of gender and other matters, free from dysphoria, seems to be a cisgender world view, yet is for Gower only a speculation to contrast the actual divisioun creation inscribed in everything and anything made out of the combination of diverse materials or social forces. One can imagine an ideal homogeny only after observing and collapsing all real heterogeneity.

23. Galen, On the Natural Faculties, A.J. Brock trans., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), II. ix. 24. Watt, 35. 183

Gower also uses forms of the word “mad” to express the experience of being made as part of a dysphoric creation. Book I of Confessio starts with a plea to the gods stating that without love Amans will go mad from “divisioun.” “O thou Cupide, O thou

Venus, / Thow god of love and thou goddesse,” says Amans. “Now doth me pleinly live or dye, / For certes such a maladie / As I now have and longe have hadd, / It myhte make a wis man madd” (I. 124-31). Just as making comes from bringing diverse bodies together, madness comes as the experience of long suffering from that “divisioun.”

Madness as a feature of “divisioun” without love is evident in Gower’s use of the word to describe a woman divided from relationship with her family, “sche is madd / And loveth noght hire housebonde” (V. 495-96). Here, as elsewhere in the text, for Gower being

“mad” is not an isolated condition but due to the “divisioun” and “debat” inherent in the social environment.

Because of the ubiquitous nature of madness both as the condition of being made and the experience of madness in a world of “divisioun,” it would seem very difficult to overcome dysphoria, and scholarship suggests that Gower may intend it to be fixed.

“There is at the heart of Gower’s writing a contradiction that he does not and cannot resolve,” writes Watt.357 Rather than offer conclusive endings to his tales, definitive prescriptions for sins, or an actualized unified world, Gower’s stories of “divisioun” open up and flow one into the other. He shows stories and the world in all their messiness, he presents contraries that “[s]tant evermor in such debat.” Such debates certainly set up later tales and discourses in Confessio to respond to conflicts Gower establishes earlier in the text. Likewise, the overtly confessional and ethical concerns of Confessio suggest that readers too might be prompted to respond to the debates presented. Gower seems to open

25. Ibid., 21. 184

a “debat,” such as that on dysphoric youths, and then not close the matter with a definitive solution. His provocative theses that testify to the state of the world and tales that testify to states in society reach out to readers and ask them to “speak together” and

“debat” with the ethics of each tale.

To embrace “debat” as an invitation for love to transcend “divisioun,” one must learn to write and read in a confessional mode of “speaking together,” without allowing one voice to silence the other. This embrace of dysphoria as a mode of relating to a larger community resonates with what Huffer calls “coextensivity.” Referring to a mutual extension across divides, Huffer’s term identifies the breakdown in the self as either on one side or the other, an existence that gestures toward both. “The coextensive subject is the exposure of the ‘I’ as the result of an inward folding,” writes Huffer. “Coextensivity is a concept that unfolds the ‘I’ to reveal the illusionary nature of subjectivity conceived as a separate, coherent, stable form of individualization.”358 While dysphoric subjects may seem to be so particular as to be exceptions in society, the process of managing them as isolated individuals is this act of “unconfessing” that drives a sense of madness.359

So what is gender dysphoria? While many describe dysphoria as a disjunction between one’s mind and body more consistent with premodern notions of dualism, must we assume this necessarily takes place internally? Can we see this as a form of social disorder, of corporate sin, or of injustice? Gender dysphoria is what people suffer when they are denied power over their embodiment and that tense union called a self by society. This suffering is not merely momentary or personal but sustained over time, usually over generations. In “Crusades and Crusaders” from Sins of the Father, Brian

26. Ibid., 30. 27. Huffer, 27. 185

Mills and Roger Mitchell explain how social disorders and corporate sins in the modern day were inherited from medieval England through a genealogy of systems and behaviors. “The cycle gets repeated in successive generations because the problem is not addressed,” write Mills and Mitchell.360 Offering a social and historical model of dysphoria, confessional texts such as Gower’s encourage coextensive identification with the dysphoric in order to implicate readers in the “debat” his tales examine. Like Mills and Mitchell’s Sins of the Father, Gower’s Confessio Amantis encourages us to see how systems and habits in which we participate affect others, whether these others live down the street today or in an imagined past.

“Reading Gower’s Confessio Amantis in the twenty-first century invites self- reflection,” writes Watt, “as it must have done in the late fourteenth century and fifteenth century.”361 Watt asserts that the interplay of love and “divisioun” functions less as an exemplum that situates the figures in them as extraordinary individuals than as invitations for identification with dysphoria, “to allow the audience an imaginative participation in and an aesthetic experience of the division of the world.”362 Dysphoric subjectivities extend to wider audiences, both past and present, through the unfolding of narrative. As a result of such narrative work, current-day trans readership can unfold from a sense of temporal isolation in the modern world by coming to identify with experiences of medieval “divisioun.” By encouraging coextensivity, where those isolated by circumstance unfold lives toward one another through shared social mechanisms, confession reestablishes a communion across historical divides.

28. Brian Mills and Roger Mitchell, “Crusades and Crusaders,” Sins of the Father: How National Repentance Removes Obstacles for Revival, (Tonbridge, UK: Sovereign World, 1999), 49. 29. Watt, xii. 30. Ibid., 35. 186

For Gower, a poet who reads dysphoria as a disorder caused by existing across divided states at once, rather than insisting on existing in only one category within absolute divides, is a corporate sin that demands public “debat” and confession, calling readers to identify across “divisiouns” of gender and time. “Gower seems to be a good student of the model of encouraged identification,” writes Little, “familiar in vernacular sermons and penitential manuals, in which the priest directs listeners or readers to . . . see themselves in relation to both the language of sin and contrition and the virtuous or sinful figures.”363 Because engines of alienation and sexism extend beyond a single life, readers can identify with youths undergoing dysphoria in other eras. The particular lives of characters and readers may not historically overlap, but the systems that produce dysphoria are sustained over time. Thus systems that divide and isolate individuals within distinct categories end up providing the shared circumstances that allow for readers to identify across differences in gender and time.

In Gower’s Confessio, the wod of suicide is brought on by mishandled divisioun, or dysphoria. Over the centuries, even as confession became medicalized, confessional literature demands that sin, disorder, and division be considered corporately rather than personally. Both Confessio and DSM-5 produce a sense of “divisioun” and dysphoria that, in the words of Huffer, “interrupt the knowingness that would confine inarticulate experience within diagnostic categories.”364 Divisioun and dysphoria mark discourses where diverse forces speak together without demanding that the debate be fully resolved or that one voice win out. This interruption can be read as the work of sloth or as a lack of productivity because it halts reproduction of conventional categories of gender. Rather

31. Little, 105. 32. Huffer, 38. 187

than fix individuals who are a problem for the system, the texts suggest the failure of diagnostic terms to predetermine the use and end of a dysphoric life. It is the system that is disordered, bringing about depression and suicide among the dysphoric it manages.

B. “Acedia” (or Depression)

Within the confessional frame, Confessio considers an array of sins and tales that embody them, including “acedia” and “presumption.” An examination of how the text works generically reveals a telling relation between each sin-tale subsection and the overall work of confession. Reading and identifying with dysphoria can produce a desire to sustain shared discourses of “divisioun” that threaten the production of supposedly desirable, fixed states of gender leading to what Gower calls “slowthe” and modern medical authorities call depression. What should happen to the cisgender ideals of masculinity and patriarchal structures of gender divides if people dwell in alternative middle spaces, or freely cross over systems of difference that work to ensure stable productions of sex and gender? These anxieties are present in current-day opposition to

Transgender Studies and activism, and acknowledged in medieval scholarship on confessional literature. Among the sins of sloth are storytelling and leisurely reading, such as Gower’s Confessio encourages through the poet’s interconnected tales that seem to defer resolution. Reading Ann Cvetkovich’s insightful contribution to affect studies,

Depression: A Public Feeling, alongside the discussion of sloth that directly frames the

“Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” illustrates a social model of “acedia” as the systematic depression of a person’s agency, and illuminates how Confessio resists the penitential

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demand to fix the “accidiam.” 365 By looking back at medieval “acedia,” Cvetkovich helps establish how confessional literature looks forward to and anticipates future trans and disability studies’ insights on depression.

In Book IV, Gower examines the “accidiam,” an accusative term derived from

“acedia,” or “slowthe,” as setting up a key social disorder to be illustrated in the “Tale of

Iphis and Ianthe,” which it frames. While sloth, like depression, can be considered a personal matter, Gower points to “acedia” as the symptom that comes from silencing or otherwise limiting a person from participating in community life. “Est modus in verbis, set ei qui parcit amori / Verba referre sua, non fauet vllus [nullus] amor,” Gower writes

(“There is moderation in words; but love does not favor the man who is stingy in uttering words to his love” [IV. ii]).” Silence can be a virtue, Gower admits, but silence of a physical or spiritual nature is different from social alienation. Even those who are physically mute may communicate in some way. It is clear then that Gower’s consideration of “acedia” considers the choice not to speak or the effects of having one’s voice silenced to be important.

The multiple meanings of silence in relation to the depression of the spirit, as choice and as social alienation, are evident in the Latin preface to “pusillamité,” the form of sloth with which Iphis’s tale is associated. Gower writes, “Qui nichil attemptat, nichil expedit, oreque muto / Munus Amicicie vir sibi raro capit” (“He who tries nothing accomplishes nothing, and a man rarely collects the reward of Friendship with a silent mouth” [IV.ii]). The reason for the lack of Friendship’s gifts is unclear in the Latin. In the second edition of volume I of the Confessio, Andrew Galloway translates “oreque muto”

33. Storytelling as slothful is recurrent throughout Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Prologue” and “The Parson’s Tale.” See: The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 189

in a footnote as “a silent mouth” (IV. ii). In the first case, silence and inaction appear to be the choice of one who does not try to speak. Yet, situating love’s reward as the consequence of friendship suggests other possible scenarios for the friendlessness. In the outcomes of this particular form of the sin, the social implications are evident. Gower is warning that the silenced do not receive the gifts of a community, among which is the ability to communicate to the public and speak back to power. As in the DSM’s definition of dysphoria, these silences compound over time, inculpating the social orders of divisioun and shame that keep the “accidiam” in a silenced, isolated, depressed position.

To understand how physical muteness and depression differ from the medieval sins of “acedia” and “pusillamité,” we must mark the difference between the medical and social models of madness and examine how Gower positions his examination of sloth

(“acedia”), which “in its original Greek,” writes Cvetkovich, “means without care or careless.”366 Following an impulse common to transgender and disability studies to look at the “public” environment rather than the “personal” pathology for the grounds of diagnosis, Cvetkovich’s work on sloth and depression comes out of a project to establish these affects as the consequence of impossible labor demands. Unpacking the term

“acedia,” Cvetkovich determines that the presence and lack of “care” continually points away from the body and toward a person’s relations. While care can be understood as a feeling for another person, carelessness as its binary opposite suggests being without loving relationships. Care can also be an active treatment for another’s health, meaning that being without care is to be without support. In both cases, depression and “acedia” are social problems based in culture and merely private medical ones based on biology.367

34. Ibid., 88. 35. Ibid., 88-90. 190

Care always occurs in a community and so carelessness signifies a separation from public life. As such, issues of care may have as much if not more to do with social systems that inhibit relations of care than with individuals who simply lack the ability to care.

In the social model of madness, depression means the suppression or release of power. Gower’s study on “acedia,” like Cvetkovich’s study of depression, suggests that the medicalization of “divisioun” and sloth produces a population marked as perpetually depressed, powerless, and unproductive. Diagnoses such as “acedia,” writes Cvetkovich,

“produce life and death not only by targeting populations for overt destruction . . . but also more insidiously by making people feel small, worthless, hopeless.”368 The obscuring and internalization of social mechanisms of control and destruction is critical to their widespread functioning. Systems of power are more effective when people police themselves. Indeed, sloth as a systemic disease can manifest through a host of symptoms from suicide to social erasure. Society targets those marked by dysphoria to be relegated to oblivion. The targets are coerced through isolation and shame to kill themselves like

Narcissus, or through the impossible demands of compulsory cisgender, embodiment to become a depressed, docile, and silent subject like Iphis.

Among the populations most marked by the depression of dysphoria are youths.

As a period in which lived gender identity goes through significant shifts that may be in contradiction to what society demands or even the person’s own will, childhood and adolescence exaggerate dysphoria. Certainly that is the case with Gower’s story of Iphis.

Cultures with strong patriarchal traditions, such as those found in medieval gentry and in

Gower’s tale, insist on ending phases of ambiguity as soon as possible. This is especially true when considering the demand for more men to sustain and reproduce the patriarchy.

36. Ibid., 13. 191

“Of that he mihte do now hier / He tarieth al the longe yer,” Gower writes of the slothful

(IV. 8). Like the alchemist practice of “solve et coagula,” described alongside Iphis in the book on the “accidiam,” mutations of gender are considered a waste of time. They challenge the constancy and coherence of the patriarchy over time (IV. 8-10).

Young people who remain in dynamic states are doubly marked as disordered and slothful, unproductive and non-reproductive. They are marked as slothful because they prolong periods of gender ambiguity that allow them to embrace dysphoria, to exist in what queer and trans studies scholar J. Jack Halberstam calls “the wondrous anarchy of childhood.”369 Halberstam establishes the power of this anarchy in The Queer Art of

Failure as the possibility for alternative forms of growth and productivity.370 This power,

Halberstam argues, is most evident in trans and queer youth because of the ways they resist teleological fulfillments of cisgender, heterosexual compulsions to become properly governed men and women, but remain open to anyone marked by immaturity. Indeed, there are those who can and would embrace an anarchic personal diagnosis of sloth. Yet in “Undiagnosing Gender,” Butler asks the question of anyone who would assume that all youth are equally able to actualize such an anarchical potential to appropriate the systems of discipline, such as diagnosis, which compel their submission. Butler writes, “are children and teens always capable of effecting the distance necessary to sustain a purely instrumental approach to being subjected to a diagnosis?”371 As a form of social regulation such medicalization has the potential to overpower a young individual.

Because much of a young person’s physical and social bearing is yet to be set, children

37. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. 38. Ibid. 39. Butler, 82. 192

are denied the power to make lasting decisions, even those pertaining to the future of their bodies.

Defined by Gower as “lack of herte,” “pusillamité,” amounts to despair that labor will never produce a prescribed end (IV. 334-35). Put in a depressed position, the person suffering the social disorder of “pusillamité” does not attempt what he knows he cannot reach; he “dar no mannes werk beginne. / So mai he noght be resoun winne” (IV. 317-

18). Rather than failing at the impossible, the depressed person gives up work and so cannot experience success. A person who suffers “pusillamité” may surrender just as the system is beginning to crack, making real change truly impossible: “evere he faileth ate nede, / Til al be spilt that he with deleth” (IV. 332-33). Marked by failure in narratives of

“pusillamité,” depression becomes associated with subjugated populations. The depressed are less likely to take chances, as the odds are stacked against them. “Of this vice the nature / Dar nothing sette in aventure,” writes Gower (IV. 321-22). The sin of

“pusillamité” is its presumption that the flow of power is so set that there is no chance for change. Lacking choice and voice, dysphoric youths become depressed, fulfilling diagnoses that such youths are careless.

By situating the “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” within a study of “acedia,” Gower presents the compulsory production of gender norms and the heterosexual reproduction of the proper gender ideal (that is, cisgender men) as due to natural and social

“divisiouns.” Thus, the social danger of dysphoric youths is their refusal to produce and reproduce for the patriarchy. Unsettling the constancy of the patriarchy leads authorities to fear that dysphoric children may change society as they work toward uncharted futures. The dysphoric become medicalized as suffering from sociopathic conditions that

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make them inherently antisocial. Gower writes that the dysphoric have natures that keep them private and away from community, “this propreliche of kinde, / to leven alle thing behind” (IV. 5-6). Such diagnoses for depression are effective ways of justifying the isolation and silencing of those with no loyalties or, rather, no loyalties to patriarchal gender norms. Rather than seeing the dysphoric as alienated by society, it would be better to allow for the suggestion that they might have legitimate critiques of the social order through which their marginalization is explained as inherent to who they are. Working in too many directions, producing too many “kindes” of embodiment, the lack of movement in one socially legible direction under “the plogh” and “labour” of patriarchal cisgender leads authorities to discredit dysphoric youth by labeling them directionless. A part of this discrediting comes in the form of medicalizing depression as essential to a certain

“kinde” of gender. As noted earlier, the Middle English word “kynde” commonly suggests the pseudo-medical condition of the body, “[t]he aggregate of inherent qualities.” Yet the less commonly considered but pertinent definition of “kynde” as

“gender” remains. A particular reading of Gower’s statement is that certain genders are more likely to eschew all (e.g. identities, habits of behavior, or embodiments) assigned to them by nature, tradition, or patriarchy. One might suppose that certain marginalized genders, such as trans youth, would feel less loyalty to systems that subjugate them. Yet, the “divisioun” of genders inscribed in the youth through Nature and society is likely to spur on further social “divisiouns.”

While certain constitutions and genders may be medicalized as essentially depressive, Gower suggests wider social causes for diverging—or, dividing one’s self— from patriarchal values. In the Latin introduction to Book IV, Gower writes, “Dicunt

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accidiam fore nutricem viciorum” (“They say that Sloth is the nurse of the vices” [IV. i]).

Introducing his study of “acedia,” Gower’s assertion that sloth is the midwife of sin sets high stakes on the relation between depression and “divisioun.” If “divisioun” is the consequence of sin, then Gower is establishing a formula where systems that depress people’s agency create the foundations for other forms of violence and alienation to be inscribed and compounded. In effect, “acedia” names recursive systems that progressively decrease people’s power while increasing their isolation from life-giving and life- affirming social resources. In the end, being removed from the community is essentially a social death that sets persons on a road to despair and deeper elimination.

Gower writes, “Qui nichil attemptat, nichil expedit” (“He who tries nothing accomplishes nothing” [IV]). This establishes a conceptual slippage between a lack of socially valued labor and nothingness. He enacts nothing and so comes closer to nothingness. While silence may be deemed a less overtly violent mode of controlling populations, for Gower, the force of individualized medicalization causes the internalization of shame, the feeling that the self is essentially without value, a life essentially not worth living.

In an instance where the form of the text reflects and sympathizes with its content,

Gower’s Confessio can be considered slothful because it lacks a resolution. In the conclusion of its frame, Amans is not given the kind of love necessary to fix his experience of “divisioun.” Little notes this spiraling as critical to its confessional project.

The “failed consolation” at the end of the frame where Love is unable to cure Amans is a signal that change needs to happen on the public level and not only the private:

“confession (and the absolution it brings) returns a prayerful and hopeful Gower to

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‘amende’ his social world.”372 The confessional frame does not imagine personal solutions without social change. Watt concurs with the social reading of Gower’s frame and argues that the creation of tensions that are not resolved, the orders of nature that are established and undermined, and the “interplay of order and disorder” is fundamental to understanding the form and content of the Confessio’s ethical message.373 Composing a text that makes many different texts, social problems, and discourses “speak together” but failing to be properly penitential, lacking absolution, or cure, Gower leaves his confession in a strugglewith the ongoing problem of “divisioun.”

C. The Tale of Iphis and Ianthe

Situated within competing debates of silencing difference or speaking together, as well as empowering or depressing those marked as pathological bodies, Gower’s “Tale of

Iphis and Ianthe” directly engages the tension between “divisioun” and love established as foundational in the natural order of the Prologue in order to revisit, nuance, and contrast differing forms of understanding and enacting Nature, Eros, and “divisioun.” To do this, Gower’s tale holds up dysphoric youths to bear witness to and confess the corporate divisiouns that silence and depress their power (IV. 451-505). In an act that is effectively an embodied reconciliation with the patriarchy, Gower evidences that many actors work on Iphis’s behalf to turn the dysphoric child into an ideal cisgender man. Yet insofar as those both inside and outside the tale limit the dysphoric and depressed youth’s speech, these actors inhibit confession’s function to give voice to the silenced.

40. Little, 127. 41. Watt, 35. 196

In this concluding section, my reading pays close attention to certain details in the

“Tale of Iphis and Ianthe” in order to note the changes Gower makes in adapting the text from Ovid: the exchange of Isis for Eros as the reformer of the youth’s body and the absence of Iphis’s voice in the English text. By attending to the social networks around the youth, I contend that we see how the change of a body designated female into a body designated male evidences environmental discord in the community and the gendered oscillation of cold and heat in a body’s humors. This in turn suggests a deeper allegory operating in the characters of Isis and Cupid as representations of a dysphoric feminine

Nature and a reproductive patriarchal Nature. The opposition of these two forces echoes the “accidiam” brought on by “divisioun” and illustrates how establishing the dysphoric youth as a crisis in the order of Nature can excuse excessive measures to fix him.

The tale begins with Iphis born into a crisis of gender and constancy in the stability of the patriarchy, a dysphoria emphasized by the insertion of Isis as a divine midwife. When Iphis’s mother becomes pregnant, she is concerned because of her husband’s decision to kill any child other than a boy. Desperate, the mother prays to Isis for help since as a goddess of “childinge,” or childbirth, Isis governs transitions. Savvy in navigating “divisiouns” of and around embodiment, Isis insists that the child be born “in privete” (IV. 460-66). There, apart from the rest of the household, Iphis is born and designated “a dowhter.” Yet, in this private space, as though in penance, the child is reformed, redressed and renamed, then presented publicly, as “a sone.” Isis answers the gender debate by privatizing the problematic body. In the process, the goddess compounds corporate gender dysphoria by adding “divisiouns” between father, mother, and child, as well as between Iphis’s body and gender identity. Socially, Iphis’s father

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knows his child as a son, yet the mother knows the child in other ways. Physically, Iphis both follows the patriarchy’s prescribed gender performance and creates an alternative mode of embodying it.

In contrast to Eros who appears to facilitate and expedite the desires of the patriarchy to have a son who better passes as male, Isis’s position is more ambiguous.

She facilitates the work of others but in a way that compounds dysphoria and “accidiam” rather than correcting it. She complicates gender embodiment and relations. Describing

“accidiam” as a midwife of all sin, the root of which is “divisioun,” Gower writes,

“Dicunt accidiam fore nutricem viciorum” (“They say that sloth is the nurse of the vices”

[IV. i]. Yet this midwifery also applies to Isis.374 While it has been asserted that the

Metamorphoses of Ovid provides a key text for Gower’s Confessio, both follow in the wake of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (a.k.a. The Golden Ass), which developed ideas used by the later works, particularly in establishing Isis as a dysphoric figure. At the conclusion of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Isis describes herself as Nature inconstant: “I am nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen of the ocean, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are.”375 Isis is a craftswoman whose Nature is also mad and many faced. This is evident when she puts together her dead husband, Osiris, following the alchemical dictum, “solve et coagula,” and Iphis is remade in the image of Nature, a dysphoric Nature that creates without constancy and makes “divisiouns” even as she reforms them.

42. Isis as midwife also marks pregnancy and birth as processes of transition and bodily change. 43. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, XI, 47. http://faculty.cua.edu/ (accessed February 8, 2016). 198

While Ovid’s Isis returns in the conclusion of the Tale to answer Iphis’s plea to grow a penis so he can penetrate his wife, Gower eschews the agency of the dysphoric by having Eros intervene, unasked, to give the family’s patriarch the male heir he wanted.

“Forthi Cupide hath so besett / His grace upon this aventure,” Gower writes, “That he acordant to nature . . . Transformeth Iphe into a man” (IV. 496-501). Marking Cupid here as an agent of Nature aligns him with Isis, yet the masculine nature of Eros does what the dysphoric feminine Nature, Isis, cannot or will not do. “For love,” writes Gower, “hateth nothing more / than thing which stant agein the lore / of that nature in kinde hath sett,”

(IV. 493-95). These two gods represent two competing natures: the nature of dysphoria and the nature of cisgender (“nature in kinde”). The mutable nature of Isis is represented as an “aventure,” an unexpected happening. “Aventure” is a common feature in medieval romance where chance interrupts the proper order, sending characters and relations veering off into diverse paths and setting the narrative’s dramatic events into motion. Isis did not cause the disorder in the patriarchy but she did arrive as an “aventure” to compound and confuse it. In contrast, Eros’s transformation of Iphis into a man is meant to signal a restoration of the cisgender order of embodiment and relationship that Isis’s

“aventure” frustrated.

The exchange of Isis for Eros has more than allegorical significance, as the transition from dysphoric feminine to lustful masculinity corresponds to changes in humor. The “grace” that Eros bestows means an increase in blood corresponding to the wet body becoming warmer (IV. 497). “Wherof the kinde love he wan,” continues

Gower, “[o]f lusti yonge Iante his wif” (IV. 503-04). In the process, Iphis takes on the gender and humoral register of Love, that is, male. He is of the “kynde” of “love” (the

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gender of Eros) because of the circuit that Iphis and Ianthe form. Humorally, Iphis’s arousal with Ianthe mirrors the change that takes place at the point of the mutual “kest”

(IV. 478-500). In other words, the medicine of Eros fills Iphis’s loins with blood as he becomes erect, changing a (cold and dry) melancholic girl into a (hot and wet) lustful boy.376 Indeed, even in the twenty-first century, transgender hormone medication can be accompanied by hot flashes and mood changes.

Eros’s cure targets Iphis’s body while silencing Iphis’s voice and depressing his agency to fix a disruption in the patriarchal line. The importance of physical changes in

Gower’s story should not be underestimated. While modern medicine associates depression with the mind more than the whole body, Cvetkovich’s understanding of

“acedia” is that the affect is bound up in the physical and spiritual as much as the mental.377 Loss of agency over the body for any reason can cause or compound feelings of helplessness. In Gower’s tale, Iphis’s body becomes the site of cultural conflict and dysphoria about gender and sexuality. In other words, the medicine of Eros may be a kind of cure for dysphoria that the patriarchy provoked and nature compounded. If assigned a girl at birth, Iphis would have been killed. As a dysphoric youth, Iphis’s power is depressed. The physical change empowers Iphis physically and socially. Yet Iphis did not have a voice in the formation and reformation of his gender. Perhaps, in the world as

Gower sees it, Iphis would never have received a choice and would have remained silent and depressed. The poet suggests as much when he writes, “Poscenti tardo negat

44. While medieval thinkers did not approach the humors with the same language as a modern endocrinologist, premodern and early modern humoral scientists observed fluctuation in the blood, body temperature, and sexual characteristics. In a famous case of folklore, recorded by Michel de Montaigne, the change of a woman into a man is explained by intense exertion on a hot day causing such dramatic changes in her humors that her body pushed out her internal genitalia, forming a penis. See: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, M. A. Screech trans. (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 109-20. 45. Cvetkovich, 113. 200

emolumenta Cupido” (“Cupid denies his rewards to the one asking tardily” [IV. i]).

Those who are not able to speak cannot effectively receive the saving Eros in confession.

What do we make of Gower’s omission of the dysphoric voice from his Middle

English poem? Removing Iphis’s prayer for aid, Gower changes how audiences read the text. In Ovid’s Latin version of the tale, Iphis is given a voice in how to manage his dysphoria. “Juno, guardian of brides,” prays Iphis, “and you, Hymen, god of marriage come to these rites.”378 Yet this prayer is not provided in the Middle English text of the

Confessio. Watt notes that the change between Gower’s English book and its Latin source is rooted in differences between his English and the Latin text. In the Latin marginal gloss in Book IV, line 455, Watt observes Gower’s addition to the narrative, “Set cum

Yphis debitum sue coinage vnde soluere non habuit, deos in sui adiutorium interpellabat”

(“But when Iphis did not have it in her power to honor the debt owed to her spouse, she prayed to the gods in their oratories”).379 In this Latin commentary, Iphis is given the voice and agency she is denied in the English text, thus creating a division in the readership of the text. It is through the exclusively Latin element of the narrative that educated, often clerical, medieval patriarchs could hear Iphis’s voice while English-only readers hear only silence. While medicine was far from only an elite vocation in the

Middle Ages, the move to admit only the youth’s voice in Latin reflects the sort of authoritarian control over how speech is allowed and structured characteristic of the privatization of medical discourses of the body. In this way, medieval patriarchs as well as trained medievalists can act as gatekeepers, able to shut down Iphis’s voice from a wider English-reading community, both in the premodern past and today. Within the text,

46. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2004), IX, 1097-9. 47. Watt, 74. 201

these divisions mirror the demands of Iphis’s father to see only cisgender masculinity in his child. He is said to be “mad so to wene . . .”—made to understand—that Iphis is a boy, yet this echoes with the meaning that he is “madd” in his understanding of Iphis’s masculinity (IV. 469). The father is divided by his own patriarchal language from effectively speaking with the text of Iphis’s body or life story. The patriarchs and the dysphoric youths, doctors and patients, Latin and English readers are not all speaking the same language and reading the same story. This evidences the critical role dysphoric persons can play in society as cultural polyglots able to translate (literally, “move across”) divided linguistic, class, and gender communities. Unless diverse readers “speak together,” there cannot be understanding across “divisioun.” Unless dysphoric youths are allowed to speak their multiple truths in multiple tongues, “divisiouns” will only widen.

Both in what he writes and what he omits, Gower speaks volumes. While boasting tales of dysphoric, transgender figures, in Confessio Amantis Gower omits a prominent classical trans narrative, Ovid’s story of one of Aphrodite’s other children: Hermaphroditus. Unlike the silence at the end of Iphis, the tale of

Hermaphroditus ends with a dysphoric cry against the gods who rule the world around him. When a nymph rapes the youth, his body taken and metamorphosed against his will,

Hermaphroditus uses his voice to pray, “sed iam non voce virili” (“But it is no longer a man’s voice”).380 Ovid not only records the youth’s plea but the particularity of his hermaphroditic voice. It is only when the youth speaks that he is named

“Hermaphroditus” for his parents, Hermes and Aphrodite. The god of discourse and boundary-crossing and the god of love and sex inscribe the youth into the environment by enchanting the well in which he bathes into a site of perpetual gender change where all

48. Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV, 317-45. www.ovid.lib.virginia.edu (February 7, 2016). My own translation. 202

may experience and “debat” the natural environmental forces of gender dysphoria so that dysphoria may be read as a natural state of being and not a disorder.

Youths’ agency or lack of agency is at stake in the decision to regard “divisioun” and “acedia,” or dysphoria and depression, as medically individual or social in nature.

While in Confessio Gower does not give us the well of Hermaphroditus in which we can hear the echoes of dysphoric youths rippling through time, he begs readers to listen to the silences in his “Tale of Iphis and Ianthe.” By rooting his confession in the “divisiouns” of the social environment against the medicalization, or “unconfessing” of dysphoria,

Gower offers a model of reconciliation that can only be realized by crossing boundaries, including those of time and gender, to find the silenced, so that they may be brought into a discourse of healing. By listening to the stories of these dysphoric youths, readers can come to hear the sounds of the environment, the patriarchy, and other social “divisiouns.”

In the work of re-confessing silenced discourses, learning to listen is critical to marking the social structures that limit dysphoric lives and to empowering these depressed voices.

In the end Gower holds up a sounding board and amplifier that disclose the corporate sins of the patriarchy. The role of readers then is to listen to these dysphoric texts to hear how they reflect the sounds and silences of both the past and the present.

Gower prefigures the distinction between the medical models of dysphoria with which only modern trans persons are supposed to identify and social models that invite wider identification. Literary and trans scholars of confessional texts share a fate with dysphoric youths by dwelling in unresolved “divisioun” rather than insisting on the reformation of idealized norms. Gower leaves readers with the question: will you be like Eros who swoops in to solve individual problems without being asked, or like Isis who embraces

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and nurtures dysphoria? By affirming the creative (if unexpected) work of “divisioun” and dysphoria, readers are called to create alternative structures that invite the silenced and depressed back into community discourse. As a result of learning to speak together more effectively, rather than having one authority speak for another, our listening and waiting allow dysphoric youths to express their needs in their own voices.

D. “Presumption” (or the Ymage of the Nymphs)

In the Middle Ages, the wood and wód were unordered (or less ordered) sets that came into being as the ordering of normative cities excluded lands and peoples. I argue that in the treatise on “Presumption” that frames the Tale of Narcissus, Gower acknowledges how confessional discourses (including his own) can operate as walled cities of truth, often excluding the truths of medieval transgender lives in a way much like how trans-exclusive radical feminism excludes the truths of modern transgender lives. I conclude that Gower seems to be acknowledging the necropolitical processes at work; that wóds of exclusion (and suicide) grow in erased and circumvented gaps in presumptuous systems of gender. These wóds of suicide are tended to by those who belong to the wód, those who exist in a bio/necropoltical relationship with a world that isolates, kills, and profits from the death of trans youth.

A genealogy of presumption shows the concept’s relation to the claiming of turf, be it land, people, and discourses (such as feminism) and holding possessions (such as the image of what defines a woman). The term presumption comes from Latin, meaning, “to take beforehand,” from the roots, “pre, before + sumere, to take."381 In Middle English, the word held associations with property, suggesting "seizure and occupation without

381 "presume, v.". OED Online. 204

right," or "taking upon oneself more than is warranted."382 The presumptuous are not without rights to claim bodies and concepts yet go beyond what is justified by refusing other occupants who might also have a claim to the image of a woman or a movement. In

Middle English, “surquiderie” is in many ways a synonym of presumption but comes from the roots, “sur, over + cuidier, to think.”383 If presumption takes land and goods from other occupants, surquiderie takes images, ideas, and histories from other discourses.

The treatise framing each tale in Confessio prepares readers to approach the text in certain ways and to take away certain truths. It is by this device that the Tale of

Narcissus turns into a confession the social presumptions that normalize what gendered embodiment looks like, the images of womanhood that include and give life to some, while excluding and abandoning others. When in the Tale, Narcissus sees themself as a woman, Gower allows readers to see how presumption interferes. “He sih the like of his visage, And wende ther were an ymage Of such a nimphe as tho was faie” (I.2315-2317).

A hasty reader might assume that this ymage is the artificial truth of a trans youth. Yet the emphasis on seeming suggested by the word “ymage” points to the presumptuous social constructs of gender that alienates a trans youth from themselves. This turns the tale from a singular story into a moral machine that makes readers aware of presumptuous ymages of what a nymph looks like; whether they are reading in the fourteenth century or today.

In a queer study of the Confessio, Watt cites trans femininity as a troubled ymage.

Trans femininity in Confessio, including “male cross-dressing,” is held as an embodiment of an unacceptable truth, “a travesty of masculinity… an ontological crisis, which can

382 “Presumption, n” Online Etymology Dictionary. June 2016. Douglas Harper. www.etymonline.com (accessed August 20, 2016). 383 "surquidry n.". OED Online. (accessed August 20, 2016). 205

only be resolved by self-destruction.”384 Following Watt’s wayfaring into the Confessio’s trans necropolitics, I argue that Gower nonetheless admits how his truths presumptuously drive other ymages down trails to isolation and death. Following the confessor’s lesson on presumption, Gower cries, “my fader, I confesse… that my wenynge hath gon amis touchende to Surquiderie” (I.1952-1971). Aware that he is never alone in a sin, Gower’s confession points to a network of trans-exclusive sexism. Revealing the walls around his own ymage of truth, Gower invites readers to reflect on the presumption that excludes trans truths at the medieval moment of its writing and the current moment of its reading.

The danger of ignoring exclusion in medieval literature is that readers may join with premodern patriarchs in the work of transhistorical wall-building to keep trans truths from the walled city of feminist histories. Feminist scholarship has a tradition of presuming against trans insights. Such feminists are named TERFs, “Trans Exclusive

Radical Feminists,” by the trans movement,. One famous TERF, Janice Raymond, has named trans feminism “The Transsexual Empire.”385 In the turf war between the two,

Janice Raymond paints an ymage of TERF womanhood as a city under siege. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies,” she writes, “reducing the female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.”386 In defending what womanhood is and who may assume it (i.e. claim it, as with a piece of land), TERFs reduce women to artifacts, ymages, that one presumptuously claims and holds, even against the will of women.

The discursive walls built around this ymage of womanhood, what I call the walled city of truth, is not directly named in the treatise on presumption. However, its meaning is expressed from the Latin inscription that introduces the section. Gower writes,

384 Watt, 71. 385Janice Raymond, Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-Male, (Cambridge: Beacon Press, 1978). 386 Raymond, 104. 206

“Omnia scire putat, set se Presumpcio nescit, / Nec sibi consimilem quem putat esse parem,” (All things Presumption thinks he knows, but he does not know himself, nor does he think that anyone similar to him is his equal, I.viii). Too often a hard won ymage of truth, a movement or methodology that once sought beyond itself, now consolidates.

Presumptive knowledge walls itself up like a city of truth, excluding neighboring forms of truth as less worthy ghettos of knowledge. “And thus,” writes Gower, “[presumption] wolde bere a pris Above alle othre, and noght forthi He seith noght ones 'grant mercy'”

(I.1900-1902). Presumption then is the double-edged sword that protects its ymage of truth yet denies resources from potential allies, creating for itself a self-imposed siege.

As necropolitical spaces live in the shade of biopolitical architecture, presumption may begin not with iconoclasm but with love for an endangered ymage. Gower writes that for the presumptuous love for one ymage can arise from the unloving of another, “he alle othre set at noght… And weneth of himselven so, That such as he ther be no mo, / So fair, so semly, ne so wis” (I.1896-1899). Anxiety and pride for defending womanhood against other claimants, such as the patriarchy, can make feminists less able to perceive conviviality with trans feminism. Gower concedes that such ymages can be good (fair), true (wis), and beautiful (semly) but warns that such icons can become idols that make one less able to perceive these graces in other ymages. “Ful ofte [the presumptuous] heweth up so hihe,” warns Gower, “that chippes fallen in his yhe” (1917-1918). The

“chippes” in the eye of the presumptuous may very well be the ymage of the beloved.

Ymages of the Middle Ages are recurrently being reclaimed in part because critical movements are limited by who is allowed to be involved. 387 While trans

387 Medieval scholarship has recurrently referred to the Middle Ages as an image or mirror on which society can reflect, including C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and 207

exclusive ymages may allow for readings of medieval cis men and women, one way of knowing interferes with other ways. As if aware of the learned audience reading his

Confessio, Gower warns of intellectual’s tendency to presumption, “his wittes he despendeth upon himself, as thogh ther were no godd which myhte availe there” (1904-

1906). Reasoning can be Self-referential, like a feminism that defines womanhood only by those women present, leading to the isolation of knowledge; ivory towers within walled cities. “Non other conseil good him siemeth Bot such as he himselve diemeth,”

Gower writes of proud thinkers, “For in such wise as he compasseth, his wit alone alle othre passeth” (I.1891-1894). The invoked compass is a tool of orientation and a circle, even a social circle, which draws ends back to its beginnings without asking who or what else is not being questioned.

It is worth noting that trans exclusion can occur without the subject knowingly being a TERF because of the appeal of a defensive deferral of risk in dangerous environments like patriarchies. By making the world safer for cis women, Or merely attempting to, feminists can unintentionally make the world more dangerous for trans people. Citing queer feminist Judith Butler, Rucovsky argues that denying access to discourses of power leaves trans lives in a state of precariousness. “Precarity,” writers

Butler, “designates the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks and become differently exposed to injury, violence, and death.”388 For the sake of communities who reject the truth of trans lives, trans persons are left without safe homes, schools, bathrooms, or jobs. By making room

Renaissance Literature (1964) and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1987). 388 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso Books, 2009). 25. 208

for one ymage of gender at the expense of another, presumption shifts precariousness by building cities of truth alongside wóds of suicide.

Nonetheless, often, presumptuous exclusion occurs not by accident but by design.

When presumption treats truth as a limited resource, those embodying different ymages of truth are excluded from life-giving and life-affirming discourses. Trans exclusion is too often justified as necessary for the health of a field. Rucovsky writes, “necropolitical calculus reminds us that, in order to protect certain lives (cissexual ones), many others have to be sacrificed (trans* lives).”389 When love is treated as a circumvented good, so that only so many may be counted in the ymage of womanhood, presumption grows.

Rucovsky observes that in order to enact the biopolitics of cis feminism, groups eschew trans feminism to the realm of necropolitics, “to achieve growth, expansion and protection of civic life (cissexual universality), the vulnerability, precariousness and death of others (trans* lives) becomes necessary.”390 Trans exclusion becomes integral to admittance into womanhood, securing livable cis lives by making trans lives unlivable.

To conclude, the joining of the frame and Tale gives an ymage of presumption as a cultural tendency by which certain lives may be systematically isolated and eliminated.

In this way, while Confessio moves on to other subjects and tales, it continually returns to the setting and drama established in the frame: Gower in the wód of suicide. At the end of the treatise on presumption, Confessio returns to the frame to remind readers that it is because of such exclusion that Gower was driven to suicidal ideation. “Forthi, my fader, as of this, that my wenynge hath gon amis touchende to Surquiderie, Gif me my

389 Rucovsky, 21. 390 Rucovsky, 21. 209

penance er I die,” Gower begs the confessor. (I.1969-1971). Gower’s “er” suggests the precariousness of excluded lives. In the first case, Gower needs intervention from outside his exclusion, “or I die.” Suicides may demand change “er” (i.e. before) their death, even if it is too late for them. The confessional literature of suicide may yet produce meaning that gives them power in death that they were denied in life.

Thus, while presumptuous wall building, like trans-exclusive radical feminism, can lead to other necropolitical forms of power, there is a difference between the power of the living and the dead. Rucovsky writes that excluded trans people find themselves conflated with the ymage of the dead in the wóds of suicide, “represented all the same in the threshold between life and death as undead lives, half alive and half dead; spectral lives, immaterial citizenships, resurrected bodies or bodies in the threshold.”391 This is how presumptuous wall builders create wóds of isolation next door. By denying the lives of transgender persons, TERFs turn trans bodies into the living dead. Suicide or homicide does not surprise the presumptuous society that figured these deaths into their calculus, their naturalized ymage of transgender. Gower illustrates in his Tale of Narcissus that, over time, the system eliminates trans lives by marking them as killable or denying lifesaving tools.

E. The Tale of Narcissus

As shown, the frames of Confessio prepare readers to approach Narcissus through a critical model that locates dysphoria in the environment rather than in the body. The wód of suicide in the Confessio’s general frame establishes the cost of isolating one from

391 Rucovsky, 21. 210

life-affirming discourses. The subframe on presumption then sets readers to attend to the isolation of those embodying genders outside socially accepted genres of truth. Within these discourses, Gower re-narrates the Tale of Narcissus from an exemplum on personal vanity and into a story on precarity, “the politically induced condition,” caused by society’s failure to affirm the life and truth of trans persons, resulting in unlivable lives and death by suicide.392 Contrary to reductive answers that shut down discourses on suicide, Gower expresses the drive to an isolated wód by a presumptuous trans exclusive society as an unbearable thirst, a condition externally brought on by a “wonder hot” day.

In classical versions of Narcissus, the youth is driven by a curse brought on by a scorned lover. Gower’s narrative lacks such a super-natural cause. Without this element,

Gower’s Tale begs the question, “why is Narcissus alone?” No easy answer is given.

Instead, spurring on this mystery, Gower introduces the tale, “was ther no comparisoun as toward his condition” (I.2283-4). The word condition suggests discursive associations

(i.e. comparisons), deriving from the Latin “con-” (together) and “-dicere” (speak).393

Conditions are the state of existing in confession (com-fateri, together-speaking).394 To exist in a condition without comparison is to exist in a kind of discourse that actively denies relationship. In a word, Gower establishes environmental conditions that work together to exclude and divide Narcissus from community and then from their own body.

While framed by discourses on the sin of pride, the youth in the Tale of Narcissus shows few signs of personal vanity. Instead, Gower establishes in a multitude of ways, how suffering is caused by a lack of associations, especially with women, by cultures of presumption that exclude the youth. The closest Gower comes to naming a personal sin

392 Butler, 25. 393 "condition, n.," OED Online. (accessed August 20, 2016). 394 "confession, n.". OED Online. 211

of pride is a statement about women’s socio-economic condition. “Ther was no woman for to love,” Gower writes. “So hihe he sette himself above/of stature and beaute both,/that him thought alle women lothe” (I.2279-82). Narcissus does not relate to women, but we cannot presume to know why at the start. What can be known are external conditions that divide Narcissus from women. Raised as a man in a patriarchy, Narcissus is set above women. Raised as a rich man in a patriarchy, Narcissus is set above other men. Raised as a cisgender man in a patriarchy, Narcissus is set above trans folk.

Nonetheless, male supremacy never exists without the need for conditioning, for collective participation and repetition in its rules of exclusion. This takes the form of a lack of associations and associates. Gower writes, “was ther no comparisoun as toward his condition” (I.2283-4). Raised as a rich, cisgender man in a patriarchy gives Narcissus privileges that are not free. To remain above others, in their condition, Narcissus must not be lowered to “comparisoun” with other gender associations and associates. The demand from the biopolitical environment is nonetheless veiled as personal choices and personal accomplishments similar to what Puar describes as “a call to upward mobility” that echoes the isolating, individualist motto, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.”395

Narcissus is conditioned not to associate with women. Further, presumption about the givenness of cisgender, about the exclusion of trans narratives from the education of the literate, conditions Narcissus not to be able to associate themselves with trans women.

As will be shown, claiming one exists in dysphoric conditions or environments does not require the use of specifically modern transgender or psychiatric terminology.

Even for modern trans persons, the DSM-5 now names gender dysphoria as the mental suffering resulting from social prejudice rather than the personal condition of being trans.

395 Puar, 151. 212

“Gender dysphoria refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender,” writes the American

Psychiatric Association, “[subjects] feel uncomfortable being regarded by others, or functioning in society, as members of their assigned gender.”396 Because dysphoria is in the environment rather than the body, it can be named as a social ill. In DSM-5: Clinical

Cases, John Barnhill clarifies that the dysphoric are “not intrinsically pathological but are problematic because they exist within a certain social structure.”397 By this definition, a person may experience gender dysphoria without using or knowing of trans discourse.

The condition of being set apart by the environment causes unbearable dysphoria in Narcissus to grow like an embodied thirst for new gender associations. “The day was wonder hot withalle,” writes Gower. “And such a thurst was on him falle, That he moste owther deie or drinke” (I.2307-2309). It is not unusual for medieval writers to use the environment to comment on the state of society. Narcissus’s world lacks the wetness associated with women and the fluidity to move between genders. Before they even knows what they wants, Narcissus knows that the current conditions are unbearable. Puar and Berlant name this kind of death by thirst “slow death,”398 of silence and isolation, presumption and exclusion, “the debilitating ongoingness of structural inequality and suffering.”399 As for many trans people, the future life is not set but the present conditions are so unlivable that one way or another it will soon pass away, by transition or death.

396 “Gender Dysphoria,” American Psychological Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2013). 397 “Gender Dysphoria,” DSM-5: Clinical Cases. John Barnhill, ed. American Psychiatric Association. (Washington, DC : American Psychiatric Publishing, 2014). 398 Berlant, “Slow Death.” 399 Puar, 149. 213

The conditions caused by the patriarchal environment exclusion of life-giving associations eventually draws Narcissus outside to the wood where “a lusty welle” might quench this thirst. One day, while out hunting with a group of cis male associates, the youth breaks away for fear that if they stayed they would die of an unanswered thirst,

“[he] hasteth faste for to ride, Til alle men be left behinde” (I.2302-2303). The youth flees from patriarchal, trans-exclusive presumptions to a wood of alternatives. While those who remain may blame the one who finds life elsewhere for leaving old conditions and communities of gender behind. If the society is exclusive of trans people, however, those who flee might never have felt at home there. Society set the “lusty welle” in the excluded woods, a condition of division and displacement in the environment that calls

Narcissus to break from the old associations.

In important ways, the well acts as a reconditioning device. The first power of the well is that, unlike the presumptuous society that limited Narcissus’s associations, here the youth is able to move out of the isolated heights of cis manhood. Lowered “doun” and to “the brinke” (of the well and self) looking to sate their thirst, “He teide his hors unto a branche, / And leide him lowe for to stanche / His thurst” (I.2310-2312). The leaving of the horse corresponds with the act of lying low, stepping away and down from the privilege of a man in a patriarchal, chivalric society. They give themselves to the well that finally takes them out of that embodied condition all together, “Wherof that love his herte assaie Began, as it was after sene, of his sotie. Of his sotie, and made him wene / It were a womman that syh” (I.2318-2321). Suicides and trans persons are often called out of their mind. Gower escalates and reveals Narcissus’s conditioning, so that new associations and meanings for the self and world can emerge.

214

The second reconditioning power of the well is that unlike cis male society the youth left, here at last Narcissus is finally able to see herself in the environment. The conditioned divisions between the isolated self and the external world begin to break. The well takes the look (image) of Narcissus and makes them finally look at (heed) what it means. Yet there is a difference in the repetition of images, it is “the like of his visage,” but not the image (visage) that corresponds to her conditioned way of seeing (visage).

Gower writes, “He sih the like of his visage, And wende ther were an ymage Of such a nimphe as tho was faie”(I.2315-2317). Narcissus saw themselves but strangely, as a nymph, as a woman. The nymph is a woman appropriate to the well and appropriate to womanhood. The well says, ‘this is where you belong and this is your community.’ The well reconditions the person by undoing the conditioning of cis society.

Finding new life giving conditions and associations in the well, Narcissus forms a relationship with the excluded feminine environment and the excluded feminine self. In this location, even the syntax is reflective. Gower writes, “He cam…cam she… whanne he wepte, he sih hire wepe, And whanne he cride… sche cride also” (I.2322-2327). She comes, he comes, she weeps, he weeps, she cries, he cries. The youth begins to love women and the self by trans woman identification. The trans woman here is saying, “I am with women, what happens to women happens to me and what happens to me happens to women.” It is hard to define the affective register of these tears but readers can surmise that Narcissus feels the conditions (beauty, fear, hope, and pain) that are at once theirs and another’s. This is the value of such a trans woman environment: the youth learns to see themselves as lovable by seeing and learning to love reflections of themselves in the world around them. At last, Narcissus finds conditions to live in and with the world.

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Yet so long as the conditions of Narcissus’s livable life exists only at an isolated well in the wood, this “hard eschange” love may only serve to extend an unlivable life

(I.2330). The strangeness of the love arises from the ways that society, by presumption, failed to prepare Narcissus. Narcissus lacks the conditioned knowledge of trans life to survive and transition, the lack of belief in trans womanhood in order to recognize and love themselves, and even the lack of language to articulate these feelings. Narcissus does not have the power to face the world as a woman alone, “to beginner thing which he mihte nevere winn” (I.2330-2331). Womanhood is a genre of embodiment, a condition, and trans womanhood is a genre within and across it, signifying a collection, a network, and a community that makes sense and power out of one another. Without help, for

Narcissus and many youths, trans identification may be a start of a new life and its end.

Because of continued social exclusion on the basis gender, the DSM-5 warns that suicide can result of persisting gender dysphoria. The DSM-5 fact sheet informs that for dysphoria to be diagnosed, “it must continue for at least six months.”400 The definition of duration signifies an ongoing, therefore systemic, condition in the environment.

Dysphoria is the ongoing condition of feeling trapped not only in one’s body but also in an isolating and excluding society. If dysphoric environments are not altered, the DSM warns that suicide is a common escape, “[a]dolescents and adults with gender dysphoria before gender reassignment are at increased risk for suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicides.”401 Reassignment can come along with physical or legal changes, but signifies the need for a change in social conditions more than in the person. Yet in a

400 “Gender Dysphoria: Fact Sheet,” The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publication, 2013), 1-2. 401 “Gender Dysphoria,” DSM-5. 216

society that isolates the youth from the means for a livable life or presumes against their ymage, death may seem the only alternative to a dysphoric environment.

F. Conclusions (and Otherwhiles)

While isolated and ignored, the medieval trans suicide is not alone. Gower’s

Narcissus is not the original but another echo, a ripple in the pond. Directly, it mirrors and distorts Ovid’s Tale where the nymph Echo disappears and curses Narcissus. While

Gower cuts Echo out of the story and changes the nature of the youth’s condition, he marks the folding together of nymph and Narcissus in the Latin inscription, “ipse faciem suam pulcherrimam in aqua percipiens, putabat se per hoc illam Nimpham, quam Poete

Ekko vocant, in flumine coram suits oculis pocius conspexisse” (seeing his own very beautiful face in the water, he thought himself to be in the presence of that Nymph whom the poets call Echo, rather than gazing into his own eyes).402 Narcissus is an echo of

Echo, like later trans suicides are echoes of Narcissus. Each life and story is different but contributes the ongoingness, a slow death, a replaying of an old trans historical necropolitical machine that Gower suggests in the word “otherwhiles.”

The Tale of Narcissus is adrift in otherwhiles, alternative times and events that play out again and again. The word “otherwhiles,” which Gower uses to show the ongoingness of necropolitical, presumptuous, and dysphoric environments means literally, “other times.” Yet the etymology of the term suggests more than mere trans historicism. The Middle English “other” comes from the Old Saxon Gower’s “athar,” a proto European term from which “alter” is derived, meaning “beyond” (al-) and “that one

402 Watt, 78 217

of two” (-tero).403 The “whiles” element of the word likewise passes through Old Saxon,

“hwilo,” from the Proto European “kwilo,” meaning “to rest.”404 Together, otherwhiles suggests a time beyond rest. Otherwhiles can signal that which comes after death, undeath or resurrection. Otherwhiles might also mean other rests, other deaths.

Otherwhiles also mark the suicide of Narcissus as a slow death. We know

Narcissus struggles, and the text suggests it is a long struggle. “Ever” he “gan… And preith… And otherwhile he goth… And otherwhile he draweth… And evere he fond hire in o place” (I.2333-7). The repetition of the words “ever” and “and” suggests the passing of time through repetition and return; Narcissus sits with the dysphoria for some time. In

“the Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” Puar examines the ongoingness of suicide, as a “slow death,” that does not occur in an instant of insanity but in a long duration of exclusion and dysphoria. Puar calls ‘slow death’ a “nonlinear temporality, for it starts and stops, redoubles and leaps ahead.”405 Suicide is not a rush toward death but what Berland calls, “wearing out.”406 The mirror-machine formed by

Narcissus and the well shows the cyclicality, spinning their wheels to show the passage of time but without change in circumstance. It is the duration of suicide as a slow death.

The slow death at the well is not just a drive toward death but toward an unlivable otherwhile. Narcissus continually returns to the well because it is the only environment where the thirst for inclusive womanhood is sated, “whanne he wepte, he sih hire wepe, and whanne he cride… sche cride also” (I.2325-7). Rather than being self-obsessed,

Narcissus disassociates from themselves as a man among men. The irony of environment

403 "other, adj., pron., and n., and adv.1". OED Online. (accessed August 20, 2016). 404 "while, n.". OED Online. (accessed August 20, 2016). 405Jasbir Puar, “Coda: the Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. v18. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 152. 406 Berlant, 760. 218

is that it is only in the wód of suicide that Narcissus finds meaning for life. This well of otherwhiles functions as what Puar calls, “a zone…of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent.”407 The well is not enough to keep Narcissus alive but it is enough to keep them going. Necropolitical machines create undead, not only the dead. An unlivable otherwhile, an unbearable ongoingness is what slow death looks like in narrative. The confessional work of Confessio is to make this generic structure evident, to highlight the ongoingness of the narrative and create a sense of wearing down in the reader.

What is too often skipped over in the Tale of Narcissus, like many suicides, is the calls for help, the pleas to escape the ongoing otherwhiles of the necropolitical machine.

“He wepth, he crith, he axeth grace,” writes Gower, “There as he mihte gete non”

(I.2338-2339). The youth calls for help but none comes. In the moment between the cry for help and the answering silence, there is a moment, an otherwhile of anticipation and hope. Something might happen. The whole narrative has driven to this point. If not for the isolation of the trans youth, there might be those around to intervene. If not for the presumption of a gender system that excludes knowledge and love for trans and other non-binary bodies, then the youth might have been better prepared. If not for a society that allows the toxic environments that make trans lives unlivable, something might have been done. In this pause exist all the questions and discourses that have yet to be asked and answered. But for Narcissus, and for too many trans youths, no response arrives.

When death comes, the suicide shows its ongoingness, a sense that death is not sudden but the culmination of a slow wearing out and a system that continues to exist.

Narcissus takes “a roche of ston” and “smot himself til he was ded” (I.2340-2). The

407 Puar, 152. 219

phrase, “til he was ded,” suggests that the suicide was not momentary. It took time. It had duration. Blow after blow came and nothing stopped the sequence of events. From necropolitical view, the blow derived from many otherwhiles, long before the rock and the well. Blows were struck when Narcissus was assigned male. Blows were struck when

Narcissus was raised a man among men. Blows were struck when Narcissus was isolated.

Blows were struck when Narcissus called out and no answer came. In the long view,

Narcissus, like the rock, is an instrument and instrumental cause of the suicide. A larger machine of trans exclusion and death uses the youth’s own hands to eliminate them.

What is Gower’s goal in slowing down the events of medieval trans suicide?

Slowness, writes Puar, gives readers time to examine the necropolitical engines at work,

“to ask what kinds of ‘slow deaths’ have been ongoing that a suicide might represent an escape from.”408 The death is more a riddle than the dysphoria. While the suicide is the main event, the climactic happening that all other events flow toward, most people do not dwell with it or in its many otherwhiles. Reading about suicide is often done quickly. By slowing down, those who read and write about trans suicide feel the ongoingness of an unlivable life, the affect of wearing out. As a result, the question changes from “why did they die?” to “why did they live so long?” Gower shows that while trans identification is a key twist, it promises yet another otherwhile, a new way to continue on. It is the lack of response that reveals how excluded the youth is and how long they has been excluded. In the light of livable trans womanhood, their exclusive manhood cannot go on.

In a way death changes everything and nothing in a necropolitical machine. No sooner the youth is dead than “the Nimphes of the welles” and all others “unto the wodes belongende” come to mourn Narcissus (I.2343-2345). This should give pause. Narcissus

408 Puar, 152. 220

calls for help and none came. Yet Narcissus was not alone. The nymphs waited and watched as Narcissus died, doing nothing. These women who belong to wood and well, environments coded in the ymage of womanhood, did not answer Narcissus as one of them. Ironically, the wood to which they belong is the location of exclusion outside the patriarchy. These women know what it means to be excluded. It is unknown why they left Narcissus to die. Perhaps, like TERFS, they deny the truth of the youth’s trans ymage, seeing them as a man who has invaded the feminine environment.

Even after death, the necropolitical machine is not done drawing us across otherwhiles. “Comth ‘hadde I wist’ ful ofte aplace,” the presumptuous says, “if only I had known.” (I.1887-1888). The nymphs of the well, like us, are better at grieving the dead and making memorials than interrupting paths that lead to suicide. Readers are put in the place of the nymphs who passively observe the ongoing tales of trans suicide, consuming its affect while treating the story as predetermined, its ending presumed from the start.

The truth of the unlivable conditions exist in otherwhiles and help is perpetually too late.

The moment for action and therefore responsibility is over. No more cries for assistance.

Nothing must change. Biopolitics uses discipline to shape life, yet necropolitics is more conservative in its energy use, only demanding that we allow certain lives to unravel.

Biopolitics wants hope or shame. Necropolitics suffices with despair or indifference.

In the end, readers are left with the symbol growing out of the grave of Narcissus.

Once the trans youth is buried, “out of his sepulture ther sprong anon par aventure of floures such a wonder syhte,” flowers of winter (I.2349-2351). What do the flowers mean? Is there a message in this fragile easily overlooked trace of life amidst desolation?

These flowers grow out of season, “in the wynter freysshe and faire…contraire to kynde”

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(I.2355-2357). These are the flowers of otherwhiles, presumptions realized too late, replies not given, reflections of the future in the past, the past in the present. The flowers are like Narcissus, creatures contrary to assigned “kynde,” an engendering not in the spring of birth but claimed in a later season. The flowers are like the trans lives that come after. In places of death and isolation, fragile lives cling to existence. The flowers show the ghostly ongoingness of trans suicide. Necropolitical systems have adapted across otherwhiles, over centuries, continuing to isolate, exclude, condition, and kill trans youth.

What stories might these flowers tell? Gower challenges readers to think on the flowers, which exist as a sign, “[t]hat men ensample take myhte” (I.2352). By heeding the flowers, in otherwhiles the stories of the trans suicides are not left unheard. The flowers of winter are what Gower intends to grow in his Confessio’s wood of suicide, when he writes, “Me quibus ergo Venus, casus, laqueauit amantem, Orbis in exemplum scribere tendo palam,” (Those disasters by which Venus ensnared me as a lover I strive to write, publicly, as example for the world. I.ii). Gower is a Narcissus, Confessio is a mirror, and the tales, writer, and readers are the many rippling reflections. These flowers draw later generations to cross into the otherwhiles, the boundaries of presumption, to enter the wód of suicide, and to look in the mirror of Narcissus. What do we see? Do we enter the wód? Do we know the nymphs? Do we feel the thirst? Do we heed the flowers?

When all is said, this essay cannot answer the question or crisis of suicide. At best, it follows what Gower sets in the Complaint to Cupid and Venus as the Confessio’s thesis: “Vt discant alii, docet experiencia facti, Rebus in ambiguis que sit habenda via.

Deuius ordo ducis temptata pericla sequentem Instruit a tergo, ne simul ille cadat”

(Experience of the deed teaches so that others might learn what path should be held

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amidst uncertain circumstances. The twisting progress of one leading instructs another following at his back in the dangers already met, so that he too should not fall. I.ii). No one can give an easy answer to the question and crisis of suicide. The world is too full of otherwhiles, divisions, and uncertainty. We cannot fix the path like a master over her property but can try to assist others as fellow travelers in a troubled world. Confessio and this essay are addressed as much to Narcissus as later readers who see themselves reflected in its sense of deathly ongoingness and are seeking a way forward together.

3. Leelah Alcorn’s Suicide Note

In 2015, Pope Francis, leader of the Catholic Church, was attempting to reconcile with the transgender community by inviting a trans man to the Vatican for a private meeting. The meeting was said by the executive director of New Ways Ministry, “as genuine interest in learning about the transgender experience from a firsthand source.”409

The meeting ended with the man asking if despite the Church being a toxic environment for trans people if “there was "a place somewhere in the house of God for him.”410

Francis hugged him, but, a shrewd politician, he voiced no reply. The meeting was arranged to pre-empt the publication of a book in later 2015, This Economy Kills, where

Francis compares the trans population with atomic bombs.411 Francis fears trans people as what Puar calls “terrorist assemblages,” those with the atomic power to speak, “Fiat lux,” making an explosion of light that will transform how we understand the order of

409 Thomas C. Fox, “Report: Pope Francis Meets/Hugs Transgender Man.” 30 National Catholic Reporter. January 2015. www.ncronline.org. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 410 Ibid. 411 Pope Francis. This Economy Kills. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 17 October 2015. 223

nature.412 Excerpts of the book were released in early 2015. Thus the meeting, question, and silence. Francis wants reconciliation but fears confession, or speaking words of life for trans people. In his own way, Pope Francis fears confession because he understands the power of the genre to bring the transgender population back into the community and discourse. The Catholic Church continues silencing trans lives like Iphis and Narcissus for fear of how their words might remake the Church. How can the patriarchy and its patriarch survive when the dysphoric divisions of gender division and embodiment are exploded? How does privacy, silence, and death serve the patriarchy more then public confession?

These are the circumstances of confession between Church and transgender in

January 2015, only weeks after the silencing of another trans voice, Leelah Alcorn’s.

After writing a post entitled "Suicide Note" under her blog “The Transgender Queen of

Hell,” as well as a hand-written note that read, "I had enough," and after years of silencing in a toxic environment, she stepped into oncoming traffic and died.413 It was a silencing without reconciliation, the loss of the spirit and breath. This is the desperation to speak and be heard, wherein the transgender person is made to feel lucky enough to speak at all. This is what happens when suicide is the only way to gain the public voice and associated power. Necropolitics is so deep, many trans people feel more able to serve biopolitics as the forsaken spirit, in the last breath of the suicide.

412 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. (Durham, NC: Duke Press 2007). 413 Jenny Kutner, “Transgender teen Leelah Alcorn’s death ruled a suicide — mother threw away handwritten note.” Salon. 30 April 2015. www.salon.com. After Alcorn’s death, her parents deleted her note and Tumblr account but not before the message was widely copied via news sources and other blogs. The entirety of Transgender Queen of Hell was saved by digital archivists and is available via Leelah Alcorn, “Transgender Queen of Hell,” The Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. www.web.archive.org/web/20150101040547/http://lazerprincess.tumblr.com. (accessed 2 January 2017). 224

In this final section, I argue that the trans suicide note exists as a distinct genre of trans literature (as well as digital literature and humanities) with characteristic tropes, structures, and social functions. A trans person does not spontaneously decide to get literary just before death. Rather the note is compelled to fulfill political demands that (1) a note must confess a mental illness, typically dysphoria but compounded by depression,

(2) it must contextualize the death of the suicide as highly private and personal through a brief narrative of self that begins with diagnosis of transgender and ends in death. To map how the genre functions and is compelled by society, I will close read Leelah Alcorn's

"Suicide Note," not because her life is particularly atypical for trans suicides, but because she describes her not-atypical life with atypical eloquence.414

In the process, I point to this eloquence to show how Alcorn's "Suicide Note" shows knowledge that her life, death, and note fall into a social script. This self- awareness allows readers to map the note as the last step of a long necropolitical process.

The system kicks into gear to (1) silence trans persons from speaking non-pathological transgender discourses, (2) isolate them from trans community, and (3) compel notes that recast the necropolitical process from the public elimination of undesirables into a personal tale of mental illness or bad luck in birthplace, being placed in a hostile social environment. I conclude that the genre of personal confession and place of isolation are not accidental to transgender suicide but socially engineered, and reframing notes as public confessions of necropolitics turns trans identity from personal pathology into collective community, and isolation from an accident of place into a prison designed to silence the trans voice and smother the trans spirit.

414 Alcorn, 12/18/2014. 225

Through transgender literary study, the genre of the transgender suicide note explodes to reveal that there is light even where we perceive silence. Not only does this affirm the significant subgenre of trans literature and embodiment, this establishes the suicide note within the wider historical genealogy of confession. In this way, the rhetoric and ritual of the genre of embodiment connects the subjugation and suicide of medieval trans youths from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis with twenty-first century lives and deaths. The transhistorical genre of confession brings together the fictional characters

Iphis and Narcissus with the historical Leelah Alcorn, to compel society to speak together to consider the systems of excluding, isolating, and eliminating transgender lives across time. Through such consideration, Medieval Studies finds renewed purpose in the study of premodern trans lives and current trans studies gains historical perspective and nuance.

A. From Public to Private Confession

A close reading of Alcorn’s suicide note reveals complicated ways in which this modern iteration of trans literature utilizes elements of public confessional practices that submit and resist modern demands for privatization and medicalization. Implicitly, the blog Transgender Queen of Hell is public. Alcorn is not addressing an individual authority in private but a host of known and unknown readers. The blog functions as one of Alcorn’s key mechanisms by which she connects with the transgender community and also gives voice to messages both to the community and the wider public. Yet by the publishing of the suicide note, Alcorn recounts having been cut off from her online forum by her parents who redirected her away from a public community and towards the private

226

scrutiny of Christian ministers and doctors. This personal shift demonstrates how the modern era generally moves to contain and privatize trans discourses.

The confessional nature of the trans suicide note is meant to compel an explanation for the death of its author to answer the lingering “why?” Usually, some form of psychological illness is given as always already terminal. Alcorn answers to the demand for self-diagnosis in her opening line, “The life I would've lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender.”415 What at first seems like a personal spontaneous claiming of self unravels as a performative enactment of social conventions. “I never knew there was a word for that feeling,” explains Alcorn. “When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant,” presumably from her online community, “and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was.”416 Alcorn's filled her blog, Transgender Queen of Hell, with images and messages by other trans people.

The narratives and images posted on the blog form a network of associations that construct the many different significances transgender means for the youth and her readers. Alcorn was particularly fond of pictures adapted from anime, such as Sailor

Moon or Pokemon, that often emphasized gender ambiguity or transition. These posts explore how transgender might be celebrated as beautiful and connected to diverse arrays of cultural products. The blog raises questions like, how does transgender look? Is transgender beautiful? What counts as transgender? Likewise, Alcorn worried over how transgender can be understood as ugly, painful, and shameful. She shares with her trans bloggers messages of the hardships and depression. Just a week before her suicide,

Alcorn posted to her blog, "every time I [sic] want to kill myself it’s always inconvenient

415 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 416 Ibid. 227

to everyone around me. i want to fade away without ruining everyone else’s plans

#personal."417 While delving into conflicting personal experiences of dysphoria, the blog allowed Alcorn to confess these feelings with a wider community. She was able to raise questions that others could help answer.

The online trans community also shared messages of hope and affirmation with one another, including more than a few posts that communicated to Alcorn how beautiful and inspiring she is for her readers. On December 12th, 2014, Alcorn posted her appreciation to her readers, "oh my god people on here are just so nice to me I don’t deserve this you guys treat me like a princess and it makes me so happy whenever I feel like shit... i don’t have that many followers but the followers I do have treat me like a human being and you have no idea how much that means to me <3 #i'm crying #thank you."418 This re-blogging formed networks of transgender discourse that affirmed the posters as part of a shared community. Drawn from online networks, Alcorn’s understanding is based on a social model, a collective identity that instills the political spirit, ‘hey you are like me, and we are all together in this.’ The online network and transgender literary archive formed from a kind of public confession, a together- speaking, that gave Alcorn the power of collective speech and life.

“I immediately told my mom,” writes Alcorn, “and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.”419 At the moment of speaking the trans discourse, Alcorn is marked as “wrong” by her mother, an agent of a Christianity that seeks to silence and contain dangerous trans spirits. Transgender moves from a social

417 Alcorn, 2/22/14. 418 Alcorn, 2/12/14. 419 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 228

discourse, a way of connecting self and other, to be contained in the “wrong” individual as personal pathology and a phase which can be contained to specific “phases” of life. In the process, God moves from the giver of breath, voice, and light to the authority by which others contain, silence, and extinguish her spirit. In a post to her blog entitled,

"All," dated November 30th, 2014, Alcorn wrote that she viewed God as "a meanie," heaven as "nonexistant," and hell as "my parent's house."420 Contained within her parents’ house and church, as well as their definitions of gender and God, Alcorn does not see the light of the heavens spoken into being on the first day of Genesis. Instead she only sees the walls of her all-too-personal, all-too-human hell. God is the mean truth that

"doesn't make mistakes" which is held only to contrast and shame Alcorn as "wrong." In the binary of right and wrong, man and woman, Alcorn and God exist on opposite sides.

Yet both discourses, divine and transgender, are contained by the hermeneutic of Alcorn's

Church. God is made to speak (in specific biopolitical forms) and Alcorn is made silent

(in specific necropolitical forms). This is one critical sense that confession becomes privatized as the means of speech between God and humanity, as well as humanity and humanity- it comes under the proprietary control of specific Church agents. As a private confession, Alcorn speaks but the authority assigns, contains, and hides the meaning

Alcorn’s words – preparing her for conversion therapy and biopolitical correction or necropolitical elimination.

Conversion therapy helps to facilitate Alcorn’s shift from a collective identity into personal shame, signaling the shift of genre from a pubic into a private confession. This movement follows the shift from the public digital sphere into the privacy of church and the doctor’s office. “My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to

420 Alcorn, 11/30/14. 229

Christian [sic] therapists,” writes Alcorn on her first session of conversation therapy.421 Such conversion therapists are spurred on by psychiatrists such as Dr. Paul

McHugh of Johns Hopkins University. As self described orthodox Catholic, McHugh continues to push that transgender identification is a medical disorder that needs therapy to correct despite the vocal opposition of The American Medical Association, the

American Psychological Association, the American College of Obstetrics and

Gynecology, the American Psychiatric Society, the American Public Health Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.422 Among McHugh's other anti-LGBT opinions, which are commonly espoused by Christian therapists, is that the sexual abuse of children rampant in the Catholic Church is not due to pedophilic desires but is a natural extension of homosexuality.423 While Alcorn does not disclose what the doctor told her, we do learn what she felt: “I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.”424 The doctor’s diagnosis that

Alcorn is depressed reflects the effects of isolating transgender subjectivity from a collective identity. This is compounded by conceptualizing her suffering as a personal condition and marking it as a form of narcissism. Alcorn is taught that this strictly personal condition is “wrong” (the diagnosis), and to be made right she must submit herself to the doctor and then to God (the treatment plan). Her trans and depressive feelings are her selfish, private problem. The solution is to redouble commitment to stay

421 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 422 Mari Brighe, “Clinging to a Dangerous Past.” The Trans Advocate. 15 June 2015. www.transadvocate.com. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 423 Bryann Tannehill, “The Scary Science at John Hopkins University.” The Advocate. 15 December 2015. www.advocate.com. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 424 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 230

in the Church and submit to its tightly privatized discourse. Rather than speaking together with Alcorn, listening to her express her identified gender as well as her feelings of depression, the conversion therapy worked to contain and control her speech.

By moving from the public to private, confession has turned from an act of empowerment to a mode by which Alcorn is depowered, her power becoming depressed.

“When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart,” writes Alcorn.425 The confession to parents and doctors that offer diagnostic access to the powers to transition were inverted and became a mode to limit

Alcorn. Some people might suggest bunkering down, waiting, as she says, until her emancipation at the age of eighteen, which is only two years away. Yet what most people who advocate bunker mentalities don’t understand – but what a transgender person or medievalist (or a trans medievalist) knows well – is that siege wars are hardest on those who bunker down. The besieged become starved out by those well-supplied powers that surround them from all sides and cut them off from lifelines. The flow of power is on the side of those who surround the city and grows as those contained by it become weaker.

Isolation is dangerous to any ecology, much like being locked into a single discourse is dangerous to the healthy subject. Too quickly the ground waters can be poisoned, resources depleted, the air used up until the life held inside must surrender or die.

B. From Confession to Non-confession

425 Ibid. 231

The effect of the privatizing of the trans youth’s experience of dysphoria is a move beyond individual subjugation, such as Iphis experiences, towards the wod of suicide where confession becomes non-confession, silence, and death. In the second third of her suicide note, Alcorn explains the silence between her posts where she was unable to connect with her public life-giving discourse and community. While framed by and as a privatization and medicalization of her dysphoria, the containment depresses Alcorn’s voice to the point where she feels utterly silenced. Like someone taken from a community forum into an individual cell, Alcorn finds her confined life unlivable. While removed form her suicide by a period of time and a return to the public forum of Tumblr, this period of silence affects Alcorn deeply. She begins to feel she exists in a state of ongoingness, a slow death that is unsustainable and drives her toward a deadly conclusion. By better understanding this silent period of ongoingness, readers can come to better understand how death did not come on her suddenly, but rather slowly like the grinding of a machine that contains, silences, and subjugates trans voices to breaking points.

Alcorn grew up in King’s Mills, Ohio, where she began identifying as "gay" at school in preparation for later gender transition. When her parents found out, they went into action to circumscribe her with the church, the Northeast Church of Christ in

Cincinnati. “They took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends,” she writes.426 The place of Alcorn’s suicide is isolation. She is taken out of public school and kept in a private home, separating her from her local community.

Moving from high school where friends see one another five times a week to solitary

426 Ibid. 232

confinement in the house for several months was a shock to Alcorn's system. Nor was she able to explain to her friends what was happening because she had no way of contacting them. Yet the environment also cuts Alcorn off from her public online life. Alcorn no longer had the words of affirmation from the readers of her blog, nor could she call to them for help. The purpose of this separation from her transgender and ally community was to purify her eco-system of LGBT life. Likewise, this was an expression of her parents’ power, disciplining her with the knowledge that they and not her controlled her voice and environment. “I was completely alone for 5 months,” Alcorn writes, “No friends, no support, no love.”427 The togetherness brought on by friends, support, and love of her confessional community was expunged from her life as her environment became increasingly privatized, individualized, and isolated. In a war of attrition, the key to siege, Alcorn’s parents cut her off from the resources for life, suffocating her voice and spirit.

In less than two years, less than five months even, Alcorn’s spirit shrank in the toxic environment of isolation, moving her steadily towards death. Her note traces the relation between the depression of power and necropolitical forces engineering her death.

“This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed,” writes Alcorn,

“and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself.”428 The work of alienation is not a one-time event, but has lasting impacts. When Alcorn was allowed back into social media, the loss of contact made it harder to reconnect. “I felt even lonelier than I did before,” she writes.429 “The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.” This very socially conscious observation strikes at the stakes of

427 Ibid. 428 Ibid. 429Ibid. 233

transgender discourse and confession as living ecosytems. Without participation between many actors, confession can become just speaking into a void. Some voices and spirits are powerful enough to create lights that brings a community into being, but most people require the power of co-creation in order to build and maintain such systems of life support. High school in particular is such a hard time for so many people. Youth often depend on the larger established frameworks of classrooms, buses, lunches, and after- school activities. These systems can provide those lucky enough to take advantage of them the necessities of communal life while each person undergoes personal transformations and hardships during adolescence. Without being part of the framework of public education, Alcorn is removed from the living, breathing, and changing ecosystem of the school. In five months and without alternative forms of connection, the friendships she once had are not the same friendships that she had previously. In the lack of a social media, her suffering is turned from a collective struggle to a personal hell, fulfilling her digital handle, the Transgender Queen of Hell.

Alcorn’s personal hell is toxic. A toxin is distinct from other drugs and poisons because it is not necessarily harmful. According to the National Science Teachers

Association handbook on Assessing Toxic Risk, a toxin is any substance that reaches a quantity at which it suppresses life.430 For Alcorn, the process of her environing was that she was cut off from her public queer and trans resources and flooded with anti-trans

Christian necropolitics. By the end of the summer, Alcorn recounts she had “almost no friends,” either local or online, and in their place she only had “church” where

430 Nancy M. Trautmann and The Environmental Inquiry Team, “the Dose Makes the Poison,” Assessing Toxic Risk, (Arlington VA: NSTA Press Book, 2001). 234

“everyone... is against everything I live for.”431 For Alcorn, the Church was a toxic environment. The presence of this particular anti-transgender brand of Christianity made her unable to grow and survive. The community was so full of its own gendered ways of life that it did not allow other forms of life to coexist. This community designed to be a heaven for certain straight cisgender Christians was in a sense designed to be an unlivable hell for transgender women like Alcorn. Indeed, for her parents and church, trans people like Alcorn are toxins that challenge their tolerance. Thus they wanted her substance in their community but wanted to contain and control it. Thus like a toxin in the ground water of a besieged city, the very eco system that kept Alcorn alive, her parents and church, also made life unlivable. This is how Alcorn's church environment existed at the cross-roads of a biopolitics that worked to contain her and a necropolitics that worked to suffocate her spirit.

The sum consequence of the depression of power and mind in a toxic environment is that Alcorn despaired of ever being able to escape the body and life of a boy. “I felt hopeless,” confesses Alcorn. In time, the body itself becomes an unlivable environment and the imprisoned feel that escape is impossible. “There’s no winning.

There’s no way out,” concludes Alcorn.432 The Transgender Queen of Hell became increasingly convinced of the perpetual reality of her hell in contrast to the "nonexistant" heaven. Three days before her death, Alcorn posted an image to her blog of Elsa from

Frozen (a recent Disney film) dressed in red and dancing in her "world of isolation," but recast as Hell. Along with the image came the quote: "Parents: 'you are going to Hell.'"433

The Christian church her family built around Alcorn increasingly marked her as a target

431 Ibid. 432 Ibid. 433 Alcorn, 12/24/14. 235

of its necropolitics. Alcorn was set to be a part of the great eternal pyre (Hell) wherein all that is excluded from their brand of Christianity are obliterated. The alternative to necropolitical destruction was to live a life bound up in a kind of living Hell that Alcorn comes to identify with her body. “Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself.” While

Alcorn once externalized Hell as existing in the constructed environment of her home and

Church, her [something] has become so personalized and privatized that Hell now seems to be written on her skin. She has breathed in the toxins so long that she feels as though her whole life spirit is now toxic. She cannot escape hell when she is hell herself. Alone, this may be true. Under parents, a doctor, a church, and a god, she may not have the power to reclaim herself. Because of her isolated, toxic environment, she may not have the power to escape. “That’s why I feel like killing myself,” she concludes.434 “Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me.” Two-thirds of the way through the note, Alcorn no longer cares about the public’s opinion. In the end, she is left alone to decide how to escape a depressed spirit, an unlivable body, and a toxic environment: she chooses escape by suicide. This is the final work of necropolitical environments and the privatizing of confession- making the subject identify the toxic environment as within themselves. The walls are no longer necessary because the subject will police herself, embody her Hell in herself, and if it comes to it, to kill herself. The necropolitical work of killing the unwanted life is committed by the victims while the system keeps its hands clean.

434 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 236

IV. Conclusions (and After Lives)

The conclusion of the suicide note work to turn the trans suicide into one of the speaking trees in Dante’s wood of suicide. The Transgender Queen of Hell will once more scratch at her wounds in order that other travelers through the wod of death might find their way back onto the roads of life. This self-sacrificing characteristic in Alcorn’s note demonstrates how public confession is not always enough to ensure personal salvation. The critique of corporate sin and violent social systems can continue even as it is too late to repair the dying individual which have offered up their lives for confession.

As of the final third of the note, Alcorn seems to feel that she has sufficiently fulfilled the demands of the genre to give the cause and circumstances of her death, so there is a significant turn from the personal to the political and the private to the public. Aware of how her confessions have been cut off, she wants her story become a public confession prompting social change. “My death needs to mean something,” Alcorn writes.435 “My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year.” For Alcorn, her life and death have meaning because they exist in the context of other trans lives and deaths. She is aware of the number of trans suicides and accompanying notes. She is all too aware she is not only writing in a genre but a growing archive of trans literature.

Alcorn does not simply want to make literature, she wants to change how we read.

“Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better,” she concludes, among which, trans literature and the trans suicide note.436 We need to treat trans literature as

435 Ibid. 436 Ibid. 237

worthy of serious study; by excluding it, cisgender studies is causing serious trouble without it as trans voices continue to be erased. The atomic bomb of Alcorn’s trans speech went off, enacting significant political power on the United States at the same time that Leelah Alcorn’s personal life and death are systematically unconfessed. Leelah

Alcorn was buried as Josh by her parents who insisted on using Alcorn's assigned name despite outcry from activists.437 Alcorn’s parent’s deleted her "Suicie Note" post as well as the rest of her blog.438 The physical suicide note which read "I had enough" was also destroyed by her parents.439 The blog was saved by digital archivists and activists who preserved Alcorn's on a downloadable zip drive.440 At first, it was an elimination of the

"con-" of confession, our togetherness, of being a part of a wider public. But this comes with an elimination of the "–fess," the -fateri, the speech that gave Leelah Alcorn power in death that she did not have in life. The war of attrition on trans culture, literature, and history is as real as the murders in the form of homicides and murders in the form of suicides. Slow death claims another victim in yet another otherwhile as the necropolitical machines remain ongoing, even while confession offers final unction and resistance.

Alcorn is not content to merely exist as a piece of literature divorced from social implications, she demands that readers respond to what they read and act. “I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it,” she insists.441 The numbers that Alcorn is likely referring to is the report that she blogged on November

437 “Petitioners Press to Put Leelah Alcorn on Transgender Teen’s Tombstone.” ABC News. 2 January 2015. www.abcnews.go.com. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 438 Nick Duffy, “Leelah Alcorn’s Blog and Suicide Note Deleted from Tumblr.” Pink News. 3 January 2015. www.pinknews.co.uk. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 439 Jenny Kutner, “Transgender Teen Leelah Alcorn Death Ruled a Suicide. Mother Threw Away Handwritten Note,” Salon. 30 April 2015. www.salon.com, (Accessed 2 January 2017). 440 JamiesANerd, "Archive of Lazerprincess.” LArchive.org. 2 January 2015. www.archive.org/details/archive.lazerprincess.2015.01.02. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 441 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 238

20th, 2014, from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, stating that 41% of transgender persons will attempt suicide in their life and among transgender women 48% will attempt suicide.442 Beyond this one study, however, other studies report higher numbers at or above 50% attempting suicide by the age of 20. For transgender women of color, their total life expectancy is set at thirty-five years.443 At least half our population find themselves isolated by siege, unable to escape, and die.

Too many trapped in toxic environments that work to eliminate trans lives one way or another. In such dire circumstances, Alcorn affirms that words need to turn into providing liberation and systematic change. “As for my will,” she writes, “I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money... to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups.444” Alcorn’s death allows for what resources she retains to be directed to providing resources to pull other trans persons from their toxic disabling environs. Beyond her material possessions, Alcorn leaves behind her note as a means to spur confession. Surrendering her life, the trans suicide propels their story into infamy and turns her body into a relic of the necropolitical machines that produced it. In short, the trans suicide becomes an embodiment of confession and society’s corporate sins.

Through her effective confession, Alcorn gives voice and power to a silenced and subjugated transgender community. Since her death, a petition called "Leelah's Law" has gone up to ban conversion therapy in across the United States endorsed by over 300,000 signatories including President Barack Obama.445 In the wake of Alcorn's note and

442 Alcorn, 11/20/14. 443 Jen Richards, “It’s Time Trans Lives Truly Matter to Us All,” The Advocate. 18 February 2015. www.advocate.com. (Accessed 2 January 2017). 444 Alcorn, 12/28/14. 445 Transgender Human Rights Institute. “President of the United State: Enact Leelah’s Law to Ban Transgender Conversion Therapy.” Change.com. www.change.org. (Access 2 January 2017). 239

collective political pressure, a law was passed in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Alcorn went to

Church, banning the practice of conversion therapy.446 These are the stakes of telling trans stories, speaking words of life for the trans community, however dangerous they may be. These are the stakes for Gower’s Confessio and Alcron’s note. Both find some degree of voice in the wood of suicide through confession. They speak the words, “Fiat lux,” and create a light at the end of the tunnel; a light like the first glimpse of liberation against the bulwarks of isolation and silence from the Middle Ages until today. Nor do they leave the church a safe haven for the systematic isolation. Confessions call on us to walk through the woods of isolation and suicide, to listen for the silences in medieval literature and digital archives for unconfessed trans lives. Research into confessions of the past makes us better able to hear the voiceless in the present. By speaking together with contemporary trans lives, we learn how to better confess the past. Across the centuries, the confession of trans lives, Iphis, Narcissus, and Alcorn, affirm that our corporate sins will not be solved by silence with voices that will not be silenced by mere hugs. For those trained to walk through the woods of division and dysphoria, even the dead trees speak in confessions of renewed life and new springs in some otherwhile.

446 Joseph Patrick McCormick. “Cincinnati Becomes Second US City to Ban Gay Cure Therapy.” Pink News. 10 December 2015. www.pinknews.co.uk, (Access 2 January 2017).

240

Chapter 3: Hagiographies of Transvestites: Imago Dei in the Book of Margery Kempe (c.

1420) and Dylan Scholinski’s The Last Time I Wore a Dress (c. 1997)

This chapter concerns hagiography as a mode of re-narrating the difference and isolation of trans lives from socially dictated shame and marginalization to divinely lauded virtue and exemplarity. In particular, this study centers on the construction of saints as Imago Dei (images of God) and their lives as scripts of Imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) by which others may reconsider and reconstitute their lives. The form of these features, commonly assigned to saints in hagiographies, find their peculiar form in trans saints lives as what I call the Imago Transvesti (the image of the transvestite as an image of God) and Imitatio Transvesti (imitation of the transvestism as an imitation of

Christ). In this study, transvestism will be defined as a form of trans embodied which utilizes clothing as the central technology of social transition; allowing that transvestites may or may not seek to reconstruct their bodies according the asserted gender.

Broadly defined, sainthood is the status of being “set apart,” from the Latin sancire or sacrare, meaning "to make sacred, consecrate; hold sacred; immortalize; set apart,” which was understood in the Roman and Early Christian period to describe something out of the ordinary in nature or separated from society and came to be tied to those things supernaturally blessed by God.1 While the later medieval period saw a formalized procedure and requirements for naming someone as a saint, in the early

Church a wider range of interesting persons with interesting lives, folk heroes, or even non-Christian gods were narrated within Christian systems of meaning. As a result, in the

1 "saint, adj. and n," OED Online. (accessed February 13, 2017). 241

Early Church a transgender monk might find themselves the subject of a hagiography and sainted on account of their extraordinary life while in the Late Medieval period he and his story would have had to fulfill more rigorous, specifically moral qualifications.

Over time, trans hagiography evolved as the genre of saint’s lives (and what defined a saint) changed over the centuries. In the early Christian era, Saint Marinos the

Monk, a man assigned female at birth but transitioned to male and joined a monastery, was sufficiently out of the ordinary to be accepted as a saint and to inspire a number of copycat hagiographies about like individuals in other lands.2 Indeed, the early Church passes down around a dozen such trans saints recognized by the modern Orthodox and

Catholic Church, complete with shrines and feast days. Such stories went through periods in the Middle Ages where the saint’s lives were widely translated in various versions. As a popular trans hagiography, St. Marino life was in circulation in during the fifteenth century when Margery Kempe was actively transitioning from mother to virgin and composing her own Book, an auto-hagiography, with the assistance of scribes.3

By the twentieth century, the trans saints are substantially less well known and their lives have gone out of print, although the form of trans hagiography arguably continues in books such as The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Dylan Scholinski although admittedly through the secular trans memoir.4 While not necessarily framed as reflecting a divine God or imitating the biblical Christ, hagiography lay the foundations for the secular biography by popularizing the telling of extraordinary life stories. Indeed, according to the older understanding of saint as one set apart, a trans memoir can be seen

2 “Life of Saint Mary/Marinos.” Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation. Alice-Mary Talbot ed. (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996). 3 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe. Lynn Staley, ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). Web. d.lib.rochester.edu. (Accessed: 1 July 2016). 4 Daphne Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a Dress, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). 242

as framing within modern values how the subject reflects a secular Imago Transvesti, an life exemplary for its transvestism, and a secular Imitatio Transvesti, a model by which others may understand the struggles and tactics a transvestite may us in living their life.

Any modern study on “transvestism” in some form must briefly consider the many contrasting definitions. The term arouse in Magnus Hirschfeld’s the Transvestites, which called for a rethinking of the diagnosis of a distinct and insular minority as well as a wider rethinking of the gender binary.5 That transvestism was and still is misunderstood is evident in the many diagnoses the author contrasts it against: homosexuality, fetishism, and masochism. It is Hirschfeld who suggests that in a sense we are all transvestites, beings positioned between and across forms of existence. Yet since 1910, transvestite has become discarded as derogatory.6 Why is this? In short, transvestite has become a term cisgender (non-trans) persons use to control trans lives, write trans history and fix trans identity. Yet this need not be the case. Transvestism calls out in our history and art, in the lives of Marinos, Kempe, and Scholinski, for reclamation and reinterpretation.

“The term I use,” writes Hirschfeld, “is taken from the Latin ‘trans’ = across and

‘vestitus’ = dressed.”7 While later studies of transvestism emphasize a play of signifiers, for Hirschfelt, ties between transvestites and clothes reflect essential truths in their souls.

Hirschfeld calls for readers to ponder, “to what extent we recognize the essence of the clothing as symbol, as unconscious projection of the soul, then it might become clear that in the psyche of these men there is present feminine admixture—and in the feminine

5 Magnus Hirschfeld, “The Transvestites: the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress (1910).” Transgender Studies Reader, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed., (New York: Routledge, 2006). 6 National Center for Transgender Equality, “Transgender Terminology,” Transequality.org, 15 Jan 2014. 7 Hirschfeld, 38. 243

counterpart a masculine one.”8 In his consideration of apparel, Hirschfeld stresses clothes as both social symbols and essences that can have more or less correspondence to and participation in the substance, or soul, a transvestite being. From its genesis, it seems transvestism raises metaphysical questions that trans studies has not yet fully pondered.

The lack of critical work regarding trans ontology is evident in scholarship on the continuity between transvestites of the past and today. This essay arises in large part to intervene in scholarship concerned with medieval figures and literature, particularly

“transvestite saints” as a genre featuring trans men (often called transvestite women) and trans women (often called transvestite men).9 Such studies use of transvestism as “a sexual fetish for wearing women’s clothing,” often reflects out of date knowledge based on a narrow lines of modern psychology.10 These studies also will use “cross-dresser” as a synonym, a word I reserve for temporary and task-specific acts versus a transvestite’s prolonged life as a gender other than one assigned. In general, I encourage scholars to think critically when engaging with trans texts and consider if “transgender” (an equally modern term) is not a more informed choice. Yet, by reclaiming transvestite as a form of metaphysics, this essay works to repair some damage done by the word’s uncritical use.

Critics of medieval transvestite saints often cite Deuteronomy 22:5 as a problem

While the Christian church affirms transvestites as embodiments of God’s virtues, Old

Testament scripture seems to condemn transvestism, “non induetur mulier veste virili nec vir utetur veste feminea abominabilis enim apud Deum est qui facit haec” (A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever

8 Ibid., 34. 9 An example of this is referring to a trans man who lived as a monk a “transvestite female” or “transvestite nun,” Talbot, Holy Women of Byzantium. 10 Karen Lurkhur, “Medieval Silence and Modern Transsexuality,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 11 (4), 2010. 222-3. 244

11 does such things is abhorrent to the LORD your God). This passage has been used for centuries to condemn trans persons and as a boundary line between men and women.

Arguments against women in pants, slacks, or suits may be based on the scriptural law.

Extending from this assertion is that conclusion that women are not to work jobs designated for men. It is hard to work certain jobs without the uniforms or gear. Yet despite a literal surface reading, problems and alternative understanding lurk beneath the obvious. First, what clothing is considered men’s or women’s clothing changes across time and culture. What would be considered women’s clothes in the twenty-first century

(robes, tights, and makeup) were commonly used by men in the Middle Ages. Second, although the text could be read to justify condemning theater and festival wear, readers might quibble that putting on a costume as part of a celebration or performance does not fall into the category of men’s or women’s clothing. Thus a third moral might be derived from the scripture: do not wear disguises and wear clothing that reflects your identity. If a man wears a dress, then it is a man’s dress. If a trans man wears a suit, then it is a man’s suit. A trans woman is a woman and should be allowed to wear women’s clothes. Forcing a trans woman to wear clothes that identify her as a man is the abomination. In other words, Deuteronomy 22:5 might be read in defense of transvestism: if God assigns an

Imago Transvesti, the Imago Mundi (image of the world) will not assign otherwise.

A critical trans examination of Hirschfelt’s and Deuteronomy’s transvestites comes to the conclusion that transvestites must be free to be their authentic selves.

Indeed, while modern Trans Studies resists ideas of whole and parts as too essentialist,

Hirschfeld’s transvestism and medieval transvestism affirm that the entanglement of

11 “Deuteronomy,” Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Vulgate): Holy Bible in Latin, 4:11. (Stuttgart, Germany: German Bible Society, 2007). 245

essences are critical to allowing continuity across change. If affirmed as a whole with many parts and iterations, Hirschfelt concludes, “I do not think it is probable that the transvestite drive can be made to disappear… it is basically a harmless inclination by which no one is injured, then, from a purely medical standpoint, nothing can be said against the actual putting on of the clothing of the opposite sex.”12 Just as transvestism cannot be reduced to any single set of clothing or gender, so transvestism cannot be reduced to one word or cultural context. The ability to exist within substances suggests that transvestism can persist across personal changes and generations of cultural reforms.

“Even if there is an internal and external influencing … access to education, practice, and suggestion,” Hirschfeld writes, “sexual individuality as such with respect to body and mind is inborn… dormant in the individual long before it is awakened, forces its way into awareness and develops.”13 Like genres of literature, such as medievalism, genres of embodiment can undergird waves of time yet become readable in patterns of difference.

Within the texts and contexts of this study, patterns of difference are constructed by trans hagiography as a genre of embodiment. As a genre, hagiographies are often reactive, reclaiming and revaluing differences asserted by society. Society may assign a youth as a femme girl but by narrating himself, the trans person can assert the image of themselves as a butch or trans man. Likewise, society may eschew mothers as less desirable or sacred as virgins, yet the transvestite might reclaim the lost identity and assert a renewed value through transgressive transitioning. This assertion of an image of the self that transcends social assignments I call the Imago Transvesti. By way of reclamation, these narratives show the struggles and tactics of reconstructing the self. The

12 Hirschfeld, 38-9. 13 Hirschfeld, 37. 246

trans man is thrown into a mental hospital to convert him into the girl society determines he already is, yet finds alternative communities. The trans virgin is thrown in jail but summons a community to vindicate her. This I call the Imitatio Transvesti.

In order to execute this argument, this chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I examine hagiography as a genre of embodiment. From a survey of the

Early Christian archive of medieval transvestite saints a few generic features, particularly the Imago Dei and the Imitatio Christi. The tradition of the Imago Dei in Christian debates around gender is considered, contrasting interpretations that assert a fixed gender binary of male and female with an understanding of scripture and theology that looks to a the broader diversity of God’s creation. Within this discourse, trans saints function as test cases for the generic feature of the Imago Dei, demonstrating the failure of a binary system and embodying an alternative understanding. This alternative understanding of the Imago Dei propounded in trans hagiographies is identified as the Imago Transvesti.

Subsequently, the feature of the Imitatio Christi is established as a fundamental feature of hagiography, given the intermediary status of most saints who transition from worldly to sacred ways of life within the narrative. Because saints are more like readers than the ideal model provided by Christ, they are more able to engage in tactics and struggles that would be recognizable in their given contexts. Often this transition from worldly to sacred coincides with an exchange of moral systems that structure their life, as the norms of society are expelled for the sacred ideal models. In trans hagiographies, this transition from secular to sacred systems is embodied by the transition of genders, announced in the exchange of clothing. In particular, transvestite saints demonstrate that the ideal mode of living for a person may be a gender other than the one society assigns.

247

As such, the rejection of the world that already marginalizes and shames the transvestite is contrasted with the sacred set-apart life that exalts the trans saint. This diversity model of life contrasts with homogenous idealized models and is named the Imitatio Transvesti.

In the second section, the development and social influence of trans hagiography between the early Christian period and the late Middle Ages is mapped through a pair of texts. In the first case, a close reading of “the Life of St. Marinos the Monk” offers clear examples of the principles of Imago Transvesti and Imitatio Transvesti.14 A version of the

Vita closest to the presumed life and first narration will be studied in order to interrogate elements and themes that are more filled out in the early Christians versions but often abridged in later medieval translations. In the early Christian Vita more dialog is given that attests to Marinos’ direct relations to God and his understanding of his place in

Creation, providing details of an Imago Transvesti that is simplified in later versions. The longer length of the Vita provides a greater number of steps in the plot than later versions that give a brief summary, thus allowing for a closer understanding of the motions of transition that would provide an Imitatio Transvesti for later trans hagiographies.

Subsequently, The Book of Margery Kempe is examined within the tradition of trans hagiography.15 Generically, scholars have long accepted the Book as influenced by saint’s lives and showing evident signs of being composed in their tradition. Studies of the Book also consider Kempe’s wearing of white clothing, tantamount to an assertion of virgin identity, as effectively changing her gender and sexual identities, with one scholar going as far as naming Kempe as a transvestite. This study considers these two established thread in relation to one another. The virgin transvestism will be shown as

14 Talbot ed. 15 The Book of Margery Kempe. Lynn Staley, ed. 248

evidently tied to hagiographic narratives in the Book. Furthermore, the ways in which the trans virgin Imago Transvestite of Kempe and her Imitatio Transvesti transition evidence influence and participation in the genre of trans hagiography.

In the third, I consider how saint’s lives in general and trans hagiography in particular have been adapted over the centuries into memoirs such as Dylan Scholinskis

The Last Time I Wore a Dress, where the shifts from marginalization and shame of trans identity to exemplarity and pride continue to play out among secular world views.16

Shifts in moral systems remain a key feature, however the transition occurs between ideologies that are both not necessarily concerned with God. In particular, the assertion of a trans identity, an Imago Transvesti, is still in contest over a worldview that excludes this vision of the self and insists on a more rigid and reductive idea of gender. While

Scholinski at the time of the memoirs writing did not yet identify as a trans man, as he would later, the book’s focus on clothing and transitioning from femme to butch apparel continues a strong association between hagiographies and transvestism.

In turn, Scholinskis memoir continues the tradition of trans hagiography of

Imitatio Transvesti to detail the struggle and tactics of transitioning from a state of alienation to self-actualization. Scholinskis struggles mirror and contrast Marinos’. While the Monk chose his isolation in a monastery, Scholinski is forced into his isolation by his father who has him committed to a mental hospital. Yet like both Marinos and Kempe,

Scholinskis marginalization sees the trans saint to be set apart by medical and community authorities that cite social rules and regulations to arrest or exclude them. This conflict drives Scholinski to reclaim his life by coming to an understanding of himself not as a gender outlaw on the margins but as a martyr set apart for a struggle against an unjust

16 Published under “Daphenie Scholinski.” The Last Time I Wore a Dress. 249

world. While Scholinski’s story does not fully resolve in the same ways as Marinos’ Vita, as he is still alive, nonetheless his transition from a girl in a dress to a trans man provides a model Imitatio Transvesti for others facing marginalization.

1. Hagiography as a Genre of Embodiment

A. Definitions and Histories

The canonization of Mother Theresa as a twenty first century embodiment of womanly virtue and the comments from Pope Francis that continue to alienate and marginalize the trans community raise questions of the relationship between transgender and the Church. While modern Catholicism opposes non-cisgender, non-binary genres of embodiment, forms of transgender life, narrative, and spirituality grew in the medieval

Church. It may be surprising to some, that the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church has long revered transgender persons as saints, replete with their own hagiographies, relics, shrines, and holy feast days. One scholar lists the number of transgender hagiographies as no less than eleven. A review of these stories reveals a vast number of generic similarities between the saints lives and between the medieval and modern trans community.

Hagiography is a deceptively simple genre. Literally it means, holy writing,

"hagio-" (adj.) holy- and "-graphy" (noun) -writing.17 Or else it means, writing about the holy ones: "hagion" (noun), meaning holy-ones, and "graphy" (noun), meaning writing- about a subject. Yet when the root, "hagio" or "hagion," is examined more in depth, the meaning becomes more ambiguous. In Greek, hagio meant sacred or holy. Yet a still

17 "hagiography, n," OED Online. (accessed Feb 13, 2017). 250

older meaning for hagio is different or set apart. The transformation from the one to the other is easy to grasp. The sacred is that which is set apart and different from the mundane or worldly. This has led to the common definition of saints in the twenty-first century Church to define "saints" as "those set apart." In this context, hagiography is not only "holy writing" or "writing about the holy ones" but "the writing of difference" or

"writing about those set apart." By this definition, hagiography is about those who do not fit into the world as we know it.

What is trans hagiography? What are its generic qualities and social function?

Many of these stories offer few examples of miracles and martyrs, focusing its argument for the trans person sainthood on their extraordinary gender and how the faithful pursuit of their authentic gender brought them closer to God. This project to examine the qualities of the trans hagiography and the trans saint as medieval genre of embodiment marks a critical intervention in the perceived history and place of transgender in the

Church as well as offers a model by which we may understand current day transgender lives and narratives. In particular, I will take the case of the Vita of Saint Marinos the

Monk (also called Marina, Marine, and Marinus) as it was engaged in various medieval texts and traditions to demonstrate how the oppressive setting apart of trans lives can be reclaimed as a move towards alternative forms of embodiment, narrative, and faith.18

The question then arises: what forms of difference are markers of sacredness? Can the image and practice of transgender life be honored as pointing toward truth and grace?

I argue, yes. As will be shown, "transvestitism” (or transition) “is the unmistakable ‘sign’ or image that links this group of hagiographical narratives," that has a central place in

18 Talbot ed. 251

Christian theology even as it is marginalized.19 As a genre of embodiment that continues into the current day, trans hagiography constructs persons as particular images of divine truth (under the Imago Dei) and (through a form of Imitatio Christi) spurring the transformation of society so as to allow for and produce trans lives. If scholarship is to make the necessary assertion that transvestism in hagiography provided first, an image of

God in the particularity of the trans experience, an Imago Transvesti is discernable in the shape of the genre, and second, as a model of Christian sainthood, readers should be able to derive this Imitatio Transvesti by an examination of the genre’s key features.

This argument responds to trends in scholarship on "transvestite saints" that tends to undermine the binding of trans "difference" and "sacredness." Such readings fight against notions that medieval hagiographers find something sacred in the difference of trans figures20. Critiques waged against "transvestite saints," who they call "women disguised as men," is that they only reinforce the male supremacist notion that women are only holy when they are like men. The reading of the saint as a "trans man" is sacrificed for the reading of him as a "woman forced by society into the role of a man." TERF readings see transition as the entrance into a deeper prison for women rather than as an escape from cis womanhood into trans masculinity. Rather than admitting transvestism but focusing on male supremacy, I call that we admit that context of male supremacy but focus on the sacred difference of medieval trans saints.

Contrary to modern expectations, the transvestism of the saint was not something

19 S. J. Davis, "Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men," Journal of Early Christian Studies, 10.1, 2002. 1-36. 20 “TERF: Where the Term Comes From,” TheTERFS.com. 2011. www.theterfs.com, (accessed August 20, 2016); see also: Kelsie Brynn Jones, “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism: What Exactly Is It, And Why Does It Hurt?” The Huffington Post. 2014. www.huffingtonpost.com(accessed August 20, 2016); and Christan Williams, “You Might Be a Terf If…” TheTransAdvocate.com www.transadvocate.com, (accessed August 20, 2016). 252

to be explained away or excused or overcome. As Stephen Davis writes in "Crossed

Texts, Crossed Sex" (2002), "[i]n many of these Lives the heroine's change of dress is virtually left unexplained … suggest[ing] that the hagiographers actually presumed that their ancient readers were already acquainted with other 'texts' — other discourses — that would have helped make sense of the transvestite motif within these saints' lives."21

Readers of hagiographers knew what a trans person was or has some way of knowing.

Furthermore, they would likely have become familiar with the trans hagiography as a genre and the trans saint as its key feature. Davis writes, "in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries there was a revival of the genre," noting, "at least eleven vitae of transvestite female saints were published during this period."22 All this is more than saying that a transvestite merely hagiography included transvestites, rather the transvestism became a central mechanism in the working of the holy writing.

In “The Transtextuality of Transvestite Sainthood,” Jonathan Walker argues that

“transvestite saint’s lives” exists as an accepted genre in medieval literature and studies, yet scholars tends to elide either the trans or hagiographic elements.23 Walker observes that because “transvestite” is a modern definition, “for the roughly thirty-five sacred biographies that fall, in studies of medieval literature, under the traditional rubric of a larger hagiographic genus,” scholars focus too much on what seems atypically modern at the expense of the medieval. Yet the construction of this transvestism cannot be considered separately from the genre that constructs and frames it. Walker writes, “most medieval writers and readers of hagiography show little interest in parenthesizing or

21 Davis, 16. 22 Davis, 4. 23 Jonathan Walker, “The Transtextuality of Transvestite Sainthood: or, How to Make the Gendered Form Fit the Generic Function.” Exemplaria. 15. 1. (Binghamton, N.Y.), 73-110. 253

accounting for these cross-dressed saints.”24 Walker discounts that the medieval writers did not notice the trans elements because they were accepted in society, and instead posits that trans sainthood was so integrated into the genre that however transgressive the trans elements may be, they are indispensable in fulfilling the goals of the genre. In other words, because trans saints successful present an Imago Dei and Imitatio Christi that starkly contrasts with the Imago Mundi, the non-normative elements are tolerated.

Arising from tensions within hagiography as well as fulfilling its social and literary goals, transvestite saints fits the definitions of a genre of embodiment. As Walker insists, the transvestism of the saint cannot be considered separately either from his status as a saint nor from the hagiography that imagines and narratives that trans sainthood.

Walker writes, “the genus of ‘hagiography’ functioned as its own hermeneutic for medieval writers, readers, and auditors by providing certain interpretive limits to the different species of texts classed under the more general rubric,” or stated another way,

“discursive context conditioned the scope of transvestite saints' transgressiveness.”25 For medieval readers and writers, the transvestism of one such as St. Marinos cannot be considered separately from the Imago Dei that he embodied as a saint; the Imago

Transvesti was the particular form of the Imago Dei.

For many medieval readers the idea of transvestism may have been inextricable from sainthood. In the same way that modern television viewers may only imagine transvestism as a fetish of sex workers within the context of crime dramas, medieval readers may not have perceived or imagined transvestites existing outside of saint’s lives.

“The standard notion that within this sub-genre the goals and properties of a broader

24 Ibid., 75. 25 Ibid., 75-6. 254

hagiographic literary and cultural features are grafted,” writes Walker.26 To use a more fantastic example (as transvestism and sainthood may have seemed equally fantastic to medieval readers) aliens may be said to exist in reality but are hard to imagine independently from science fiction in which they are usually represented. Trans saints may be believed to be real but bound to the generic rules and goals by which they are composed and read.

B. Imago Dei

So what is the image of the transgender saint that makes them an image of God?

The answer depends on how one looks at that image. Framed by the gender binary, the divisions of the world will be highlighted. From a patriarchal perspective, the trans monk embodied the dysphoria generated by the patriarchal exclusivity, what Davis calls, "the palpable tensions between... hostility toward women as the source of their sexual desire, and... the monks' suppressed longing for female presence."27 From within a patriarchal frame, if trans saints did not exist, hagiographers would imagine them to relieve tensions in cis binaries. For scholars concerned with affirming patriarchal gender structures, Davis writes, “[t]he transvestite female saint is understood as the literary product of this tension."28 Self-interested limits of patriarchal scholarship go a long way in explaining why the image of the trans saint as a living subject in itself has long been deflected.

Yet patriarchal cisgender approaches are only one side of the dice. Alternatively, from a feminist perspective, the trans saint embodies a relief of tensions for women.

26 Ibid., 76. 27 Davis, 7-8. 28 Ibid., 8. 255

Davis observes, "the central motif of transvestism would have challenged late antique social models of male authority and female subjection. The image of the transvestite saint was an image of female independence and autonomy."29 For men, trans monks were acceptable exceptions to the rule of gender exclusivity. For women, trans monks were a defiant crossing of that exclusivity. The problem with both of these readings is that they reduce transgender to a product and solution for cisgender problems, ultimately ending with the return to cisgender binary. A critical reading of the trans hagiography represents that if one is to become a saint, to be set apart, this means radical change that will make a replacement of things back to where they were impossible.

Exploring the theological scholarship on trans hagiography, Davis concludes, "the

Passion of Christ is particularly embodied in the transvestite gesture itself." Indeed, the flight from oppressive social and physical conditions, through a period of transition, and ending in a state of revealed truth is at once very trans and very Christian. Transgender transition, Davis observes, can be seen as a form (a genre) of a transition all Christians undergo: baptism. Davis writes, "the act of changing garments evokes… the Pauline baptismal formula of Galatians 3.27-28: 'As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ… there is no longer male and female; for you all one in Christ Jesus'."30 Through the transition at the heart of trans hagiography, the trans monk is clothed at once in his own material and social manhood as well as the spiritual manhood of Christ which is beyond the cisgender binary of the world.

The willingness to undergo suffering to live as one's Imago Dei becomes a form of martyrdom in the Imitatio Christi. Hotchkiss calls this, "[the] willingness to suffer for

29 Ibid., 9. 30 Davis, 35. 256

the sins of others [which] obviously evokes the figure of Christ."31 In medieval theology, in the incarnation, Christ too engaged in becoming embodied and becoming man. This came with privileges but also with costs. Some of the costs are evident in the passion encountered for being his authentic self. In the case of trans male saints, Hotchkiss observes, "[d]espite the governing precept of male superiority… disguise emerges, paradoxically, as a sign of humility, since it reflects a voluntary disregard for the self in favor of serving God."32 Whether disguise of transition, receiving the benefits of male privilege demands a sacrifice of truth about past embodiments and struggles. Or else the trans men confess both the trans and male aspect of their lives and deal with cis male rejections. Either way, privilege and manhood comes with a cost.

The transition of embodiment enacts baptism in many ways. Embodying a trans narrative can be one way toward grace and sainthood. Hotchkiss, writes, "cross-dressed women [trans men] symbolically depict the power of Christianity to 'transform' its adherents… Radical transformations - water to win, death to life, male to female - informs Christian doctrine on many levels."33 Indeed, the process of embodying manhood for trans masculine saints in many ways mirrored Christ's the incarnation of manhood and the initiates entrance into the body of Christ. As Hotchkiss writes, "she cuts her hair and puts on male clothing, thus realizing the symbol of the baptismal robe as the sign of the new man in the male image of God."34 The use of the language and concepts of baptism making you a "new man" marks trans masculine hagiography is in many ways a natural extension of traditional Christian narratives and theology.

31 Davis, 25. 32 Valerie R. Hotchkiss. Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe. (NY: Garland, 1996), 25. 33 Ibid., 19. 34 Ibid., 22. 257

The use of the baptismal robe in early Christian traditions further tied transvestite transitions to sacramental transformations. "The Pauline metaphor appears to have been incorporated into the earliest baptismal ceremonies," writes Hotchkiss, "in the removal of clothing and, after immersion, the putting on of new white robes, apparently the same for men and women. The initiate is described as transformed, reborn, and united with

Christ."35 The use of the word “incorporated” is significant in Hotchkiss’s statement. Far from being merely a play of signifiers, where appearances cover an unchanging essence,

Christian baptismal robes signified that changing clothes can mark an ontological change in the person. In contemporary trans Christian culture, trans people engage in baptisms as part of their transition process where they become named, blessed, and accepted into the body of the Church as their authentic self. In this way and others, trans narratives not only mirror or use Christian tradition but alters the way we understand those traditions.

C. Imitatio Christi

"The hagiographers are not advocating transvestism," one scholar stubbornly insists, while acknowledging, "these characteristics convey the saints' extraordinary natures."36 For decades, a tension exists in medieval scholarship on trans hagiography, where academics (who sometimes seem uncomfortable and pitying of trans subjects than the medieval writers) insist that although hagiography function is to create an imitation

Christi, a way of living that brings one closer to God, there is a persistent belief (perhaps more modern than medieval) that trans-ness must be a negligible or negative trait that

35 Ibid., 20-21. 36 Amy V Ogden, “The Centrality of Margins: Medieval French Genders and Genres Reconfigured,” French Forum, 30.1. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 8. 258

holiness overcomes. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, reflecting a trans affirmative counter history, Hotchkiss’s question, "If disruptions of gender hierarchy were not encouraged, why then do so many hagiographers write about women disguised as men?"37

If as Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey argue, "all early Christian hagiography... was motivated by an ethic of imitation,"38 then Davis wonders, "Were ancient readers called to seek out the example of Christ in the lives of transvestite saints?"39 The answer must be that there was something virtuous, saintly, and even Christ-like in being trans.

Davis offers a useful survey of the genre’s texts and contexts.40 While Davis acknowledges, "the image of the transvestite female saint was certainly full of contradictions," he affirms this trait of trans hagiography as central to its purpose. "The transvestite female saint was (quite literally) the embodiment of various oblique cultural discourses—an intertextually constructed body,” writes Davis.41 Perhaps leading to its divergent readings, trans hagiography arises as a limit testing of discourse of sex and gender, worldliness and holiness, constancy and change that become inscribed into the trans saint as an embodiment produced through the genre.

The trans saint’s work of embodiment is critical to the work of trans hagiography.

While other genres offer ideal values, hagiographies are distinguished by moves towards wonder from the materiality of everyday life. “The body is thus the primary tool for conveying the narrative's meaning, which contributes to the saint's Imitatio Christi," writes Amy Ogden in "The Centrality of Margins." 42 As images of God, saints are closer

37 Hotchkiss, 19. 38 Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, updated edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 17. 39 Davis, 32. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 14. 42 Ogden, 8. 259

to a historical Christ than abstract ideals. If saints bleed like Christ, they also bleed like you and me. Embodying the transitional crossroads between the world and God, hagiography, "calls attention to the profoundly marginal identity of all saints: from a terrestrial, political standpoint, their behavior relegates them to the edges of society, while from a spiritual perspective, it locates their identity in the overlap between the human and the divine.”43 Far from being incidental, the contradictions and marginalization that trans saint’s embodied brought them closer to readers and to God.

As an embodiment of limit testing, the trans saint imitates Christ by moving between cultural centers and margins, drawing followers to revalue the marginalized. By aligning the Imitatio Transvesti with Imitatio Christi, the transitional movement of trans saints participates in the Christian project of reframing margins as central to spiritual life.

"Their essential liminality," writes Ogden, "points to a fundamental and paradoxical quality of hagiography: namely, the centrality of margins."44 Hagiography generically selected someone who the world rejected to become a saint. This feature of hagiography illuminates its social power. Through trans hagiography, readers are accustomed to see something "trans" then about all saint's lives where persons are oppressed or marginal for the living out of their beliefs (much like trans folk) and also existing in a liminal (i.e. trans-) position between body and spirit, this world and the next.

Because crossroads frequently involve conflict, as an embodiment of transition, the trans saint becomes is materially and spiritually formed by the suffering they undergo.

Giving the saint’s life a “highly literary quality,” Hotchkiss writes that trans hagiography draws positive meaning from the conflicts experienced during transition, "elements of

43 Ibid., 8. 44 Ibid., 8. 260

flight, disguise, calumny, and dramatic anagnorisis.”45 Undergoing transition contrary to the limits of the world, often means that one will face some form of opposition. This

"calumny" can be limit tests where social sins can be reveal and the trans life can prove its virtue. The exchange of clothes (more a ‘transition’ than a ‘disguise’) signals that the trans saint is more than the world understands, a man of the world and a man of God. The struggle of a trans saint, can cause scars that embody the spiritual virtue of transness and sacredness; an Imitatio Transvesti that cooperates with an Imitatio Christi.

The crossroads that the saint embodies is the cross of Christ, a revelation of a broken world does to one that calls for radical changes that bring a higher justice. As

Hotchkiss writes, "transvestite saints reveal much about gender definitions and cultural biases based on gender."46 Embodying the conflict between the world and God’s truth, traditionally called sin, but which in secular terms may be called transphobia and sexism, reveals social structures that inhibit readers from seeing the image of god in trans lives.

Thus, argues one scholar, by embodying of the transition process, "the transvestite female saint ultimately embodies the theological paradox of redemption."47 In the end, the

Imitatio Transvesti is not tangential to the function of hagiography but a form and limit test of the Imitatio Christi. For all the prejudice and marginalization of trans people face, perhaps the greatest gift that trans hagiography offers them (and other oppressed people) is the message that that suffering matters and can be used to bring more grace into the world.

2. Medieval Hagiographies: The Lives of St. Marinos and Margery Kempe

45 Hotchkins, 15. 46 Hotchkiss, 16. 47 Davis, 10. 261

A. Introduction

In this section, I examine The Book of Margery Kempe48 as an example of a life lived and a text narrated in the fifteenth century within the cultural genealogy of trans hagiography that has its roots in the early Christian tradition of Saint Marinos the Monk.

As such, a literary analysis of “the Life of St. Marinos”49 informs a critical trans study of

Kempe, especially episodes in which she lives as a transvestite virgin. The Book has been generally called the first medieval autobiography and more specifically an auto- hagiography.50 As a genre, the memoir of a secular life did not crystallize during the

Middle Ages arose out of the genre of the saint’s life. Because God is the highest good and final end of all things in for medieval Christians, the value of the personal life story was not a sufficient in and of itself.

As a result, the available literatures of significant lives were most often about the saints, who were supposed to embody the image of God and offer modes of imitation for those who wish to be more like Christ. Consequently, the genre of The Book of Margery

Kempe may be debated but usually is cited as deriving influence from and working to associate with hagiographies, mystic meditations, and even the performance of liturgical plays. In this section, I argue that while The Book of Margery Kempe has been accepted within many of the norms of hagiographies, offering both an Imago Dei and Imitatio

Christi for readers to consider, specific portions that are central to the overall meaning of the work derive from the particular sub-genre of trans hagiographies.

48 Staley, ed. 49 Talbot, ed. 50 Vereni, 369. 262

The episodes in which Kempe is commanded by God to wear white as a virgin, adopts the attire, then faces down opposition are reflective of the trans hagiographic narrative that St. Marinos. While numerous scholars have considered the wearing of white in the Book, few have named how the transition from wife and mother to virgin constituted a shift in gender identity akin to the transvestism of trans saints.51 In medieval

England, the identity of virgin carried with it certain social definitions of embodiment, beyond those concerned with the genitals, including fairer skin, as well as social norms, including the wearing of white, and social values, both in its perpetual form among nuns and its transitional form among those soon to-be-wedded.52 The identity of mother also carried with it certain ideals of embodiment, as well as social norms, such as the wearing of dark colors, and social values, especially as the mother relates to husband and child.

Whereas the transition from a female to male identity may seem more radical than the transition from mother to virgin, both are examples of an embodied and social change that transgresses norms within a society. From the outset, the shift from female to male may seem to be particularly rare. Yet so is the movement from mother to virgin. What marks the latter as distinct is that the movement occurs within an overarching genre of womanhood and become a certain degree of transition already occurs between the roles.

A virgin may become a mother. All mothers were once virgins. Yet the transition from mother to virgin moves in an atypical direction. Furthermore, the transition from mother to virgin elicits the same questions as the transition from female to male might. Does the body change to fit within the genre of embodiment, especially as it pertains to genitals?

Such concerns are answered by clothing (a monk’s or virgin’s robes) that cover over the

51 Ibid., 383. 52 Ibid. 263

body and forbid sexual contact that might reveal the genitals by other means.

Because of her transition from mother to virgin by means of white clothing,

Kempe has already been identified as a transvestite by leading scholarship. In this essay,

Carolyn Dinshaw invokes Kempe as transvestite to make an argument about her queerness, given the simultaneous resistance to gender norms and to sexual norms.53 I push this argument further, developing the study of Kempe as a trans virgin as a subject worthy of considering in and of itself, and considering this trans identity in relation to the genre of the Book. If Kempe is a transvestite and her Book is a hagiography, there are grounds on which to examine the woman as a trans saint and the text as a trans hagiography. This intersection of identities has not yet been explored, in part because of the limit scholarship of trans hagiographies as a genre and one with evident impact not only on modern trans literature but on medieval literature in the interim.

In her 2016 article for Feminist Studies, Alexandra Verini, writes, “In her efforts to establish Margery’s authority as a visionary and inscribe her into a genealogy of established female mystics and saints, Kempe likens Margery to canonical holy women in a way that adheres to the defining principle of likeness between friends.”54 Kempe and

Marinos are not identical, but then again, Kempe and the other saint’s lives her Book is common compared to are not identical either. Kempe is not a canonized saint and her

Book is not technically accepted as the life of a saint. Yet Kempe evidently composed her

Book to fit into the genre of hagiography and composed herself to fit among saints. In other words, while not a saint, Kempe positioned herself in the social and physical

53 Dinshaw. Getting Medieval. 148, 54 Alexandra Verini, “Medieval Models of Female Friendship in Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies and Margery Kempe's The Book of Margery Kempe.” Feminist Studies. 42.2. 2016. 381. 264

position of saints, “in the same locations that these women once occupied.”55

Medieval Studies has a hazy understanding of what stories Kempe and the writers of her Book would have known but because of certain generic themes throughout the narrative it is likely that those involved had some familiarity with saint’s lives. We cannot know if, how, or which trans hagiographies Kempe and her writers may have encountered. Yet studies have shown that trans saints lives such as the Life of St.

Marinos were in circulation during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century in

England.56 Thus, a brief study of “the Life of Saint Marinos” will not only be useful in illuminating key themes of trans hagiography, such as the Imago Transvesti (as a form of

Imago Dei) and Imitatio Transvesti (as a form of the Imitatio Christi), but appropriate because of the Vita’s popular status in the time and place of Kempe’s life and Book.

The version of “the Life of St. Mary/Marinos” the text to be examined comes from an English translation of the early Greek manuscript, “written…sometime between the early sixth and mid-seventh centuries, probably in Syria,” by Nicholas Constas from

Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English.57 The reason for selecting this version over later versions more readily available to Kempe in the fifteenth century is that this early version contains more details than many of the later editions which tend to summarize or abridge in different places. As the introduction of Talbot’s version attests,

“[t]he vita of Mary/Marinos translated here, termed by Richard the vita antiqua, is in his view the version closest to the original Life of the sixth or seventh century, which underwent considerable changes over time as the result of oral transmission.”58 The early

55 Vereni, 382 56 Talbot ed., 1. 57 Talbot ed., 1-12. 58 Ibid., 1. 265

“Life” contains in one place a larger collection of the many elements that are found in different configurations in later editions. Likewise, due to the text’s popularity, the editors observe there is no single authoritative version, “the story of Mary/ Marinos appeared in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Arabic, and much later, medieval

German and French versions.”59 Because it is impossible to determine if or what exact version of Marinos’s life, Kempe may have read it is best to consider a more complete earlier text that gives clues to what might be available in part in later versions.

Because of the diverse versions and translations of the text, there is no single authoritative version that Kempe would have encountered but rather what might be called the Saint Marinos tradition that ritually rehearses elements in different ways across time and location. Yet this may be too particular. The Marinos tradition is not alone but exists among, following, and preceding a whole subgenre of saint’s lives. The Talbot’s edition remarks, “St. Mary (also called Marinos) belongs to the remarkable group of so-called transvestite nuns (i.e., nuns who disguised themselves as monks) popular in Byzantine hagiography from the fifth to the ninth centuries.”60 Ranging to include from twelve to over thirty saints, depending on the definitions of scholars, these saint’s lives influenced and may have even been the inspiration for the telling of one another’s hagiographies.

“Monastic writers and their audiences were fascinated by stories of holy transvestites…,” observes Talbot, “more than a dozen different vitae were composed on this theme”61 As such, whether or not Kempe directly encountered Marinos as such, she might have engaged with other trans saint’s lives that bore traces from the early “Life of Marinos.”

The subgenre of trans hagiography that Kempe and Marinos occupy challenges

59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 2. 266

how hagiographies pit Imago Dei of the saints against Imago Mundi of social authorities.

“Margery’s acts of defiance against clerical authorities further affirm her resemblance to her saintly ‘friends,’” observes Verini. 62 “The very arc of Margery’s life, as she takes a vow of chastity, wears white, and abstains from eating meat in defiance of male authorities, shadows the lives of other female sinners-turned-saints.” Moving from the

Imago Mundi to the Imago Dei is a common feature of hagiographies, one Marinos and

Kempe both enact. The turn away from the Imago Mundi toward the Imago Transvesti positions Kempe and Marinos as experiencing similar costs.

As is observed in Talbot’s “the Life of St. Marinos,” “Transvestite nuns [or virgins] are creatures of the margins.”63 Both are challenged and shamed by men who at various times enact disciplinary acts on them. Likewise, both are excluded and lose relations with other women. The Book of Margery Kempe shows an awareness of this tradition of alienation in how it describes her conflict with society. “Since enmity from women sharpens and tests Margery’s devotion…” observes Verini, “these less amicable relationships also prove useful, as they participate in the Book’s project of presenting its subject as a saint.”64 In the binary gender system of the world, the trans saint is set apart by falling between categories and communities. Yet these struggles come with the blessing of elevating the person into the status of a saint. For Kempe, who does not already and will not gain this status from Church authorities, establishing her sainthood is critical in vindicating her marginalization as a trans virgin.

In the end, by turning from the world, trans saints answer problems in the world.

As Talbot’s introduction states, “in contriving a ritual of transition, the culture attempts

62 Verini, 383. 63 Talbot ed., 5. 64 Verini, 388. 267

to address and solve a problem that it has itself created.”65 The trans saint turns to a common Imago Transvesti because common problems in the Imago Mundi have not yet resolved themselves. The genre of trans hagiography exists as a transhistorical response to transhistorical systems of gender that continually fail to provide livable lives for those it excludes and sets apart. Because exclusion of the trans lives from the Imago Mundi and the marginalization who enact gender transitions, both the early Christian period and the late medieval period need the Imago Transvesti. The failure of the cisgender system has not yet been resolved after St. Marinos’ life and so Kempe experiences analogous estrangement resulting in a new trans hagiography. While living as normative women would have affirmed established authorities in the Church, in trans hagiographies such ways of life are coded as sinful inhibitions to the divine calling of the would-be saints.

B. Imago Transvesti in The Vita of St. Marinos

One is not born a transgender saint, one must be sainted. A look at iconography of trans saints such as St. Marinos the Monk evidences a divinely inspired life that challenged the limits of the world in which is grew and the limits of its own creation.

Certain elements of the saint’s image are common to others who are marked in like ways as “set apart,” such as the long monk’s robes, suggesting an orientation away from the world, and a blazing halo behind him, suggesting an orientation towards God. Yet other elements of his image and story mark Imago Transvesti as a peculiar form of Imago Dei.

St. Marinos is gender ambiguous. His contemporaries thought him an eunuch. Yet he also is shown supporting a child which he fathered by choice if not by birth. In this and many

65 Talbot ed., 5. 268

ways, the image of the trans saint announces a difference that is marvelous and sacred.

These differences remain challenging to some as they are inspiring to countless others.

The Imago Dei arouse in the Church from the scriptural assertion that the creatures of the world are made in the image of the Creator. In Genesis 1.27, God creates humanity, "et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam ad imaginem Dei creavit illum masculum et feminam creavit eos" (So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them, NIV).66 For many trans, intersex, and non-binary persons, the Imago Dei of Genesis is used as a weapon against them by those who insist that divine intention is only reflect in the symmetry of cisgender men and women. Yet the scripture does not say that God created humanity in only one way or that God only created cisgender binary people. In the early Christian and medieval Church, the salvation story of the gospels and diverse saints lives testify that the work of creation and recreation is ongoing in a dynamic and diverse Imago Dei.

Of the trans hagiographies that reflect a wider envisioning of the Imago Dei, among the earliest and most influential accounts was that of St. Marinos the Monk. To keep close to the original text, the version of the life of St. Marinos analyzed here comes from Alice-Mary Talbot's translation of “the Vita Antiqua,” which Talbot claims, is "the version closest to the original Life of the sixth or seventh century."67 Given the difficulty with setting an exact date shows its wide range of influence. Time and time again, the transgender Imago Dei narrated in trans hagiography continues to be craved by a society that continually slips back into a fixed and reductive vision of creation as cis male and female. A significant feature of “the Vita Antiqua” Marinos is that it contains culturally

66 “Genesis,” Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Vulgate): Holy Bible in Latin. 1:27. (Stuttgart, Germany: German Bible Society, 2007). 67 Talbot, 2. 269

rich and theologically instructive dialog not found in some later condensed versions. As

Talbot describes, "The anonymous author writes in a simple and vivid style, making extensive use of dialogue and omitting the characteristic prooimion."68

Out of this near original versions dialog, comes not only an image of a trans saint but through him to the God that created him as an Imago Dei. When Marino's father tells him that he cannot enter the monastery because he is not a cisgender man, he responds that his soul is on the line in this matter and that the making of Marinos as a man of God is like God's making of the man, Marinos. “The one who saves the soul is like the one who created it.”69 Who is the one who made Marinos into the saint he is? Who is the one who saves Marinos? I argue that the narrative offers answers nestled in one image: the

Imago Transvesti. In this short essay, I unpack the Imago Dei of St. Marinos by focusing first on how the marginalization of the saint contrasts with the world’s sexist and transphobic reduction of gender diversity, then how the transition of the saint as an act of salvation that embodies the creative, transformational, and reforming image of the

Creator.

Early Christian concepts of Imago Dei affirm a diverse and dynamic Creation. A contemporary treatise on Imago Dei is found in "De Trinitate,” by Augustine of Hippo from the fifth century would still have been in circulation by the time of Marinos.70 In it,

Augustine argues that creation begins as a seed within each soul. Life, Augustine writes,

“if it is made after the image of God … then from the moment when that nature so marvelous and so great began to be, whether this image be so worn out as to be almost

68 Talbot, 2. 69 Talbot, 87. 70 Augustine. The Trinity. Stephen McKenna trans. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). 270

none at all, or whether it be obscure and defaced, or bright and beautiful, certainly it always is.”71 Often one’s Imago Dei is hidden, yet as that person grows it is revealed. The process of constructing the self, then, can be a co-creative act of affirming the Imago Dei.

Augustine writes, “in the soul of man, i.e. the rational or intellectual soul, [is] that image of the Creator.” From a seed, this Imago Dei is not actualized from birth but is revealed when each person affirms the special (set apart/sacred) Reason of their creation.

Granting the Imago Dei as an act of creation and not merely a set of created things it is easier to understand how Imago Tranvesti arouse within Trans Hagiography as testament to the divinely reasoned diversity and dynamism within God’s creation. Indeed, within an Augustinian Imago Dei and Marinian Imago Transvesti, marginalization and transition function to affirm the holy creation of one’s life in contrast to worldly designs.

In later discussions, the work of Imago Tramsvesti on the world itself, in resisting and changing systems of gender will be explored as a form of Imitatio Christi, what I call the

Imitatio Transvesti. As liberation theologian Thomas Reynolds affirms this in his book,

Vulnerable Communion, “The Imago Dei is a Imitatio Dei.”72 To be an image is both to reflect the substance of the reflected but also the action. Imago Transvesti embodies that sacred dynamism that continually grows and challenges the limits of creation’s seedlings.

As embodiment of Imago Dei, trans saints offer alternatives to a patriarchal cisgender society that divides, reduces, and constrains God’s dynamic creation. A core power within hagiography as writing about holiness is that sacredness shows the flaws of the world through the contrast of divine differences. In "The Centrality of Margins," Amy

Ogden argues that the Imago Dei of saints, including the Imago Transvesti, are framed

71 Ibid., 6.874. 72 Thomas E Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008), 175. 271

the margins, marking them as set apart. The saint, Ogden writes, "calls attention to the profoundly marginal identity of all saints: from a terrestrial, political standpoint, their behavior relegates them to the edges of society, while from a spiritual perspective, it locates their identity in the overlap between the human and the divine.”73 By persevering through cis models of embodiment and oppression, trans saints offer an image of God’s sacred otherness, an alternative way of life that resists a damaging world

The problem of the world is presented and represented by Marinos father. The retired man he tells his child that he must go to a monastery to become a monk. Rejecting his worldly life, the father gives it to his child. “My child," says the father, "behold, all that I own I place in your hands, for I am departing in order to save my soul.”74 The transfer of possessions is likely meant to be a gift. The child will be orphaned but will be cared for by the remnants of the father's inheritance. The circumstance of many trans youth follow just such a similar narrative. The older generations maintain a world full of sexism, homophobia, patriarchies, transphobia, and gender binaries which at a certain age they may condemn but nonetheless despair of changing. Something about the world he regards as impeding his spiritual life. He rejects the sin (the spiritual distance from God) and gives it to the child. As a result, younger generations inherit the sins of the father.

As a savvy trans youth, Marinos is aware that the world he inherits will lead to his destruction and calls out his father for leaving him such a burden. Turning the exchange back on his father, Marinos calls out the gift for what it is. “Father," says Marinos, "do you wish to save your own soul and see mine destroyed?"75 The father is eschewing the gender of the world for a gender set apart. The child, likewise wants to eschew the gender

73 Ogden, 8. 74 Talbot, 87. 75 Ibid. 272

the world assigned and accept a gender set apart. If the worldly gender is not good enough for the father, why for the child? The trans saints life is a mirror for the father to see how he only continues on a lineage of destructive systems, an inheritance of sexism and transphobia. The trans saint's life serves as a mirror for all readers to contemplate.

Too often, social justice movements allow one marginalized group to escape from its system of oppression while leaving other populations (even former allies) at risk.

As an Imago Dei, the destruction of the Imago Transvesti has grave repercussions.

In Marinos Christian context, to be prevented from transitioning to a spiritual life as a monk is to risk the natural as well as the supernatural death of the transgender soul. The sins of the patriarchy work to keep him tethered to it: the reduction of sexual diversity to a gender binary, the reduction of gender to genitals and procreative ability, and the social limits that inhibit the reassignment of gender. To bring the trans child into the monastery as a monk is to be like the Good Shepherd of scripture. "Do you not know what the Lord says?" Marinos asks his father. "That the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep?”76

There are dangers in allowing Marinos to transition but the risks are necessary if the father is to save his child. Put another way, Marinos is asking, "would you rather have a dead and damned daughter or a living son?" Or again, "is it not worth the risk accepting your son’s transition if that is what saves not only his life but also his soul?"

The patriarch’s worries are continued by the monastery’s superior when he ejects

Marinos from the community, following accusations of impregnating a local girl. When questioned, Marinos confesses, “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned as a man.”77

Readers know that Marinos does not have the genitals to impregnate the woman but the

76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 90. 273

monk decides that protecting his manhood from question is more important than divulging truths that would prove him innocent. The Father hears Marinos saying that "as a man" he has sinned in impregnating the woman, while Marinos means that he has sinned by not being fully forthright in what way he exists, "as a man." Misunderstanding and sexual misconduct causes trouble for Marinos. The one corporate sin extends from another. If not for conventions of prejudice against trans men and women, Marinos would not be in trouble. In this critical way, the Vita tells Marinos that for the Trans Saint there may not be any home for them in a sexist world with so few positive images.

In various ways, the trans saint faces off against worldly sins of sexism and transphobia. Hotchkiss identifies the repeating feature of the trans saint’s battle between center and margins, "elements of flight, disguise, calumny, and dramatic anagnorisis.”78

As an Imago Dei, the trans saint of hagiography embodies a divine model that will continually contrast the concerns of the world. Yet hagiography does not merely mark these differences and conflict but turns them to positive meaning. If, as Hotchkiss writes,

"transvestite saints reveal much about gender definitions and cultural biases based on gender," then trans saints also embody an alternative vision of gender that stands in sacred contrast to the sexist and transphobic systems of the world.79 In other words, the

Imago Transvesti uses the margins that frame it in order to highlight the powerful message of personal and social transformation it embodies.

Imago Transvesti is an image of transition as a form of becoming Christian. In the

Middle Ages, Christian salvation focused on introducing changes into individual and collective lives in order to bring out the hidden Imago Dei of creation. Especially for

78 Hotchkiss, 15. 79 Ibid., 16. 274

transvestites, gender affirming processes focused on clothing recreates central elements of baptism. Davis writes, "the act of changing garments evokes… the Pauline baptismal formula of Galatians 3.27-28: 'As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”80 While God makes all people Imago Dei, the baptism ceremony acknowledges that the life the world assigns is not the one God intends. As how many trans persons assert that sex change processes are gender affirmation, changing clothes is a transformation that is also a reformation of Imago Transvesti and Imago Dei.

The Image of God and Gods image of the trans saint is not always readily visible to the world. Arriving at one's authentic self often involves battling the gender divides and demands of a cisgender world. A monastery is a location that divides men and women from one another, even certain kind of men from other kinds of men: monks.

Affirming monastic exclusivity, Marinos father asks, “Child, what am I to do with you?

You are a female, and I desire to enter a monastery. How then can you remain with me?"81 Calling Marinos his child, he begins by affirming their familial bonds, yet ends with the implicit rejection of this bond once he enters the monastery. A father cannot be a father when he is a monk and Marinos will not be welcome. This is a bit of dramatic irony, a thesis that the Vita will argue against. Marinos will prove that he can be accepted as this exclusive form of man, a monk, and as another form of man, a father.

Before gender reassignment moves forward, Marinos must reframe the problem from one of body to one of relation. Reflecting a patriarchal anti-trans, anti-woman bias,

Marinos decries, “it is through the members of your sex that the devil wages war on the

80 Davis, 35. 81 Talbot, 87. 27 5

servants of God.”82 While the life of a man, especially an abstinent monk, has very little to do with genitalia, they are devices through which cisgender exclusivity is enacted. The patriarch ignores the way in which his child would use his body, treating him as a passive object for another's agency. The devil wages a war and Marinos is merely a medium.

Following Aristotle's theory of sex, the patriarch treats women's genitals as instrumental substances on which active male genitals asserts form.83 Marinos does is not expected to have agency, consent, or control over his genitals. By insisting on this powerlessness, he is once again asserting his role as a member of the patriarchy to define Marinos gender.

Marinos responds that changing his genre of embodiment is much easier if one focuses on the more relevant parts of the body and eschew concerns over the genitals. "I shall first cut off the hair of my head, and clothe myself like a man," he says. There are differences in the culturally defined genres of medieval manhood and womanhood.84

There were styles of hair coded masculine and those coded feminine. Even among men, monks wore their hair differently than other men. Yet hair is changeable. Therefore, gender is changeable, not only in society but in the body. One can change the body to change how society treats that body. Simone de Beauvoir insists that one is not born a woman but becomes a woman.85 Likewise, in medieval monastic culture, one is not born a monk but becomes a monk. Rejects cis assumption that gender is unchanging, Marinos declares he will be able to "enter the monastery with you" and become a monk.

The subtle differences in Marinos’ body are well within the diversity of medieval masculinity. "After she lived thus for a few years in the monastery," records the Vita of

82 Ibid. 83 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals. Arthur Platt trans. (Blacksburg, VA : Virginia Tech., 2001). 84 Talbot, 87. 85 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (NY: Vintage Books, 1973). 301. 276

Marinos, "[they] considered her to be a eunuch, for she was beardless and of delicate voice."86 Because of their respective inability to impregnate a woman unaided by modern science, a medieval trans man and eunuch are effectively abstinent from this kind of reproduction; while both may engage in sexual acts. The monastery not only accepts

Marinos as a man but regards the trans man as exemplary. Many regard the particularities of his trans monkhood as a natural extension of monkhood, "the result of her great asceticism."87 Being a monk or eunuch is not a masculinity into which one is born. Such men are set apart artificially to become a new kind of men. "Day by day, the child advanced in all the virtues, in obedience, in humility, and in much asceticism," records

Talbot’s version of the Life of Marinos.88 A tran monk knows, perhaps more than most, that one is not born a monk but become a monk.

To conclude, the image of God in the Imago Transvesti is a reformation of a divine image through sacred transitions marked by the changing of clothes. By setting aside the clothes and habit of a woman, then taking on the monk’s robes, Marinos not only is affirmed as a man but a sainted Christian. As image of early Christianity, the trans saint embodied the radical changes to which all Christians are called. "The Pauline metaphor appears to have been incorporated into the earliest baptismal ceremonies," writes Hotchkiss, "in the removal of clothing and, after immersion, the putting on of new white robes…. The initiate is described as transformed, reborn, and united with Christ."89

An escape from the worldly constraints of womanhood, ends for Marinos in being reborn as an exemplary man of Christ. As an image framed by margins, Imago Transvesti is

86 Talbot, 88. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Hotchkiss, 21. 277

nonetheless central to a medieval image of God’s creation.

C. Imitatio Transvesti in the Vita of St. Marinos

As genre of writing difference, trans hagiography goal is to offer an image of sacred life that inspires imitation. Davis offers Marinos as epitomizing Imago Tranvesti as a transition that leads Imitatio Transvesti through the establishment of a model of

Christian imitation, "it should also be noted that the story of Mary/Marinos is primarily a drama of elaborate personal transformation, a grand exchange of otherness."90 The “grand exchange of otherness” is one respect concerns Marinos gender transition and his transition from worldly margins to God as the center of Creation. In another way, this grand exchange of otherness is the effect of producing Imitatio Tranvesti in society, the creation of trans likeness in different people. A model for trans and cis communities alike, the trans saint offers models by which cisgender limits on God’s creation can be liberated and the damage it has done healed.

Images inspire imitations, Imitatio Christi from Imago Dei, Imitatio Transvesti from Imago Transvestis. While Imitatio Christi has a long tradition in Christian thought, imitation of God has roots in the Image of God from Genesis. The etymology of Imitatio demonstrates a fairly old and consistent meaning, imitation. The word derives from the

Latin root, “imitari” from the Proto-Indo-European, “im-eto-” (*aim) from which the word Imago, or image, is derived.91 Imitation is the production of the same in the difference, the self in the other, in a line that connects Creation to creation. Imitation is

90 Davis, 34. 91 "imitation, n.,". OED Online. (Accessed 1 April 2017). 278

the process that produces images. If these images, such as Imago Transvesti, effectively encourage Imitatio Transvesti, then the result will be more images of the trans saint.

Consequently, Imitatio Transvesti will be the affirmation of more transgender lives and the transformation of non-trans lives into engines for trans justice as a way of following the way of the Imitatio Christi and becoming an Imago Dei.

The Imitatio Christi, or imitation of Christ, is a central thesis in Christianity even as its language and doctrines were being developed. Indeed, the name the early Church gave themselves, “The Way,” and the later name, “Christians,” function to transform each devotee into an image in imitation of Christ. In the Book of Ephesians, St. Paul calls the “sanctos,” i.e. “God’s holy people” (NIV) or “saints” (RSVCE), to live in imitation of

God. Paul writes, “estote ergo imitatores Dei sicut filii carissimi” (Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God, NIV).92

According to Paul, saints are those who live Imitatio Christi. As will be shown, this imitation, whether Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Transvesti, is characterized by acts of extraordinary love and sacrifice that inspires others to love and sacrifice.

. In the early Church, roughly a century before The Vita of St. Marinos, Augustine of Hippo published his confessions where he likewise argued that the way of the saint is one of Imitatio Christi which in turns prompts others to follow in likewise imitation. In

Book II, Augustine writes, “perverse te imitantur omnes …. sed etiam sic te imitando indicant creatorem te esse omnis naturae, et ideo non esse quo a te omni modo recedat”

(All things thus imitate thee--but pervertedly… But, even in this act of perverse imitation,

92 “Ephesians.” Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Vulgate): Holy Bible in Latin. 5:1. (Stuttgart, Germany: German Bible Society, 2007). 279

they acknowledge thee to be the Creator of all nature, and recognize that there is no place whither they can altogether separate themselves from thee).93 There are distortions of the

Imitatio Christi in any creature, including the Imitatio Transvesti, but God transforms each division from the divine into a new light and road back to the origin. In the end, innovations in the Imitatio Transvesti will be reclaimed as the trans saint’s co-creative (or sub-creative) imitation of God the Creator in acting actualization of their life.

When The Vita of Marinos began to be circulated it inspired imitators and other images of trans saints with their own trans hagiographies. By the late Middle Ages, an evident Imitatio Transvesti has arisen around Marinos, enfolded in the work of Thomas

Aquinas. In a study of Marinos effect on medieval theology, Davis notes, "In the Summa

Theologica, Thomas Aquinas considered the case of Joan of Arc in reference to St.

Marina/St. Marinos. Aquinas writes... if the brave virgin Marina pleased God in the habit of a spiritual man, how much less does this prophetic virgin in warlike arms offer; rather she will be able to fight to defend and protect the state and the common good."94 Rooted in the origins of the early Church, Marinos becomes a narrative and foundation for later trans saints to be built upon. On this rock, Christ builds his transgender church.

If early Christian saints follow St. Augustine assertion, “Let them be an example unto the faithful by living before them and stirring them up to imitation,” then I argue that the Imitatio Transvesti as a key feature of trans hagiography must work to at once imitate Christ and call on others to follow through imitation of the saint.95 The trans life turns from something that is supposed to imitate cisgender life into a model of imitation

93 Augustine, Confessions. XVIII. Carolyn J.B.. Hammond ed. and trans, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 94 Davis, 56 95 Augustine, XXI.xiii. 280

for trans and cis people alike. There is something authentic that inspires copies. In the first case, Imitatio Transvesti occurs to bring justice for the trans community. Like the sacrifice of Christ brings others to feel the passion and suffering they endured so too the sacrifice of trans lives encourages the renunciation of sinful systems they underwent. In the second case, Imitatio Transvesti occurs for the improvement of cis community, to liberate them from their own destructive divisions and limits. In both cases, imitation is enacted for the glorification of the truth and creativity of God.

In the Poetics, Aristotle names empathy, solidarity, and catharsis as key features of imitation, especially in tragedy. “Tragedy,” writes Aristotle, “is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity.”96 In other words, it is not enough that the work of the tragic figure is taken on but the trouble of the imitated, such as the trans saint, becomes the trouble of other subjects. Before Aristotle, Plato called empathic solidarity, inspiration or divine madness. In Ion, Plato defines inspiration as “a divinity moving you… For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.”97 In a way, through the

Imitatio Transvesti, the trans saint as well as his devotees are drawn into a divine madness brought on Imitatio Christi. The wondrousness and marvelousness of trans saints in turn points back to the Creator of all wonders, the Imago Dei.

After Marinos death, the body of the saint is revealed for the monastery, causing great commotion. A chorus of cries arises in the monastery response to the saint’s body.

The effect of these cries is a spreading of the disturbance. Elsewhere in the monastery, records the Life of Marinos, "The superior, hearing their cries, asked them, 'What

96 Aristotle, Poetics I.xi. George Whalley trans, John Baxter and Patrick Atherton, ed. Montreal, (Buffalo: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997). 97 Aristotle, “Ion,” Dialogues of Plato. Benjamin Jowett trans. (CT: New Haven: University Press,1989). 281

troubles you so?'"98 The first response to the trans body is inarticulate emotion.

Nonetheless, the reaction draws others in to go deeper into the mystery. This is followed by a question. Yet the question is not concerning the trans body but the disturbance. What is it exactly that disturbs those who regard the trans body? What is it in the world that makes the revelation of transgender such a cause for outcry. And they said, “Brother

Marinos is a woman.” The trouble that it inspire in the community arises from the realization of the suffering the trans person endured in life which now they share.

The power the trans body has the ability to transform a community’s divisions and relations with trans bodies. The leader is described, "[d]rawing near and seeing."99

The monks held the trans brother at a distance and did not see him for the blessing he is.

The trans body reverses this marginalization, not by changing Marinos but by drawing the community to the margins. The saint does not need to move, he is "set apart" in a way that brings him closer to God. As other Christians desire that closeness to truth and love, go to where he is to see the truth he embodied. The Vita says that leader, "cast himself down at [Marinos’] feet."100 While the superior once cast out the saint, setting him below the lowest in the monastery, the gesture inverts the relations of the world. The leader is caught by desire to prostrate himself lower than the lowest part of the trans monk's body.

Whereas in life, the trans saint was subjugated, in death he is held in honor.

Even in death, the dead trans monk drives others to allyship. On his knees before

Marinos as his confessor, the superior cries, “Forgive me, for I have sinned against you. I shall lie dead here at your holy feet until such time as I hear forgiveness for all the

98 Talbot, 93. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 282

wrongs that I have done you.”101 Too often society is better at mourning the dead than they are caring for or vindicating the truth of trans persons when they are alive. Yet the superiors tears extend the hope that death is not too late to ask for justice. The superior feels his sin and the sin of his community as a pain is his body as it had effects on

Marinos, affirming an Imitatio Transvesti. In modern terminology, the superior enacts a kind of ally-ship. As with Marinos, so with him. If injury (even death) is done to

Marinos, then so with him until the trans person releases him. In one way or another, the body of the trans saint become an impetus for more trans or trans-like sainthood.

For medieval theologians and hagiographers, imitation was a form of devotion to first Mover and Creator of all images. In Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf offer a variety of meanings for “mimesis” in the history of Western thought, “including the act of resembling, of presenting the self, and expression as well as mimicry, imitation, representation, and nonsensuous similarity.”102 If not all then many of these meanings were active in some way for medieval understandings of imitation and sustained a tension between authenticity and artifice. In some ways, difference remains between an ally and the target community, there is still a presentation of the superior’s self as cisgender. However, like an ally in war imitation declares that what happens to one, such as an attack, will be answered by the ally “as if” it were occurring to them.

Once again, the phrase “as if” remains an active and critical idea in Imitatio Transvesti.

Imitatio Transvesti functions by making copies. By creating likeness in difference

Imitatio is a form of production and reproduction that uses trans and non-trans bodies alike. After the discovery of Marinos’ body in the monastery, more and more people are

101 Ibid. 102 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf. Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society. Don Reneau trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 1. 283

drawn to Marinos, including those who slandered him, to learn his embodied truths.

"Hearing this, the innkeeper was astonished and wondered greatly at his words," recounts the Vita, "And the superior took the innkeeper and showed him that was a woman. At this began to lament and to marvel at what had happened."103 The text uses various words with the meaning of wonder or marvel. These are reactions to bodies with great differences, sacred or profane. Wonder has the ability to draw people to Marinos, like a relic. With each new devotee, word spreads and more drawn to the trans saint, caught by

Imitatio Transvesti. In the end, the distinction between trans and non-trans bodies blur.

Trans hagiography embodies the radical idea that Imitatio Transvesti is a form of

Imitatio Christi, that the affirmation of the transgender is not only actualization of Imago

Dei but that by affirmation comes liberation from the worldly constraints of cisgender.

Through the truth of imitation society will be set free and lives will be healed. In the medieval hagiographic tradition, liberation and healing usually are marked as miracles.

Hagiographies generically feature miracles as signs of God's glory and of the grace embodied by the saint. The Life of Marinos the Monk boast a series of miracles usually expressed as the liberation from demons; signs which occur in death as in life perhaps in an anticipation of turning the saint’s body into holy relics. In the first case, these demons may be the sufferings of particular lives while the second case suggests a wider liberation of society from cisgender divisions back to the diversity of Imago Dei.

The first miracle affirms the life giving power of the Imitatio Transvesti. Shortly after Marinos’ father died, the saint receives from God, "the gift of healing those who were troubled by demons." In the Church, demonic possession signified many different conditions. A clue to the demon’s meaning comes when the text description of release as

103 Talbot, 94. 284

healing, "For if she placed her hand upon any of the sick, they were immediately healed."104 The materiality of the contact and the illness undercut ideas that Imitatio

Transvesti is only a play of signs. For many, trans embodiment is a liberation from the demons of cisgender. The laying on of hands was a common trope in hagiography where saints physically touched those suffering an illness. From this contact with the hands of

St. Marinos, people became freed from their demons and healed. To this day, one of the hands of the saint remains venerated as a relic with the power to heal lives.

The second reference to Marino's miraculous materiality has more dispersed effects as it works to liberation the community from destructive cisgender norms. The miracle comes after when the saint's dead body is on display and the women who accused him of sexual impropriety, "appeared, possessed by a demon." What marks the woman as possessed by demons is unclear, yet signs were immediately visible. Coming to see his remains, the truth of his falsehood and prejudice against Marinos is revealed. She admits, before Marinos’ body, that the saint did not (indeed could not) impregnate her. Instead, she admits that she falsely slandered the trans monk, "confessing the truth." This miracle then not only set the stage of another healing miracle but complete the concluding second motion of a hagiography: provided a narrative that made sense of and glorified the body.

In death, as in life, the trans monk inspires liberation from cisgender untruths.

The revelation of the trans saint’s embodied truth unbinds the community from lies yet also directs cis and trans persons alike towards other ways to live out gender.

When the woman tells the community, “she had been seduced by the soldier,” she illuminates the exchange of a soldier for the monk as the father of the child.105 A soldier

104 Ibd., 89. 105 Ibid., 89. 285

is a man of the violent materiality of the world. Yet while he was the child's biological father, giving material life to the child, Marinos become the child's present father, giving him spiritual life. In yet another way, Marinos lived as a man and father in a way exceeding other cisgender men. Although the materiality of the saint confessed this already, the miracle of the woman's appearance provides the narrative that clarifies the embodied truth and the truth of other bodies. The father of the child has much to learn from the trans monk who lived as a father even though he was born without a phallus.

Imitatio Transvesti is not only for trans faithful, also liberating cis men and women.

After the woman's miraculous appearance and confession before the body of St.

Marinos, she is healed from demons and brought closer to God. The healing occurs sometime later, yet instantaneously, " at the tomb of the blessed Mary."106 Unlike the laying on of hands performed during Marinos’ life, here the healing occurs indirectly.

After the woman was healed, the Vita describes, "everyone glorified God because of this sign, and because of patient endurance, for [St. Marinos] vigorously endured until death, refusing to make herself known." This is much like the need for confession to restore a believer to a state of grace before they receive communion. Before the woman can approach the shrine of Mary (often associated with the spiritual life of women) she must confess her sin against the saint. In other words, in order for the woman to move closer to a grace-filled womanhood, she must repair her relations with the trans community.

In life and death, Christ drove out demons and laid hands on the sick in what is traditionally called miracles but which scripture, especially the Gospel of John call signs.

As signs, these acts that inspire many to imitate Christ, point to an Imago Dei that Creates and re-Creates the world in diverse and dynamic ways through human contact. Trans

106 Ibid., 94. 286

hagiography follows the generic function of saints lives to produce the protagonist as an

Imago Dei that is then reproduced through the Imitatio Transvesti of followers. The relation of the object, an image of God, into an action, the imitation of God, from a common root word (as well as a common divine Word) affirms an image of Creation that is ongoing and collaborative. One is not merely born a transgender saint but becomes one and that this transition always occurs in community. Thus naming saints “those set apart” is important to the social movement that directs society away from normative centers towards the margins and revaluation of trans lives that may heal and liberate the world.

D. Imago Transvesti in the Book of Margery Kempe

As a genre of embodiment and literature, hagiography creates continuity through diversity. Evident generic features exist across time but are embodied in uniquely and personally. Each saint may be said to be set apart Imago Dei but each image is distinct.

Likewise, the Imago Mundi that the saint turns away from changes over time. Each saint may be models for Imitatio Christi yet lived in different ways and circumstances. Thus, while lives and stories may be composed in association with trans hagiographic texts, the process and ends of each may be unique. Thus, whether or not Margery Kempe is recognized as a saint by the Catholic or Orthodox churches, nonetheless her Book constructs a hagiography that clearly models Kempe according to saints and sections of the narrative according to saints’ lives, following in the tradition of Imago Transvesti and

Imitatio Transvesti as modeled by “the Life of St. Marinos the Monk.”

Between 1413 and 1415, Kempe is traveling through the Holy Land and Rome,

287

during which time she is given a persistent Imago Transvesti. In a vision, she is living as a trans virgin, transforming the image of herself from a mother (as the world has assigned her to be) to a virgin (as God commanded). The transition from mother to virgin is embodied not only by exchange of clothing, dark colors for whites, but from the locomotion of the travel. Quite literally, on the road she is more free and boundaries of identity more fluid. Also, Jerusalem and Rome, the centers of Christian world, function to re-center the trans saint. In England, often shown on the margins of the medieval Mappa

Mundi, Kempe is marginalized for her revelations from God and later for her trans virginity. Moving from the margins to the center coincides with her movement from the

Imago Mundi, the image of her worldly self, to the Imago Dei, God’s image of her.

Around the summer of 1413, the Imago Transvesti is given to Kempe in a vision, wherein God commands her to go on pilgrimage, promising her freedom and protection if she will mark herself as an Imago Dei by wearing white clothes. God commands, "down I say to the I wyl that thu were clothes of white and non other color, for thu schal ben arayd aftyr my wyl" (Daughter, I say to you that I will that you be in clothes of white and no other color, for you will be arrayed after my will).107 White clothes on a woman are a medieval signifier of virginity. Kempe worries over her embodiment; marked by years of childbearing. While Genesis 1.27 asserts that God creates humanity in a divine image, including gender, "creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam ad imaginem Dei creavit illum masculum et feminam creavit eos" (God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them), the medieval Imago

Dei must combat the Imago Mundi and the gender culture assigns.108

107 Staley, 728-3. 108 Genesis 1.27. 288

Wearing white, Kempe would be insisting that the Imago Dei that God has set in her heart (virginity) is more true than the truth assigned to her body (motherhood). The motherhood may have been the will of her husband and the world, but the virginity is the will of God. The radicalness of this supernatural command is evident in the phrase,

"whyte and non other colowr." God is clarifying that Kempe would be taking on the identity of a virgin and rejecting her identity as a mother. The color of the one identity will not be seen in the other. The function of clothes is to assert identity markers in ways that usually hide or overrule the body. The body may be suggested but not seen when clothes is covering it. No word is given from God that her body will be changed but rather its meaning will be reassigned and overruled by the clothing.

The Imago Transvesti often contradicts the assigned genders of the world. For fear of embodying this contradiction and the battles her body would have to suffer as a result, Kempe pleads to God, "A, der Lord, yf I go arayd on other maner than other chast women don, I drede that the pepyl wyl slawndyr me. Thei wyl sey I am an ypocryt and wondryn upon me" (Dear Lord, if I go arrayed as a virgin, I dread people will slander me.

They will say I am a hypocrite and stare at me).109 A medieval woman, Kempe is aware of how clothing signifies distinct gender identities, between men and women, as well as between women. Virgins wear certain clothes to identify themselves, wives others clothes. To wear white clothes would be to declare that she is a virgin. One may transition from the identity of virgin to mother but not from mother to virgin.

Kempe fears the scorn that comes from such a transition, particularly being a hypocrite. A hypocrite is one who says they are one way and behaves in another way. If

Kempe says she is a virgin but has given birth to children, others will say that she is this

109 Staley, 733-5. 289

special kind of liar. Yet this is what God commands in showing her this vision. "Ya, dowtyr," God says, "the mor wondryng that thow hast for my lofe, the mor thu plesyst me" (Yes, daughter, the more they wonder at you as you live the life I command, the more you please me).110 God is showing her a true revelation of herself as a virgin. So far, this Imago Dei is only visible to her. To embody this Imago Tranvesti, like other trans saints, she would be taking a risk of becoming a target. Yet by embodying the invisible truth of the Imago Transvesti, set apart as a trans saint, Kempe is making the

Imago Dei visible to the world. She will be revealing the Imago Transvesti to others as

God has revealed it to her and make the world consider the diversity in God's creation.

Wanting to test the truth of the Imago Transvesti as Imago Dei, Kempe delays for a time until she can get validation of her revelation from the Church. Around 1413, she seeks Bishop Repingdon to affirm the command for her transition. Hearing her plea to wear white as a virgin, the Bishop gives her a discouraging response, " I have take my cownsel, and my cownsel wyl not gyf me to professe yow in so synguler a clothyng wythowtyn bettyr avysement" (I have considered with consul, and my consul will not allow me to affirm that you should wear such clothing without better advisement).111 The repetition of the word "consul" affirms how Kempe's Imago Dei is elided, marginalized, and bound by the discourse of the world. Society affirms that she is a wife and mother.

Social norms are that mothers do not wear white. The Bishop is not willing to take a risk on an Imago Transvesti that he cannot see and contradict the Imago Mundi he can see.

Where the Bishop keeps the question open is in allowing Kempe to go on the commanded pilgrimage that she might prove the truth of her Imago Dei by living it. The

110 Ibid., 735-6 111 Ibid., 796-9. 290

Bishop allows, "ye sey be the grace of God ye wyl go to Jerusalem. Therfor prayth to

God that it may abyden tyl ye come fro Jerusalem that ye be bettyr prevyd and knowyn"

(You see by the grace of God that you will go to Jerusalem. Therefore pray to God that you may abide until you come back from Jerusalem with better proof and knowledge).112

Pilgrimages by their difficulty were used as tests of unseen graces. Like how many trans persons describe transition as a journey, the work of turning the invisible Imago Dei into a visible embodiment takes time and effort. In other words, the Bishop insists that he will only believe what he can see. If Kempe embodies and lives the narrative of trans virginity on pilgrimage, the Imago Transvesti will be given a form the Bishop cannot deny.

The vision of the Imago Transvesti can be revealed, transitions are often not a smooth process full of starts, stops, and setbacks. Kempe does set off on pilgrimage, yet not until the summer of 1414. Rejected by fellow pilgrims, Kempe prays to for help. In reply, God again gives her a command and a vision of herself as a virgin, " I schal ordeyn for the ryth wel and bryng the in safté to Rome and hom ageyn into Inglond wythowtyn ony velany of thi body yyf thow wilt be clad in white clothys and weryn hem as I seyd to the whil thu wer in Inglond" (I will ordain your wellness and bring you safely to Rome and home to England without any violence, if you will wear the white clothes I instructed of you while you were in England).113 As is common in saint's lives, Imago Dei arrive when saints are at their most vulnerable. Rather than being a threat to her wellness, the

Imago Transvesti becomes the mode by which her wellness is ordained and assured.

The trans saint of this hagiography, Kempe accepts the invisible truth of the

Imago Transvesti, although she fears she will now be called a liar and hypocrite. To this

112 Ibid., 799. 113 Ibid., 1758-61. 291

worry, God assures, "I am the spirit of God... Thu fondist me nevyr deceyvabyl, ne I bid the no thyng do but that whech is worshep to God and profyte to thy sowle yyf thu wilt do theraftyr" (I am the spirit of God... you found me never deceptive, now I bid you nothing but what is good to God and profitable to your soul if you will follow me hereafter).114 Often trans persons are accused of being in disguise, yet their insistence of demonstrates authenticity over time. Saints are called hypocrites for contradicting the way of the world, but are vindicated by the end of their stories. Marinos is rejected by his community on charges of hypocrisy, yet he is vindicated in the end by God. Marking

Kempe as such a saint, God promises Kempe that her story will follow likewise.

There is a critical difference between the truth of Imago Mundi that it is made and reasoned from other true things while Imago Dei are revealed by the Creator of Logos. If as Augustine writes in "De Trinitate”, “in the soul of man… [is] that image of the

Creator,” then the truth of the Imago Dei within Kempe is true although it is not yet seen.

115If she embodies the Imago Transvesti, the charges of inconstancy will fall before the constant image of truth God makes of her. The promises of God and creature found in the

Imago Transvesti prove true over the course of the pilgrimage from Jerusalem to Rome.

Shortly after praying and receiving the revelation of the Imago Dei once again, Kempe discovers an Irishman with a bent back who speaks English named Richard. Although he is uncertain of the truth and wisdom of the Image she shares with him of their journey,

Kempe is able to convince him through her persistence and insistence of God's truth.

Occurring in private revelation remains consistent, yet delayed until Kempe changes enough in person and circumstance to be able to transition. To the surprise of

114 Ibid., 1756 115 Augustine, The Trinity, 6.874. 292

many, including Richard and the group of pilgrims who had abandoned her in Jerusalem,

Kempe and her friend arrives safely in Rome. There, Kempe commits to being constant to her word as well and makes moves to transition. When in Rome, Kempe ordered white clothes and wore them "as sche was comawndyd for to do yerys beforn in hir sowle be revelacyon, and now it was fulfilt in effect” (as it was commanded years before in her revelation, so it was now fulfilled).116 In committing herself to the Imago Transvesti,

Kempe "fulfill" several promises. God's Imago Dei is proven, the Bishop contingency is answered, Kempe's promise is fulfilled. In England, the established order could not see the truth in her Imago Transvesti, yet in Rome it has become visible for all to see.

Once the Imago Mundi is seen beside the Imago Dei, society becomes jealous.

Soon after transitioning, Kempe became the target for a local priest, " He steryd meche pepyl agen hir and seyd mech evyl of hir, for sche weryd white clothyng mor than other dedyn whech wer holyar and bettyr than evyr was sche as hym thowt" (He stirred many people against her and said much evil of her on account of her white clothing; as if she deemed herself holier and better than others, he thought).117 The revelation of Imago

Transvesti can conflict with the world that rejects it. Imago Mundi establish values and norms, setting certain embodiments in the center of its world and others on the margins.

Imago Dei asserts a vision of the world where the margins can be centers of their own. As

Kempe is told to reject all color from her white clothes, so the world feels the force of her rejection. Imago Mundi that judged and condemns her, now fears that she will judge.

The secret of the Imago Dei in hagiographies is its constant insistence through the mutable Imago Mundi that can draw the saint into inconstancy. When in Rome, Kempe is

116 Staley, 1854. 117 Ibid., 1960-3 293

introduced to a Dutch priest who convinces her to confess to him. He asks her, will you do as I bid? 118 Yes, she replies. Having set her up with a promise to submit to any of his instructions, the priest charges her to leave her white clothes and wear black clothes.

Kempe submits to the priest as an authority of the world and God, " than had sche felyng that sche plesyd God wyth hir obediens" (then had the feeling she pleased God with her obedience).119 For Kempe, norms are stronger when voiced by a churchman, when the

Imago Mundi and Dei can purport to speak in one voice. Yet readers know the conflict.

Bound by a new promise in contradiction to the old, Kempe is caught between Imago

Mundi and Imago Dei; each asserting claims, insisting on her constancy and loyalty.

Having abandoned normate motherhood and then trans virginity, Kempe is ridiculed for betraying both her masters. She has fallen into the position described in

Matthew 6:24, "nemo potest duobus dominis servire aut enim unum odio habebit et alterum diliget aut unum sustinebit et alterum contemnet non potestis" (No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other).120 Just as Jesus is describing the jealous conflict between the worldly and divine, Kempe finds herself serving different masters who are giving her conflicting commands and images of herself. The transition back to a wife was most felt as a betrayal by those who had affirmed her virginity. Her friends in Rome could not understand why she gave up on the Imago Transvesti, asked her she had been robbed. No, she replied, then fled Rome. On the road, she runs into one of the priests that had opposed her transition to virgin and smugly applauds that she realized the foolishness of her enjoyid gretly that sche was put fro hir wille and seyd unto hir,Imago Transvesti, "he 'I

118 Ibid., 1966-99. 119 Ibid. 120 “Matthew.” Biblia Sacra Vulgata. 294

am glad that ye gon in blak clothyng" (He greatly enjoyed she had been taken away from her previous choice and said, 'I am glad you have gone back to black clothing').121 At the disappointment of her friends in Rome and the satisfaction of a man she considered her enemy, Kempe began to reconsider her choices. Before the priest could move on, she told him, "Ser, owyr Lord wer not displesyd thow I weryd whyte clothys, for he wyl that I do so" (Sir, our Lord was not displeased that I wore white clothes, for her wills that I do so).122 The Imago Dei has not abandoned her, and she has not entirely abandoned her

Imago Dei. After submitting to the Imago Mundi, Kempe's life becomes more inconstant and full of conflict as Imago Transvesti constantly continues to assert its primacy.

In the end, Imago Transvesti wins out against the inconstancy of Imago Mundi by asserting the constancy that Augustine describes, “if it is made after the image of God

…certainly it always is.” Given her lack of peace during her return to her worldly identity as a mother it is not surprising that upon her return to Rome Kempe also returns to her virgin identity. The Book testifies that while she was in Rome a little before Christmas, our Lord Jesus Christ commanded her, “to gon to hir gostly fadyr, Wenslawe be name, and byddyn hym gevyn hir leve to weryn ageyn hir white clothys" (to go to her confessor, Wenslawe by name, and bid him give her leave to wear her white clothes again).123 Location and locomotion continues to function as representative of transition.

Movement destabilizes her but Rome reasserts the fixity of Imago Transvesti. While she moves, Rome does not. While she changes, the Imago Transvesti does not.

While before she confused the Imago Mundi and the Imago Dei as acting in the same voice, the voice of Christ disrupts and divides this conflation. In the end, the

121 Staley, 1966-99. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., 2136-8. 295

command from God overrules the command from a priest, "whan sche teld hym the wyl of owr Lord, he durst not onys sey nay. And so weryd sche white clothys evyr aftyr"(when she told him the will of our Lord, he dared not say 'no.' And so she would wear white clothes ever after).124 The jealous match between Imago Mundi and Imago

Dei concludes here as Kempe comes to understand that obedience to the church is not always the same as obedience to God, especially when the church becomes the enforcer to worldly gender norms at conflict with Imago Transvesti. Imago Dei of Genesis may be used time and again to assert gender binaries and divisions yet are undone by living out the failure of these social constructs and experiencing the persistence of trans truths.

E. Imitatio Transvesti in The Book of Margery Kempe

Between 1415 and 1418, the trans virgin encounters regular conflicts on account of living out the Imago Transvesti, resulting in a series of struggles that offer a model of life for Christians and those called to live Imitatio Transvesti. Whereas the trans saint is lives in relative peace while abroad, where she is a stranger in a strange land, once she returns to her home country of England, where knows the language, she begins to teach and debate. Abroad, people may merely observe her. At home, people hear her preaching the virtues of her Imitatio Transvesti and causing others to follow it. She moves beyond a wonder to be observed to a social revolution to be reckoned. Three episodes make up the primary contest between the trans virgin and local authorities, collectively producing a drama in the hagiography as the way of the world, the Imitatio Mundi, and the way of the trans saint, Imitatio Transvesti, are brought into contrast and conflict. The first event

124 Ibid., 2136-40. 296

occurs in late 1415 in Norwich with a Vicar. The second event occurs in 1417 with the

Mayor of Leicester. The third event occurs in late 1417 with the Archbishop of York.

Through these conflicts, the Imitatio Transvesti of The Book of Margery Kempe follows in the late medieval scholastic tradition of dialectic argument. Whereas Marinos tale is more passive in its resistance to Imago Mundi, the model Kempe provides shows a more active way of living Imago Transvesti. Centuries later, whereas the passive trans monk is accepted as an official saint, the active trans virgin remains contentious. Yet too few medievalists know about Marinos, Kempe maintains a more active fame or infamy.

The active Imitatio Transvesti refuses to go away, even by being quietly tolerated and integrated. In this way, Kempe’s model insists that even if society does not like who she is and what she does, it will have to deal with transvestism as a part of the world.

Arriving in Norwich in May 1415, Kempe visits the vicar of St. Stephan's Church,

Richard Caister, who interrogates her on her trans identification as a virgin. The Vicar begins their relation combatively, asking, "wher sche had don hir chylde the whech was begotyn and born whil sche was owte, as he had herd seyde" (where she had her child, the one she had conceived and given birth to while she was away, as he had heard). 125

Inverting assumptions, the Vicar suggests that far from being a virgin, she has conceived a child while away. Above all, she is not what she says. Thus, he concludes, she should not present herself as a virgin or face further slander.126 Ever Slander and scandal remains the cutting edge of the world's threat against trans saints. If she will not return to the gender norms asserted by the Imago Mundi, worse assignment will be made for her.

Returning to England, Kempe is better prepared for the wonder of those living

125 Ibid., 2419-21. 126 Ibid. 297

under other images of Creation than her Imago Dei. Openly reaffirming her testimony,

"sche had in hym how it was owr Lordys wyl that sche schulde be clad in white clothyng" (she showed him how it was our Lord willed that she should be clad in white clothing), and says, “Ser, I make no fors so that God be plesyd therwyth” ('Sir, I make no falsehood and God is pleased with me).127 Imago Dei may seem false to a world asserting contrary rules, yet the trans virgin commits no lie, laying out her history and revelations for all to see. When ever then the Vicar does not consent but asks for a fellow clergyman to asses her, she at last rejects their authority under the command from God, "I wil not that thu be governyd be hym" (I will not have you be governed by him).128 A woman once with divided loyalty now affirms she is on the Imago Dei even if the world is not.

Indeed, in the years following her return to England, the trans virgin demonstrates her willingness to undergo struggles to inspire others to join in the Imitatio Transvesti.

On Good Friday, 1415, Kempe prays to be vindicated and revived publicly. She asks that if it is God’s will that she be clad in white, that God should grant her a sign of lightning, thunder, and rain, "so that it hyndir ne noy no thyng that I unworthy may the rathyr fulfillyn thy wil" (so that no one can say nothing about me being unworthy, but rather that I fulfill your will).129 God receives her prayer and confirms that it will be fulfilled on the third day. And so it was. On the next Friday, early in the morning, as she lay in her bed, she saw great lightning, she heard great thunder, and great rain following, and just as quickly it went away again. Kempe receives this as a sign to once again take on her white clothes, "sche purposyd hir fullych to weryn white clothis," (she intended to fulfill

127 Ibid., 2427-9. 128 Ibid., 2430-1. 129 Ibid., 2433-4. 298

wearing white clothes).130 Eventually, Kempe keeps this promise.

As with the show of the storm, the white clothes again attract attention. The Book accounts, "sche was howselyd al in white, and sithen hath sche sufferyd meche despyte and meche schame in many dyvers cuntreys, cyteys, and townys, thankyd be God of alle"

(she was all in white, and suffered much despisement and shame in many counties, cities, and towns, thanks to the God of all).131 Becoming sainted means to be set apart, a living image of God's diverse creation that inspires others into action. Yet this Imago Dei often contradicts the rules of the Imago Mundi. People have negative reactions causing her to become a target time and again. This is all a part of the imitation of Christ, who also suffered. In this way, the Imitatio Transvesti follows the Imitatio Christi, that by suffering may a saint face the persecution of the world in the name of grace.

The trans saint as an imitation of Christ draws others to follow likewise to see and enact such an image. Once she committed to wearing white in Norwich, the problem arouse that she had no money to buy clothes.132 God promises to provide. Shortly, Kempe meets a good man of Norwich that welcomed her gladly and sat listening to her stories.

Kempe shares with him her need for a loan to buy white clothes.133 Not only does he offer financial assistance, he directly labors to make her Imago Transvesti materially possible. The Book accounts that this good man bought white clothe and from it made her a gown and a hood, a girdle, and a cloak.134 By her contingent neediness, being marginalized by her poverty, the trans saint brings others along with her on her way.

By his work, the man not only assists in Kempe's embodiment of the Imago Dei,

130 Ibid., 2436-41. 131 Ibid., 2453-6. 132 Ibid., 2433-56. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 299

he participates in it. When he arrives with the clothing, Kempe and the man share a revelry in the Imago Transvesti, "he browt hir this clothyng and gaf it hir for Goddys lofe, and meche mor goodnes dede to hir for owr Lordys lofe" (He brought her this clothing and gave it to her for God's life, and much more goodness did for her on behalf of our Lord's life).135 By returning to the Imitatio Transvesti, the trans saints brings another to the Imitatio Christi. Both revel in God through the shared work of embodying

Imago Transvesti. With Kempe and Marinos, Aristotle’s definition of tragedy succinctly describes how public contests of the Imitatio Transvesti inspire public resistance, “an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity.”136 Through the series of legal contest, the Imitatio Transvesti occurs to bring justice for the trans community and to liberate the cis community from destructive divisions and limits.

Through repeated performance and the imitation of allies, the trans saint wears down the Imago Mundi. After hearing her defense time and again, as well as the words of allies who authorize and repeat her story, at last the Archbishop surrenders his assault and gives her some money for her troubles.137 Struggle after struggle, Kempe both imitates previous trans saints and creates a model of imitation. Over the centuries, readers continue to read trans hagiographies and become trans saints because of ongoing problems in the world’s limited definitions of gender, as well as through the continuation of a tradition of reclaiming the image and mode of life through the transitioning of gender identity and expression. This is especially true in the late Middle Ages, as women such as

Margery Kempe look back to older stories in order to find alternatives to unlivable conditions. Indeed, by modeling itself on the trans hagiographies of the early Christian

135 Ibid., 2447-56. 136 Aristotle, Poetics, I.xi. 137 Ibid., 3023-28. 300

period, the Book of the Margery Kempe adapted an image and a model for later generations. “Such efforts to mold herself on the examples of holy women anticipate a practice that would become more common by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries…” writes Verini. “Such acts suggest that Margery’s imitation of female exemplars was the forerunner of a practice of female imitation that adumbrated a larger web of female interconnections.”138 Yet this interconnection goes beyond femaleness, existing in the space between and across. The trans monk and the trans virgin share commonalities, even similar genitalia, but what bonds them is a shared struggle, a mutual liberation, and a continuing narrative that builds on those that have come before and lay the seeds for future transitions.

3. The Last Time I Wore a Dress

A. Introduction

What and who makes a saint "a saint?" Is it being an exemplar of values held by the Church? The values of the World? Are saints the embodiment of all things society holds as ideal and normative? This is how saints are often regarded. In the Imago Mundi, saints are those who fit into the picture, in opposition of those sinners who do not fit. An examination of medieval hagiography demonstrates that the conventional vision of saints as Imago Mundi is inaccurate. Saints did not fit in, much like sinners. Marking these saints inverted value systems of the world because they directly opposed, reformed, or resisted the Imago Mundi. Yet what do trans hagiographies look like when the Church no

138 Verini, 384. 301

longer authorizes trans saints and has largely adopted the Imago Dei's exclusion of the

Imago and Imitatio Transvesti? Who are our trans saints today and how are they made?

To explore how the Imago Transvesti works in modern secular hagiography I examine one of the genre's genealogical descents: trans memoir. In form, trans memoirs share many generic features with hagiographies. They tell the life of a trans person. They work to make a misunderstood life of someone who is set apart from the world better understood. Often, these trans memoirs come with the ethical imperative (implicit if it is not overtly stated) that the reader and the world need to transform themselves if they are to better reflect the image of the trans life or to save themselves from the sins of sexism and transphobia. Whether they state a moral or thesis, many trans memoirs today compel ethical changes in a reader's life as trans hagiographies must have medieval readers.

Furthermore, an often unstated or understated goal of trans memoirs (or any memoir) is to garner a certain level of vindication, understanding, and even fame for its subject.

Toward the end of examining trans hagiographies in a modern form and context, I will close read Scholinskis’ The Last Time I Wore a Dress.139 The memoir recounts the years the author spent incarcerated against his will in a mental hospital, in large part because of a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder.140 The book details the extreme lengths the hospital enacted in order to erase the Imago Transvesti from the young trans boy and inscribe the Imago Mundi, the image of a normative cis girl. An additional reason for this study comes from a shared personal context. The town that Scholinski grew up in is the same Polish community in which I lived. Near Chicago, Scholinski was a trans teen a number of years before me, yet if he had been allowed to receive public

139 Scholinski. The Last Time I Wore a Dress. 140 R. Pusceddu, “Clinical characteristics of gender identity disorder,” European psychiatry. 2016. 33. 302

education, we might have graduated from the same high school. Others who do not share time and location, nonetheless share tactics. The pass resistance of Marinos prefigures the quiet defiance that Scholinski will show throughout his stay in the mental hospital.

Likewise, Kempe’s active argument continues a dialectic that builds over the centuries, as layers of sediment that build up a hill, until it joins with the words that Scholinski yells at the medical staff and records for readers in his memoir. In the spirit of the Imitatio

Transvesti, this modern secular trans hagiography tells a particular story that nonetheless has echoes in the medieval archives and will emit repercussions in the future.

The particulars of his life draw sharp distinctions between us, yet this ability to see parts of one's self reflected in the Imago Transvesti of another is a function of the trans hagiography. Just as the cloister of Marinos reveals something about the medieval

Imago Dei and Mundi, so too mental hospital of Scholinski reveal much about the image of transgender and normativity in our world. In order to better understand these images, this examination will occur in two parts in order to counterpoint the study of Marinos and

Kempe. I examine how the memoir presents the conflict between his Imago Transvesti

(as a form of the Imago Dei inscribed in his "soul") and the Imago Mundi of the hospital.

Next, I attend to the relations and habits formed between Scholinski and another mental patient who believes that he is Jesus Christ. The practices of alliance formed between the patient who acts too much like a man and the patient who acts too much like Christ form a secular, mad, modern form of the Imitatio Christi.

B. Image

303

The trans saint functions as a generic image of a population calling for social change, Scholinskis’ memoir presents just such an image of a particular trans person. The effect of becoming familiar with the person, learning their story, and the oppressions they faced has the effect of making that person special in the mind of the reader. That the memoir would be written and read is an honor. Yet an effective memoir, like an effective hagiography, draws readers to regard the subject life as set apart and significant; if not an ethical role model. Yet even if Scholinskis’ memoir does not offer ideals, he may yet be a guide for readers experiencing or seeking to understand and oppose the challenges faced by the particular trans person. In this way, trans memoirs resist the modern binary of saint and sinner. Medieval saints could be both and so too their modern counterparts.

To begin to understand the image of transvestism that Scholinski embodies in his memoir, it is necessary to understand that images are not always visible with and through the eyes but can be constructed and consumed by a variety of media, including narrative.

The image of the cisgender world, the Imago Mundi, that is imposed on transgender youths is just as varied as the image of transvestism, Imago Transvesti, it is supposed to replace. Just as the Imago Dei is supposed to be present in every human life and yet each life is distinct and ever changing, there is something diverse and dynamic about images.

The Imago here concerned are moving images. In this respect, narrative may be better at capturing the living Imago Mundi than static photographs. Thus, without needing to give photographs or fixed details, Scholinski is able to communicate what the Imago Mundi was for him and how it was imposed on his trans life in the mental hospital. "Every morning I lowered my eyelids and let Donna make me up," he recalls. "

If I didn't emerge from my room with foundation, lip-gloss, blush, mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow and feathered hair, I lost points. Without

304

points I couldn't go to the dining room, I couldn't go anywhere, not that we were going many places to begin with. Without points, I was not allowed to walk from the classroom back to the unite without an escort.... Either choice I hated: makeup, or a man trailing in my shadow.”141

Readers are not given a specific image of girlhood being forced onto his body, yet by listing the tools of inscription a generic image of cis femininity is invoked. The color of the lip-gloss did not matter so much as the application. The Imago Mundi is more about the power of execution, the authority of the world to dictate how his gender is embodied, than any specific feature. The point system emphasizes the abstraction of the Imago

Mundi as a value structure to be imposed. Just as there may be varieties of trans saints in

Imago Transvesti, the Imago Mundi that opposes it is able to transcend time period and gender norm as a force of marginalization that at one moment sends one youth to a monastery and at another moment sends another to a mental hospital.

Icons of saints are set apart because they are Imago Dei and not merely images of the world. The transformations of appearance in trans hagiographies show audiences how divine truth can exist just on the edge of what the world can see, the horizon of truth, or just beneath the mundane. While transgender transitions are often imagined by the public as a form of disguise or drag, covering up the identity of the person, for trans saints this

Imago Transvesti reveals in visible ways what society has covered with its own designs.

Scholinski recalls looking at himself done up in the mirror of the mental hospital where he was held and forced into feminine clothes against his will. "I stared in the mirror at the girl who was me, and not me: the girl I was supposed to be" Scholinski writes.142 The mirror scene is a traditional mechanism of transgender film, art, and narrative to show disjunctures between the outside and inside. The duplication of the images represents

141 Scholinski, IX. 142 Ibid., IX 305

competing images of the trans person themselves. Which will win out? The image the world sees or the image inside the trans person, written, as Scholinski describes, in their soul? "The staff was under orders to scrutinize my femininity: the way I walked, the way

I sat with my ankle on my knee, the clothes I wore, the way I kept my hair. Trivial matters, one might say. But trivial matters in which the soul reveals itself," Scholinski writes. "Try changing these things. Try it. Wear an outfit that is utterly foreign to you...

See how far you can contradict your nature. Feel how your soul rebels.”143 As in a mirror, one image faces off with another. Another critique of trans lives, especially transvestites, is that they are too changeable. Yet Scholinski resistance to the gender forced on him demonstrates that his soul is fixed even while his body changes. The Imago Dei is made of things unchanging if unseen while the image of the world is mutable if empirical.

When society cannot dig out the transgender soul, it suffices to control the person's embodiment down to the skin. Scholinski recalls that when he was first brought against his will to the asylum, he was forced to strip off his clothes. "A clerk went through every pocket of every pair of my torn-up jeans, unrolled the cuffs of my socks, put her hand in the silky lining of my suitcase," Scholinski records. "I'm certain I had to take off all my clothes down to my bra and underwear.”144 Once inside the hospital,

Scholinski’s clothing and gender will be closely controlled by the medical staff. At the threshold to this isolation, the medical panopticon cuts through the layers of the identity that Scholinski had built for himself.145 When social construction is reduced to systems, the creative work and agency of the trans life (and its Creator) can be take out of the

143 Ibid., IX-X 144 Ibid., 7 145 Michel Foucault, “The Panopticon,” Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. (NY: Vintage Books 1995). 306

equation. The trans person is imagined as only a social construct, without its own internal choice or image. Trying to control the changes of the trans life, the medical hospital works to strip Scholinski down to the core and rebuild. The system excuses this extreme invasion of the trans person's body on the grounds of healing. They claim to seek out toxic elements on the body (drugs, weapons, contraband) to exert changes in the body

(behavior, mindsets, beliefs) because of the danger the trans person poses to cis society.

Reaching down toward the transgender soul, the medical system turns the trans life into an embodiment of a disease to be quarantined and set aside from the general population

(justifying the systems existence and force); the negative or inverse image of cis society.

Altering the visual image of the trans person is not enough, systems construct narratives that turn them either into a sinner or a saint. In medical systems, sin as a spiritual disease (an illness of the psyche, or soul) is replaced by the diagnosis of a physical or mental disease. For many trans persons, such as Scholinski, their lives were pathologized and seized through the imposition of a diagnosis for Gender Identity

Disorder. After being processed, re-clothed and given a room wherein he will be kept, the doctors begin in on Scholinski to tell him the medical justifications for his isolation.

"[The Doctor] said the other diagnosis was something called Gender Identity Disorder...

He said that means you are not an appropriate female, you don't act the way a female is supposed to act," recalls Scholinski.146 The "supposed to" here reflects an implicit command in society that the medical system here makes explicit. Instead of religious commandments, "thou shall" or thou shall not," which are supposed to have divine authority and authorship, medical discourses follow social assumptions and norms without easily definable origins.

146 Scholinski, 16. 307

Often, cis society defined itself by how it set apart and controlled trans society as its negative image. Cisgender became not-transgender. Scholinski was not affirmed as a trans man but as a "not... appropriate female."147 The invisible truth of the transgender soul or image is recast from a thing unseen into an embodiment of negativity.

Transgender is treated as the dis- to the cisgender-order. Without context or narrative,

Scholinski trans life would not be recognizably diseased. Yet forced within the discursive and physical frame of medical institutions, Imago Transvesti are set apart as a dangerous alternative to the ruling image of the world.

In the negative construction of the Imago Transvesti, environments, narratives, and images work together to set apart trans lives. Scholinski recalls what may one of the earliest moments that an authority told him that he embodied the wrong picture of himself. The moment occurred when an educator brought Scholinski aside in school and ran through ideas of what professions he might like to have one day. "She held up cards with pictures of a policeman, a farmer, a construction worker, a secretary and a nurse, and said which ones I'd like to be: police officer and construction worker. She looked at me with a curious face like a mother robin. She was the first one who said I had a problem with my gender."148 Likely, the genitals of the images are not visible yet the figures’ gender is supposed to be apparent. Police are supposed to look like men. The nurses are supposed to look like women. These socially dictated images are supposed to reproduce themselves. Implicitly, a girl sees an image of a female secretary and so becomes a secretary. The oppressed can be an instrument of enacting an oppressive system. A mother robin works to create a little robin, even if both will remain caged.

147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 30. 308

Yet Scholinski was not only choosing jobs considered "inappropriate" for women but positions "inappropriate" for any marginalized person. Police officers enforce the law, enacting the power of systems on society. Construction works on the other hand enact the literal power to shape the image of the world. What would the world look like is women were in charge of the legal and physical structures of the world? What would it look like is transgender persons could claim that authority? Or intersex or disabled persons? Evidently, by choosing images other than those assigned to him, Scholinski is following another image, an alternative image, an Imago Transvesti that may be an

"inappropriate," disordered, and problematic choice. In the end, Scholinski will be isolated and set aside because of following these Imago and not the image of the world.

Isolation is no safe haven for the trans saint. The exclusionary system of the cis binary allows for no mixtures and movements between categories. Expelled from one space by choice or force, trans saints are often not allowed entrance into the other. As a result, trans persons medieval and modern often find themselves caught between chairs, homeless. This sense of homelessness began for Scholinski early in his life, when he was shopping with his father and needed to use the restroom. "On the door it said: WOMEN," recalls Scholinski. One his way out however, he encountered trouble,

"A balding clerk with wet produce stains on his apron gave me a look of raw hatred. He grabbed my hand. He wanted me to know who my parents were and I said my father was in the aisle… The clerk hauled me over and said, ' We found your son in the women's bathroom.' My father said calmly, 'That's not my son.'"149

From this early moment, readers see that while he was sent to the mental hospital in part to make him accept his place as a woman, spaces for women were often not safe for

Scholinski. His presence and performance of identity alienated him from women's spaces.

149 Ibid., 106. 309

Neither was Scholinski accepted as a man among men. It is true enough for his father to say, "that's not my son," but in committing the child to a mental hospital was enough to say, "this is not my daughter." Trans youth is placed in the no-man's-land by the enforcement of gender binaries in spaces like bathrooms. Here the privacy of cis persons is protected not just by isolating trans persons but also ensuring that they do not have the same privacies. At another time, Scholinski recalls being assaulted in a bathroom, "a group of them followed me in and said 'are you sure you're a girl?' Sitting in the stall I waited until the laughing stop and I heard the door close behind them."150 These acts may seem like the innocent misunderstandings of a Clerk or a few youths but reflect a wider systemic oppression. Imago Transvesti is given no room in the Imago Mundi.

There is no place in Imago Mundi for Imago Transvesti. Rejected by his family, school, or wider neighborhood, Scholinski finds himself at the medical hospital without any other place to call his own. When Scholinski first arrives, he insists to a member of the staff that the asylum is no home for him either. "I told her I didn't need to be here.

'Uh-huh,' she said."151 The response is sarcastic, a dismissive reply to crazy person who does not know they are crazy. Yet it is also ironically true. This hospital will not be a home for him. Recording various observations of various medical staff during his time in the care of the hospital, one doctor observes, "Patient has no sense of home."152 The young trans man has a residence. He dwells -against his will- in asylums for several years. Yet this place of isolation is a physical embodiment of his separation from the world. This is a place he is set apart and not merely set somewhere else. He is sainted not by becoming an exemplar of acceptable norms but by being unacceptable.

150 Ibid., 106 151 Ibid., 13. 152 Ibid., 35. 310

The function of the medical isolation is in part to ensure that the trans man does not become at home. When Scholinski is moved to another hospital, he finds that he is again being disoriented through his gender as he is placed (as a girl) among a male-only unit. "All other units were co-ed, a mix of psychotics, violent types and regular depressed people," Scholinski explains, "so there was no reason to throw me into the all-male unit, they could have shifted a depressed boy around. I suppose they thought throwing me to the boys would encourage my girly-girl side."153 The move is supposed to shock him, emphasize his girlhood and thereby reorient him towards men in a sexuality and not gender identity. While Scholinski was able to form an alternative community in his last hospital, this move is intended to further throw him off his center. In this way, the memoir emphasizes the sainting of the trans youth by showing how the world continually functions to displace him, set him further aside until he comes to embody that sainthood.

The crux that many saints face is what to do when there is no place in the world exists for them and the image of another world remains unclear. Too often, escape from the isolation the world imposes on trans life is death. Scholinski recalls how the medical process of chipping at his Imago Transvesti layer by layer changed his appearance but made him a soul with no life left in body. "My new self was pleasing. My new self: girly- girl dead stranger."154 The image of the girl being fashioned was not only an artificial construct but also an unlivable life. Rather than embrace a trans image of life, the medical staff preferred to turn Scholinski into an image of cis girlhood even if it killed him. The face of a girl was for the trans man the face of the dead. One way or another, liberation or isolation, transition or death, the girl in the mirror was not long for the world.

153 Ibid., 138 154 Ibid., 120 311

Nowhere left to run in the world or in himself, Scholinski considered suicide the final option. Yet this final act of self-agency, this final corner where the medical staff could not get at him, death, was painted for the trans man as an unfair rejection of the world. "Suicide is a selfish act," said one of the medical staff after Scholinski's suicide attempt.155 In a place where no personal decisions, it is not surprising that it was thought selfish that suicide would be among those personal decisions that the staff condemned.

Ironically, how the suicide was responded to only served to demonstrate how the medical environment constructed this “selfishness” and isolation. After being chastised for his suicide attempt, Scholinski was brought into a private room to think about what he had done. "Why the hospital would lock me in a room by myself when I felt so sad I wanted to die, I don't know" writes Scholinski.156 Leaving the suicide alone in a room, the statement is made: you cannot escape even by death. The temptation to try again is teased and yet thwarted by the stark reminder of the failure. The lesson is made: life and suicide both lead to isolation. Without escape all that is left is submission.

The mechanisms of mental hospitals not only inscribe the Imago Mundi over the visible Imago Transvesti but carve itself into the inner life of the trans saint. While the hospital could and would regulate his outward appearance, Scholinski protected his inner life and truth as his final holdout. "I like to be in control," admits Scholinski, "to keep what was inside my brain inside. It was the only form of privacy I had left."157 While the hospital insisted that he embody to image of femininity and a sexual orientation toward men, in his mind he maintained the Imago Transvesti as a hidden truth as well as mediate to himself, particularly in his journal, about his attractions to girls in the hospital.

155 Ibid., 73 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid., 85 312

This tactic worked for some time, until one day Scholinski found that even in isolation he was not free. The doctor called the trans man into the office and discussed with him details of his "disordered" feelings toward women, encouraging him to instead adopt a heteronormative relationship with men. That is when Scholinski realized, "They had read my journal.”158 While in isolation after his suicide attempt, it seemed as though being alone was the final line for the treatment. If he could submit to being a trans saint, set apart because of his diagnosed pathology, then in that sacred cloister he could be free.

The trans life of the Imago Transvesti could survive if only within a small hidden frame.

Yet this was to be. The World is a jealous God and will permit idols to no other.

Over the course of years, Scholinski survives the isolation and treatments of his forced incarceration. Yet when the time comes for him to leave the physical walls behind

(coinciding with his approaching legal adulthood) the test of the Imago Mundi was whether it could function to isolate and control Scholinski when he was on his own. "No one was watching me. Nine months of surveillance: I'd survived seclusion, I'd hugged the males, I'd walked around with globs of blue on my eyelids, and now I was here."159 For years afterwards, Scholinski recalled feeling the eyes on the back of his neck and an inscribed sense of shame that kept him from fully living out and showing his Imago

Transvesti. He experienced depression and relapses into suicidal thought. Yet as he carried with him the chains of the mental hospital, practices of liberation and creation developed within the asylum helped him finally break free and reclaim an authentic image of his life - an Imitatio Transvesti built upon a queer and mad Imitatio Christi.

158 Ibid., 98. 159 Ibid. 127. 313

C. Imitation

Imitation is not only a matter of performance but embodiment and circumstances.

In "Body Talk," Paul Murphy writes on how Christ fashioned the model by which the

Imitatio Christi would follow in later generations. For Christ too, this was a process of engaging with and reacting to the world, to the point of suffering. "The cross forces Jesus to take on the shape of the cross," writes Murphy, "and as such, humankind are to be considered exemplars of that shape just as they are to imitate Christ's example."160 Our bodies take on the shape of our sufferings. Imitatio Christi is not only how we respond to

God but how we respond to the world. The figurative cross-section is visible in how

Imago Tranvesti can move toward Imago Dei as it is set apart by the Imago Mundi. Thus, while post-medieval generations of trans persons may live outside of Christian faith, nonetheless they can come to share in the suffering of Christ (or Christ figures).

While occupying a point in the modern era, trans persons can find themselves within a living narrative of medieval continuity. Murphy observes that for late medieval

Christians, "It did not suffice to imitate Christ in his moral teachings, but rather it was demanded that a sensual and emotional activity be completed to better understand the sufferings of the Passion.”161 Unlike models of Christianity that emphasizes otherworldly purity, the Imitatio Christi of saints emphasize sharing a lived suffering and opposition to an unjust world. In this vein, one does not become a saint by excelling in worldly virtue but by opposing the norms of the world in ways that bring one closer to the suffering of others, particularly the suffering of Christ. Following this tradition in the hagiographic

160 Paul Murphy, “Body Talk: Gestures of Emotion in Late Medieval England.” Literature Compass. 2016. 13. (6). 412-422. 161 Ibid. 314

genre, Scholinski's memoir, surprisingly makes an overt move toward affirming an

Imitatio Christi from within the secular circumstances of a mental hospital. Scholinski is gifted with a chance to relate to a living Christ figure in the form of a fellow mental patient who believes himself to be Jesus Christ. Through shared sufferings in a world that rejects them, the two conjoin an Imitatio Christi and Imiatio Transvesti that gestures back to a medieval tradition of imitation even as it responds to very modern circumstances.

Imitation gives a sense of counter-reality or non-reality. The madness of a man who claims to be Jesus Christ is diagnosed as disordered in this sense. It is not-real that he is Christ, therefore to live as though he is Christ is sick. Likewise, the "girl" who lives like a "man" is regarded as imitation of the same non-reality. Imitation as a form of fakeness is then the justification for the asylum locking up youths. Scholinski's memoir however argues against this understanding and argument on imitation. "Even if we'd looked up Gender Identity Disorder, I don't think anyone would have tried to fake it,"

Scholinski writes. "We knew the rules: pacing, screaming, hallucinating and vomiting were okay. Not okay was walking around with a scarf in your hair, for a boy, or being like me, a girl who never felt comfortable in a dress."162 A man knows that he is not to say he is Jesus Christ unless he is Jesus Christ. A youth knows that he is not to live like a man unless he is a man. The other things Scholinski lists are also understood as unacceptable but for different and related reasons. Pacing, screaming, living out visions or fashion statements, even vomiting are all forms of resistance. They are ways that those incarcerated for being fake and unreal assert the reality and transgressive power. In screaming and vomiting the body unleashes their internal disgust with the reality being shoved down their throats. In pacing, the body walks and may even cross the limits of

162 Scholinski, 24. 315

freedom. Imitation may be counter-real in another sense than non-real. Imitation may be a way of changing reality, asserting alternative ways of living, and relating.

The movement of people within the mental hospital causes unexpected relations to occur and over time patients and staff began to imitate one another. At first Scholinski tried to assert a level of superiority and distance between himself and other patients. In his first encounters he imitated the role of staff more than fellow patient. "Being in a mental hospital was a boon for my counseling skills," writes Scholinski, "although after a while I got confused." Over time of meeting in the hospital, Scholinski began to like them and to question how alike they were. A trans youth incarcerated with persons with different diagnoses put them all into similar positions, made similar demands, and forced them into similar routines. Likewise, as with many friendships, relationships with the other patients as peers brought Scholinski to regard himself more as an equal with them.

Yet the more he began to associate and imitate other patients, the more the divide between himself and others, trans and mad, began to dissolve. He began asking how he appeared to others. "Maybe I don't know I'm insane," Scholinski wondered. "They don't know they're insane, so why should I know?"163 After reflecting how life in a mad house made him question what madness actually is, Scholinski describes how the system reacted to such discussions arising between patients like him and Jesus. "The staff discourage this sort of questioning," writes Scholinski. "They liked the line between sane and insane to be perfectly clear."164 The act of turning someone into a saint can be a transgressive move. In the eye of society, those who have been set apart are marginalized because they resist normative traits and values. The work of re-narrating the mad house

163 Ibid., 20. 164 Ibid., 19. 316

into a place where one may meet Jesus Christ (or one representation of Him) and the mad as perhaps worthy of imitation turns the system of madness inside out.

"'I am Jesus,' he said. 'I Know it's hard to believe, but I am Jesus.'" What draws

Jesus and Scholinski together is that both of them believe themselves to be persons that other people do not believe them to be. In the case of Scholinski, the butch soon-to-be trans man is isolated by a world that insists that he is (and should be) a girly girl. Jesus's case is more specific. Jesus is isolated by the world because they deny he is Christ.

Ironically, the world also denied that Jesus Christ was who he said he was. In both cases, it is as much the belief of the patient as much as the disbelief (or other belief) of the doctors that set them apart from the rest of society. Despite the differences between

Scholinski and this modern Jesus (or the biblical Jesus for that matter) there is a shared subject position: men who believe they are other than the world believes.

Over time, this shared physical and social position turns into a shared ethos of resistance and support. They began to believe in each other. Scholinski writes, "the more

I talked to Jesus, the more I liked him, and the less crazy he seemed. Zealous, but not dangerous. I could imagine him in the outside world, preaching. He'd probably help some people." The argument that Scholinski employs here is a traditional one in the trans community as well as Christianity: 'so what if you don't believe what I believe? If it makes my life better and doesn't hurt others, what harm is it in letting me be?' Jesus offers the trans youth a way of believing in themselves and affirming others. Beyond their ontological claims, these assertions for alternative networks of care and support when the authorized system turns against those under its care. If the world regards them as disordered sinners, they will be saints for one another.

317

Sharing in the discourse of Jesus, the trans youth begins to imitate him in ways, forming a unique Imitatio Christi. A signature of this Jesus (like Jesus of the Bible) is that he was an unstopping walker. Jesus would walk the halls to the limit of his abilities.

In this walking, Scholinski followed Jesus. "A couple times I paced with him, down the long corridor and back, for exercise," recalls Scholinski. "I wanted to help him. I was always this way, helping my friends. I thought of myself as a roving counselor. It kept people a nice distance away from my problems." Scholinski finds that by helping others he helps himself. By saving others from the harm of this place, he could save himself.

Regardless of why he did it, the walking taught the trans youth a valuable way of liberation. The walking was a sign of transgression against beging caged. It helped them imagine and prepare themselves for the day that those walls would not be able to contain them. "Escape was something we all talked about," admits Scholinski. "It was a sign of sanity; it was a statement, I am not one of these people, I am not a mental patient."165 By imitating this mad Christ's physical actions, the mad trans youth imitated his mental actions as well. In the walking was the statement that they could not be contained. They could not be contained forever by physical walls, nor could they be contained by the walls of diagnosis and marginalization. Like a form of prayer, even if this habit did not free them in body, it did instill in them a form of resistance. The walls and staff kept them bordered yet within these restrictions they could exercise a degree of freedom and life.

While they could not cross the boundaries that separated them from those outside, they could at least cross the boundaries that separated them from each other.

The saner Jesus seems to Scholinski, the more insane he fears he has become.

Scholinski considers this dilemma without coming to a firm conclusion. He asks, "If I

165 Ibid., 51. 318

thought he was sane what did that make me? Mental hospitals are rife with this kind of debate. Are people like Bob [a.k.a. Jesus] simply more sensitive than the rest of us?

Bombarded with information, the delusioned find it hard to function in the world, but is that their fault or the world's?"166 Deconstructing the definitions and boundaries of madness, the trans youth becomes habituated to skills that will indispensible in preserving his own truth. Are trans persons insane or are they simply more sensitive than others? Bombarded with information, the dysphoric find it hard to function in a world of fixed and binary genders. But is that the fault of the trans youths or the world?

This alternative way of thinking and living is attractive for those set apart by society. Scholinski admits to imitating Jesus even to the extent of claiming to sharing in his visions. "I used to hear voices," Scholinski told him. "That wasn't true, but I didn't want him to feel alone. Plus, I wanted to fit in."167 Rather than making fun of him by way of asserting the non-reality of Christ's self-understanding, Scholinski's claim of sharing in the visions of Jesus is an attempt at solidarity. The trans youth wants Jesus to know he is on his side; and to try to get Jesus on his side. By reaching out to Jesus, Jesus reaches back to Scholinski. Much like the Jesus Christ of the Bible, the Jesus Christ of the Mad

House challenges others to cross borders and identify with the isolated and marginalized.

Whether either Jesus was right about their personal ontological or metaphysical claims, this does not mean that their social critiques are not valid. The Jesus that Scholinski meets offers him a way to make the world a more sensitive and just place.

Whereas the Imago Dei affirm the diverse creative power of God, the Imitatio

Christi affirm the agency among persons to transform their lives and community. Yet the

166Ibid., 19. 167 Ibid. 319

work of imitation brings alternative forms of life and community together, systems will exert the supremacy of their definitions and boundaries. While often tolerated, Jesus's continuous walking one night burst into violence between patients and staff, challenging the alliance between Jesus and the trans youth. Scholinski explains, "they went after after

Jesus because he wouldn't go into his room at bedtime. He kept pacing."168 The physical control and isolation of patients was an exercise of power whereby the establishment worked to control and isolate disruptive spirits. "Three guards held him down on the floor and Jesus whipped his body around, screaming and crying. This guards swore at him. It was nasty," recounts Scholinski.169 Each movement of Jesus's body was an material act of resistance much like his continued assertion of the man he is was an internal act of defiance. Yet the force of putting him on the ground as well as the shoving around his body showed how the medical system could curtail even these movements.

The dangerous persistence of the system was that it could be in one moment fixed and in another moment fluid while retaining a degree of control on the body being disciplined. Jesus could yell and twist but we could not escape the firm hands of the hospital. The battle to put Jesus into his room was an assertion that the staff could put the man in his place in a variety of ways and senses. The momentary restricting of Jesus relates to the logic of the asylum as a whole: the hospital has a right to hold the bodies of patients and to assert ever more isolated control. The time specific enforcement of power

(asserting a bedtime) likewise related to the overall authority of the hospital to remove the patients from the general population for a given amount of time. The removal from public time and community is imitated in the removal from the time and community

168 Ibid., 33. 169 Ibid. 320

within the hospital between patients such as Jesus and Scholinski. By affirming the same in the other, imitation can be an act of solidarity and resistance.

The attempt to isolate and divide Jesus and Scholinski from each other are met by resistance between the bond formed during the regular walks prompts the trans youth to stand in solidarity with his companion. "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus. We yelled, Leave him alone, he's not hurting anyone," recalls

Scholinski.170 Ironically, the demand to "Leave him alone" reflects the goal of the staff in one way. The hospital intends on isolating Jesus from the others, inhibiting his ability to walk and talk with them and inspire their imitation of his transgressive spirit. Yet in another way Scholinski's demand inverts the meaning of the isolation. While the hospital removed Jesus and the trans youth from the general population, setting them apart, it also allowed for them to form an alternative community and become saints for one another.

Indeed, this night, they would become momentary martyrs for Jesus. "A guard with huge arms wrestled me to the floor and put his black leather boot on my head," recounts Scholinski.171 Because the imitation of Jesus did not stop at walking and talking together, the trans youth's decision to stand by his friend results in him receiving similar punishment. While subdued, the act of resistance forced the hospital to extend their energy threefold. Scholinski admits that the hospital staff spoke their message louder.

"He stood over me for a long moment to make sure I understood who held the power,"

Scholinski recounts. "I understood. 'Shut up, you fucking crazy queer,' he said."172 Much like the tradition of imitating Christ by "turning the other cheek," the act of others taking and multiplying the punishment was a way to shame the medical staff. The imitation was

170 Ibid. 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid. 321

a message that there are alternative ways of living, understanding, and enacting power.

While Jesus and the trans youth were insane by the standards of the medical staff, the staff was out of line by the standards of the patients. As Scholinski repeated several times in various ways, Jesus being Jesus, like the trans youth being a trans youth, wasn't hurting anyone. "So what if Jesus wouldn't go into his room?" Scholinski asks. "He was peaceful until they arrived."173 In this moment that the hospital staff was asserting the supremacy of their Imago Mundi, the Imago Transvesti and Imitatio Christi worked together to offer a peaceful alternative. Who are the ones that need to be physically restrained: the ones going for a night walk or the ones beating children?

The scene demonstrates the way and the cost of Imitatio Christi for transgender saints. Yet it the narrative also opens up for others to join in the imitative act of solidarity. The invocation of a nameless other person, "Another patient, I don't remember who, ran over with me to help Jesus," works much like the unnamed "Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John" wherein the reader can imagine themselves running to Jesus's aid.174

As in Artistotle’s definition of tragedy, like Marinos suffering outside the monastery with a child that is not his or Kempe suffering slander before clergymen and mayors,

Scholinski’s willingness to suffer in defiance of unjust Imago Mundi inspires others to pity or solidarity. The acts of Jesus and the trans saint draw others to ask what side they would take and would they be willing to imitate their actions even given the costs.

The immediate force of the violence followed by the lingering memory of the pain can secure the system in silence. "In the meeting we didn't mention Jesus being

173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 322

beaten up" remembers Scholinski.175 Nonetheless, Tylenol is not a very powerful drug.

Nor is the act of care able to make all things right and peaceful again. The pains will persist and the memory will be retained until a time that voice can be given to both of them. In this way, through the trans hagiography the veil of silence is lifted. Old wounds are reopened and at last the pain is able to speak. Years after Jesus and Scholinski were divided, the pattern of their relationship continues, offering a model of imitation for other oppressed groups to follow. Even if one is not Christ or a trans man, one can embody the same form of resistance and community through a shared suffering in the Imitatio Christi.

In the end, the contemporary trans memoir embodies both the passive and active modes of the Imitatio Transvesti. Like Marinos, Scholinski digs in his heals and passively shames an unjust system. Like Kempe, Scholinski throws himself into the fray and fights back to protect an ally. Long before Hirschfeld penned his essay, “Transvestites,” defining the modern Imago Transvesti and declaring the perseverance of the trans soul, a transhistorical genre of embodiment, trans hagiography had been active for centuries offering trans individuals a image to hold onto with honor and a model of resistance worthy of imitation. From the early Christian period, through the late Middle Ages, until the medical hospitals that try to isolate and convert trans youths, there is a tradition within trans literature and culture that reclaims alienation as sainthood, marginalization as being set apart for pride and purpose. Through trans hagiography, the struggles of the past are remembered and offer tactics by which later generations may cease the future.

175 Ibid.

323

324

Chapter 4: Pilgrimages of Hermaphrodites: Loca Sancta in the Travels of John

Mandeville (Middle English version c. 1390) and Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (c. 1990)

This chapter maps the pilgrimage of trans and intersex bodies as they are constructed by narrative and how the genre works to shape the trajectories of their lives.

In particular, this study considers the making of sacred places, or loca sancta, that orient and limit the movements of non-normate genders. The idea of “place” is contrasted with the idea of “space.”1 The former is defined as culturally constructed locations that delimit boundaries of land, culture, and population. The latter is defined as the experience of a dynamic relationship to land, culture, and population. Within this context, the concept of hermaphrodite will be reinterpreted from a personal medical diagnosis into a cultural construct that names and manages bodies outside of existing gender binaries of man and woman. Thus, pilgrimages of hermaphrodites mobilize the fixed designations of non- binary bodies and where and when these differences may be discussed as existing.

Broadly defined, pilgrimage is the practice or movement toward becoming a pilgrim, from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “foreigner,” which started in the early

Christian Church where people would leave the norms of their own land and travel to another place where these norms do not exist, making them an outsider.2 Over the centuries as Christian culture domesticated wider areas and pilgrims became more recognizable, the degree to which peregrini felt like foreigners somewhat diminished.

Despite this shift, or in reaction to it, pilgrimages to farer off places such as those described in the Book of John Mandeville, renewed the genre by (imaginatively) bringing

1 These concepts of “place” versus “space” are developed in Michel de Certeu, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988). 1-15. 2 "pilgrim, n.,". OED Online. (accessed January 30, 2017). 325

readers and future pilgrims across boundaries of location, culture, and gender into freshly foreign locations and experiences.3 Centuries later, as the lands of Africa and Asia that

Mandeville walked became less alien and fantastical, pilgrimages to the land of hermaphrodites like those described in Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride, continue as transgender and intersex persons leave the places they were raised, often feeling foreigners in their own home, to discover locations where gender fluidity and non-binary identity are giving more space.4

"Intersexed people, transsexuals, and people who don't conform to gender norms - such as bearded women who grow their beards - have their own history," claims Clare.5

Diverse peoples across time have been transformed into monsters, natural wonders, and localized tourist attractions. These places take on different forms and language but the social function of the enfreakening extends across differences in time and embodiment.

"The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization," writes Clare. "The court jester, the pet dwarf, the exhibition of Renaissance England, the myths of giants, minotaurs, and monsters all point to this long history."6 Indeed, in the Middle Ages, peoples who today are isolated in medical studies and offices can be found together on the margins of the world. "In the centuries before medicalization...” writes Clare, "the

Christian western world had encoded disability [and gender] with many different

3 While the Book of John Mandeville was likely composed in the mid-fourteenth century, the version of the text that will be the center is an edition of the Defective English version which was translated circa 1385 from French and became the most popular version of the Book in medieval England. The Book of John Mandeville. Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson ed. TEAMS: the Middle English Text Series. (Rochester, NY: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007). 4 Throughout this chapter, Eli Clare is referred to by male pronouns in accordance with his current preferences, although at the time of the writing of this book, the author retained the use of female pronouns despite a developing identity of himself as transgender. Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 5 Clare, 96. 6 Ibid., 71. 326

meanings.”7 A key part of this work then is translation and the ability of metaphor and analogy to help identification across differences. This points towards cultural histories over the boundaries of medical categorization. "I want to follow the messier course, to examine the ways in which the ugly words we sometimes use to name our pride tap into a complex knot of personal and collective histories.”8 If enfreakening is the process of isolating individual persons, then this alternative mapping of the past emphasizes the slippages in category as a call for collective power and shared history.

In other words, this project follows in the line of Stone’s seminal Transgender

Studies text, “A Post-transsexual Manifesto.”9 I take literally her call: “transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body.”10 A critical trans politics requires a medieval transgender history that reclaims bodies that have been refigured and reinscribed, at times—in effect— to un-trans them, and at other times with a yearning for other forms of embodiment and other futures than those that existed in a medieval cisgender framework. Just as modern Transgender Studies must name the struggles of the past, we must also take responsibility for the futures imagined and permitted by the premodern cultural ancestors of trans, intersex, and other non-binary peoples.

"We need to know our history, come to understand which pieces of that history we want to make our own, and develop a self-image of pride," writes Clare.11 By so being

7 Ibid., 82. 8 Ibid., 93. 9 Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” The Transgender Studies Reader. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed. (NY: Routledge, 2006). 221-235. 10 Ibid., 232. 11 Clare, 90. 327

connected, these lives speak to the value and meaning of one another. A sense of pride develops and pride means a share in power. Power then might mean material change. "Without pride," concludes Clare, "individual and collective resistance to oppression becomes nearly impossible.”12 Pride is the impulse and the power to look beyond the confines of time and place to see more connected and collective possibilities for shared histories and space. For these reasons, a critical look at intersex is greatly benefitial of any study of transgender in the Middle Ages, especially such a study that examines hermaphrodites in medieval pilgrimage narratives.

In the modern era, hermaphrodite has become defined as a medical diagnosis.

The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) explains how late nineteenth and twentieth century definitions framed and stigmatized intersex as a biological disorder.

Exhibiting sketches, photos, or models of intersex persons stripped naked for the crowd, doctors defined them as hermaphrodites, “[a] person with non-standard sex anatomy and ovaries… [called] a ‘female pseudo-hermaphrodite,’ a person with non-standard sex anatomy and testes… [called] a ‘male pseudo-hermaphrodite’” or “if a person has ovarian and testicular tissue, they are seen as a ‘true hermaphrodite.’”13 Defining these bodies as disorders, exceptions in the rules of biological gender, they were prescribed for surgery and transition so they could live as “true men” and “true women.” Modern medicine had rediscovered the hermaphrodites but instead of setting them on isolated islands, doctors kept their intersex bodies hidden in offices and medical textbooks.

Although the Isle of Hermaphrodites is nowhere on the modern map, this does not mean that freakshows ended but rather shifted to less public medical offices and texts.

12 Ibid., 91. 13 “What is the History Behind the Intersex Movement?” ISNA.org. The Intersex Society of North America. www.isna.org/faq/history. (Accessed 29 January 2017). 328

"The end of the freak show didn't mean the end of our display or the end of voyeurism," writes Clare. "We simply traded one kind of freakdom for another."14 The freakshow can change while continuing to fulfill its purpose. In premodern islands, as in today's gawkers of trans and intersex people, "they came to be educated and entertained, titillated and repulsed. They came to have their ideas of normal and abnormal, superior and inferior, their sense of self, confirmed and strengthened."15 For these reasons, by the late twentieth century the word intersex began to be used as a cultural alternative to the modern medical diagnosis of hermaphrodite, beginning a process of reclaimation.

As an alternative to medical diagnosis, the ISNA defines intersex as an identity with a more elastic definition, culture, and history, “‘Intersex’ is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.”16 Rejecting the medical diagnosis as setting limits on who and what may be considered as intersex, the new term suggests both a spectrum of gender diversity, a creative openness of association, and an alternative politics to normative definitions of gender. “Intersex is a socially constructed category that reflects real biological variation,” writes the ISNA, “To better explain this, we can liken the sex spectrum to the color spectrum.”17 Whereas the modern hermaphrodite existed within the confined boundaries of medical diagnosis and theaters, intersex could exist anywhere and be affirmed without submitting to set authority.

While by the 1990’s, the word intersex was on the rise, the term hermaphrodite began to be reclaimed as a critical theoretical and cultural term. In her seminal intersex

14 Clare, 87. 15 Ibid. 71. 16 “What is Intersex?” ISNA.org. www.isna.org/faq/what_is_intersex. (Accessed 29 Jan 2017). 17 Ibid. 329

studies essay, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” Cheryl Chase sites Transgender Studies as a good model for how hermaphrodites might be reclaimed as a genre of embodiment by the intersex movement.18 Citing “A Post-transsexual Manifesto,” where Stone offers a rethinking of gender, as “a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be fully explored,”

Chase suggests that hermaphroditic, intersexual, and trans bodies might exist together in a cultural spectrum of meanings, associations, and histories.19 Like Clare and Stone,

Chase sees the potential power of tracing cultural histories so that non-normative genres of embodiment cannot be easily separated but work together towards mutual liberation.

In order to execute this argument, this chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I define how pilgrimage developed as a cultural praxis in the Middle Ages where literary narratives and physical rituals worked together to develop the peregrini as a genre of embodiments that draw on medieval social constructions of trans and intersex to define the limits of the foreign, and to explore how intimacy with other places can destabilize the structures of gender. I begin by considering how the idea of peregrine, a ritiualized identity of becoming foreign, while noting how the genre of embodiment developed in the Middle Ages and set the stage for later trans and intersex travelers.

Next, I root the construction of peregrini in the cultural normatizing and structuring of loca sancta, delineated places that defined locations, peoples, and cultures as existing in hierarchal, distinct, and separate relation to other places. Finally, I consider pilgrimage as an imaginative and physical act that at once re-inscribed the boundaries of loca sancta as well as crossed them, destabilizing the definitions of place and identity.

18 Cheryl Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism,” The Transgender Studies Reader, 300-314 19 Quoted in Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” 305. 330

In part two, I ground the discussion of medieval pilgrimage narratives in the second half of the fourteenth century, focusing on The Book of John Mandeville’s discussion on the islands of the Amazons and the Hermaphrodites. After an examination of the structure of the text, specifically how the second half of the book reorients pilgrimage away from the loca sancta in the center of the Christian west to other places on the margins, I launch into a study of the brief description of the Isle of

Hermaphrodites. While the passage is short, it gives a sense of the place of intersexuality in the medieval mappa mundi (world map).20 The brief encounter valorizes intersexual bodies and lands as desirable yet also sets them in a distant island, separated from the rest of the world by a lack of shared history, culture, language, and commerce. Next, I respond to the historical place of transgender in Medieval Studies, particularly the tendency in feminist and queer scholarship to situate Amazons as and through cisgender womanhood, while admitting to some level of cultural masculinity; deemphasizing surgical transition as a definitive narrative for Amazons—a ritual that situates them in histories of transgender and masculinity. Second, while drawing on trans theory that works to reclaim the power of erased histories, I unpack how the “Isle of the Amazons” looks forward, extending to touch, and anticipate cultural descendants in modern transgender communities. This “co-extension” between the Amazons and their environment, for trans community signals how pre-modern society may have been more prepared to integrate refigured and reinscribed embodiments than it was intersex forms of gender. Finally, I mark how Mandeville’s text maneuvers such medieval trans figures for contingent relations and futures with patriarchal and trans exclusive radical feminisms.

20 "mappa mundi, n,". OED Online, (accessed January 30, 2017). 331

In the third and final part, I trace the features and tradition of pilgrimage as a genre of trans and intersex embodiment in Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride. An excellent example of the genre of history he wants to see in the world, in a section on the metaphoric loca sancta of “the Mountain,” Clare begins by connecting his own sense of place and alienation to the systematic centralization of certain identities and the marginalization of others. From here, Clare’s description of the place he grew up and his experience of losing home, entering exile, offers a vivid example of how modern non- binary gender people are still set off on the edge of communities, if not on islands. The conclusion of the section then considers how Clare discovered a sense of fluid space and gender in his pilgrimage through trans, intersex, and queer culture.

An important outcome of this chapter is not only the work of connecting trans pilgrimages across medieval and post-medieval histories, but also to hold the formation of trans literary studies in general and medieval trans studies in particular accountable for the diverse cultures and histories of non-normative genders that remain inextricable from transgender stories. In this way, this study follows Clare’s desire for what trans history looks like, "I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they are often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away."21 The power to write histories is a privilege of circumstances where a person is in command of their time environment, and language enough to be allowed to tell stories. Medievalists both share this responsibility not only to tell the stories as medieval men and medievalsists told them but also to read into the silences of the stories that are there but not told. "Some of the

'freaks' didn't read or write, due to their particular disabilities or to the material/social circumstances of their lives,” warns Clare, “Or, as in the case of many of the people

21 Clare, 78. 332

brought here from other countries, they didn't speak English and/or didn't come from cultures that passed stories through the written word. 22 Those who could write are often those people who were more free from the confines of their place in society; or by writing became more free. This meant that those who lived on the margins often did not have control of their environment enough to turn it into narrative. As medieval and post- medieval trans movements continue, it is critical not to abandon those other peoples who share the road and live on neighboring islands. While trans and medieval trans lives remain foreign but gain mobility through the centers of discourse, it is critical that such pilgrims not only remember where they came from but build systems of roads to give access to other travelers who may one day follow.

1. Pilgrimage as a Genre of Embodiment

A. Definitions and Histories

Like many genres of medieval narrative, pilgrimage serves competing impulses.

In the first case, pilgrimage has the ability to make the world strange by placing the pilgrim in conflict and contrast to other peoples. Such narratives use the difference of

"the other" to further define the sameness of "the self" against them. In the second case, pilgrimage has the ability to make the self into a stranger by undermining the sense of self and home and throwing them into sympathetic relations with other places and peoples. By encountering and honoring the dignity of such elsewheres, the pilgrimage turns the traveler from a local with an established place in society into a peregrini, a

22 Ibid. 333

foreigner and stranger, a wanderer with a more dynamic relation to space and society.

Indeed, the shift in the worldview from static place to dynamic space allows for a coinciding shift in the view of the self from a static local being into a dynamic life that is ever becoming-foreign. The prior depends on conservative politics that enforcing divides and withholds resources while the latter emphasizes diversity and sharing gifts. In

“Medieval Pilgrimage: an Outline” from her book, Medieval European Pilgrimage,

Dianna Webb traces these competing impulses which brought about pilgrimage as a medieval structure of narrative and biocartographic ritual.23 From this outline of the genre and ritual, the hermaphrodite arises as an embodiment of gendered social constructions of place as well as a critical figure that shapes pilgrimage as an engagement with the world.

A brief history of pilgrimage demonstrates how the practice arouse in response to the universalizing of the Church and the centralizing of places as fixed in the cultural mappa mundi. "Christian pilgrimage, at least over long distances, was probably relatively uncommon before the reign of Constantine," writes Webb.24 "Christians were true peregrini in the original sense of the Latin word, 'strangers' or foreigners' in the midst of sometimes hostile society.”25 As Christians no longer felt like foreigners in their world, they felt called to go on pilgrimages that would unmoor them from their sense of place and make them back into peregrini. Such dislocation from the sense of home would prompt a return to being pilgrims, as Webb writes, "spiritual pilgrims between earth and heaven, between physical birth into this world and spiritual rebirth into eternal life."26 In the uncertain beginnings of the Christian church, there was less need for rituals and

23 Dianna Webb, “Medieval Pilgrimage: an Outline," Medieval European Pilgrimage c. 700-1500. (NY: Palgrave, 2002). 24 Webb, 2. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 334

narratives of travel to create a sense of contingency. Many places were not safe homes for

Christians. It is only later when Christianity rose from subjugated to subjugator in the world that pilgrimage was in demand as a way of becoming- or re-becoming-foreigner.

As a social practices of “biocartography,” pilgrimage narrative and travel asserted that within God's omniscience and created world a distinction exists between places, marginal and central, which could be used to subordinate peoples and locations under particular authorities. Webb argues that the idea of loca sancta, sacred locations, was not always considered traditional or orthodox in the Christian worldview. Webb writes, "[t]he concept of 'holy places,' of sanctified earthly locations of peculiar Christian significance, was in important ways at variance with beliefs in which Christians had been schooled from the first days of the Church," even as the carving up of the world into distinct and hierarchal places had clear benefits for the centralizing of power around the Church. 27

The "first step" towards a Christian conception of place over space, writes Webb,

"was taken almost as soon as the ecclesia, the assembly of the Christian people, moved out of private houses and clandestine meeting-places into purpose built churches, and the buildings themselves became the ecclesiae."28 In other words, the physical construction of Churches began the project of organizing space and orienting populations towards centers of Christian authority. Beyond the realm of churches arouse shrines that expanded the work of churches to new areas while still clustering around certain topographies such as Rome and Jersualem as a way of cementing their centrality in the mappa mundi. As a result, pilgrimage began to serve two competing but not mutually exclusive purposes: (1)

27 Ibid., 2. 28 Ibid. 335

the social biocartographic structuring of power across networks of places and peoples and

(2) the personal experience of becoming-foreign by crossing the boundaries of place.

The twofold work of pilgrimage made intersex and trans bodies into foreigners from foreign lands as well as invited travelers to become hermaphroditic foreigners themselves. As will be shown, the holy sites of hermaphrodites were one of many Greco-

Roman traditions adopted (if marginalized) within Christian mappa mundi. "The number of holy wells which became and remained associated with Christian saints speaks for itself," writes Webb.29 Beyond those places named for Hermaphroditus, for instance, the features of trans and intersex loca sancta were adapted for Christianity in ways that erased their classical associations. The well of Hermaphroditus that could transform a person's gender exists within a tradition Christianity wholly embraced: waters of baptism where the spirit was changed or waters of healing where the body was changed. Thus even as histories were forgotten, the locations and rituals remained. Change and travel remained linked ritually and narratively from the classical to medieval era. To understand how this works requires a brief examination of the orientating work of loca sancta as destinations and the disorienting work of pilgrimage in drawing people across borders.

Because of the allure for strange and wondrous pilgrimage narratives, encounters with trans and intersex bodies were a natural conclusion for the genre. "Most of the more interesting accounts emerged from the Holy Land pilgrimage," writes Webb, "because the journey was bound to introduce the Christian to people, places, and things that were strange and indeed alien to him. Relatively few narratives are totally devoid of reaction to these stimuli.”30 Once the center of the world became domesticated, however, the desire

29 Ibid., 4. 30 Ibid., 175. 336

for the foreign became fulfilled along the margins. Hermaphrodites on the Hereford

Mappa Mundi or Amazons in the Book of John Mandeville then are not extraneous to the genre of pilgrimage but a fulfillment of the project of making the world strange.

B. Loca Sancta

Among medieval genres, pilgrimage is more concerned with the narration of place, dissecting space to establish one location as home and another location as foreign then turning the space between them into a road across which travel and narrative can flow. The narration of place is critical to the genre of pilgrimage which functions according to a linear movement (cyclical if the journey is returned) from one point to another. The environment between these locations is then developed in order to serve as the challenges and changes in the plot. Yet these locations (home, road, and destination) are not all equal. For most Christian pilgrimage narratives, the reason for the tale is teleological. The destination is the moving, attracting, and orienting force of the narrative. Both home and the road become subservient or marginalized in the tale. The movement of pilgrimage towards loca sancta is a function of establishing certain places as set aside from one another. Places function as calls for narrative just as narratives organize the social space. In The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Robert Ousterhout defines

"loca sancta" as the "special places" behind holy travel, "where the powers of heaven were more easily tapped, either for earthly benefit or for aid in salvation.”31 In her essay,

"Loca Sancta," Sabine MacCormack develops the concept further. "Certain places, objects, or persons were regarded as sacred or venerable for some reason, and the faithful

31 Robert Ousterhout, The Blessings of Pilgrimage. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 1. 337

undertook to visit them for devotional purposes."32 What is evident in the lived tradition of loca sancta is the critical role of narrative. As a result of hearing or reading these stories, people became filled with the desire to go there. God could appear anywhere and in anything but when God does appear it is always in particular places and particular things. Ironically, the drive to have a unique encounter follows the belief that the sacred place allows the encounter to be repeated again and again. The power of place is at once particular and transferable. The place is hailed for natural or divine wonders but shows the construction and commerce that determine what is attractive and what is estranged.

Foreignness in medieval pilgrimage is not a natural given (what happens to be far away) but is an effect of cultural constructs that structure what places offer an attractive affinity and what locations are merely marginal or even repulsive. Much like the physical architecture that maintained loca sancta from forces of entropy, the repetition of narratives about places and paths reinforced their significance. Genre narratives made locations readable just as locations defined the genre by their physical and social particularities. "Pilgrims may be classified, then, by where they went, and by their reason for going.”33 In this context, collections of tales such as TThe Book of John Mandeville have evident story lines wherein not one but two pilgrimages are made. The second, which occurs in the latter half, seems to break from many normative conventions but also in some respects extends and shifts many of the moves made in the first half of the book.

Eccentricities granted, in this first half readers are given a fairly normative pilgrimage narrative. Mandeville travels from a place on the margins (England) to a center of

Christian life (Jerusalem). Along the way he undergoes trials and encounters that alter

32Sabine MacCormack, "Loca Sancta,"The Blessings of Pilgrimage. 7-41. 33 Ousterhout, xiii. 338

him in preparation for arrival at the Holy Land. Medieval theologians such as Augustine in his City of God (De Civitate Dei) note that even as they tore down and discredited many sacred pagan shrines and groves, Christians would rebuild their own holy structures and narratives around those loca sancta.34 The "Old" holds in in the spirit of the "New" but needs the work of new buildings and narratives to make the hidden essence of the loca sancta as ancient texts readable to new visitors.35 Medieval authorities did not leave pilgrims to read a place "like they would read a book," MacCormack writes, "Christians had taken practical steps to heighten and make clear such meanings.”36 In a very real sense, Augustine predicts the relation between the Old and the New as a cyclical yet centrifugal movement of pilgrimage that draws circles of travels around loca sancta but which also grows with each subsequent journey like New Works built on ancient buildings or tales in a growing saga.

The spirit of sacredness and foreignness is not only in the environment then but also a product of the repeated cultural movements that follow, change, or cross these boundary lines. Settings require story to bring them to life and transmit their power across distance and generations of pilgrims. Places and pilgrimages gain and sustain meaning through the telling and retelling of narratives. "If in Christian eyes holiness was not inherent in a place, it could nonetheless be achieved by Christian ritual and by regular worship," writes MacCormack. "Place might be viewed as indifferent but human action could never be.”37 Places may or may not make active calls that all could understand but with narrators that could hear and give them speech, they attracted stories that would turn

34 Augustine, City of God, William M. Green ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 35 Augustine, IV.33 36 MacCormack, 25. 37 Ibid., 17. 339

them into distinct and sacred loci. The location needs the story to make it speak to travelers and the story needs to environment to ground it. Yet in this dependency, there is a suggestion that lands, like people, might take on other roles, identities, and shapes if only society changes the stories they tell. Locations can arise as holy as the result of a story. In Reframing Pilgrimage, Simon Coleman and John Eade write that they prefer the term "sacrilize" rather than "sacred," "to emphasize the often partial, performative, contested character of appropriating something or something as holy.”38 Narratives constructed meaning for places and places proved the veracity of narratives, including scripture, and saints lives. Movements and places were as metaphorical as they were real.

"Such a capacity for 'doublethink' may be a characteristic of thought patterns in the

Middle Ages," writes MacCormack, "the symbol and the prototype were regarded as equal, or at least a part of the same reality.”39 There was not a fundamental difference between reading about a pilgrimage and physically going on one. There is a qualitative difference but much of medieval Christianity functioned by way of intermediaries.

Reading a story or being touched by a person or object that in turn touched something holy was the best that many people in the Middle Ages could expect. For those confined at home by poverty, disability, gender, or other circumstance, reading or listening to a pilgrimage narrative could be a way to undergo the travel through proxy.

The difficulty of following or finishing a pilgrimage was no accidental.

Pilgrimage worked to make foreign things distant in meaning if not always in location.

The cyclical repetition in travel—as bodies and narratives revolve around specific loca sancta—affirm their meaning and centrality while spinning other places and peoples off

38 Simon Coleman and John Eade, Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, (NY: Routledge, 2004). 18. 39 MacCormack, 7. 340

into the margins. The tension between what and who are central and what and who are foreign is important enough to be contested. The control over loca sancta gave Christian authorities more power over those who traveled to and through the sacred place.40 By encouraging the flow of people and resources from the margins of the world towards these centers of culture, authorities gained a kind of wider dominion over the margins.

While the list of loca sancta may include numerous entries, certain places and authorities gained influence over the others. Among these locations, Rome and Jerusalem were a couple places that controlled many. "Space as perceived by Christians was thus no longer neutral," writes MacCormack, "in Rome and elsewhere, space was ordered in a system of focal points of sacred power.”41 While the world was generally not considered flat by the writing of Mandeville’s Book, it was still drawn that way on flat maps. In the medieval conception of the world as imagined in “T in O” mappa mundi, the world could be considered like a circle (an O) cut into three major continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia) by major bodies of water to form a “T” shape, with Rome and Jerusalem in the center and the rest of the world on the margins.42 The marginal places remain worthy of marking but are oriented towards the center that structures their meaning. The center becomes more central by the marginalization of other locations. This centrality was affirmed through the unfolding of pilgrimage journeys and stories. Walking and writing a pilgrimage narrative became deeply entwined. A pilgrim was aware of following a script based on other travels and stories. They would likely share their journey with those who would follow.

In many respects, pilgrimage was a discourse that fed into a loop where social narratives cause movements which in turn causes a social narratives which causes more movement.

40 Ibid., 18 41 MacCormack, 19. 42 The T in O map was first defined in Isidore de Séville, Etymologies, (Paris: Le Belles Lettres, 1981). 341

In the Middle Ages, as today, one has a sense on the road that one is participating in a story that had been told again and again. New pilgrims enter into the tale and carry on the journey in the place of old pilgrims, like the rhythm of walking where foot replaces foot, or how the arrival of new destinations replace the locations from which one departed.

C. Space

While the structure of pilgrimage as a genre creates distinctions and hierarchies between places and peoples, the movement of pilgrims through the story of the road crosses social and physical boundaries that lead toward a sense of shared foreignness and space. The encounters with other locations and peoples, including God, cause a breakdown in walled-off worldviews. Even as loca sancta work to structure discourses of place and people around religious ordering, there continued to be critiques that the experience of God in time and space could never be contained or hierarchized into set parameters. "What temple can I build for God seeing that the whole universe, which is his creation, cannot hold him?" writes Minucius Felix in his Octavius.43 One of the defenses that arose was that loca sancta point outward rather than inward for their significance. "In a holy place," writes MacCormack, "spatial and temporal duration were suspended," making a holy place a kind of mini cosmos in itself.44 Yet as a creative work, such attempts to create a microcosm of the world’s diversity prompt readers to wonder what elsewheres and elsewhens are left out? The possibilities are open. Citing the blossoming of holy sites, Webb observes, “pilgrimage was never confined to saints and cults that had

43 Quoted in Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval Literature c.700-1500, (Cambridge: LDS Brewer, 2001). 44 MacCormack, 7-41. 342

received the seal of official approval.”45 Seeming to break down the rules by which the genre is defined, the act of crossing and changing boundaries was an integral element of pilgrimage. As a set of creative work, the constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing of walls were all effects of the ongoing tensions of the genre.

While set apart as places of particular significance, loca sancta gained meaning by networking together through narrative. In the authorizing of "Christian sacred space,"

MacCormack argues that Church authorities "were bringing into existence a network of holy places."46 Certain locations like Rome and Jerusalem may be able to edge out competitors, yet the popularity of pilgrimage was encouraged by have a wider diversity and number of sacred sites. Not every illness would warrant or allow far travel. Likewise, a journey to Rome may encourage further travels out of a desire to cross new ground. As

Rome became domesticated, may have also lost the allure of being foreign. Even to sustain the attractiveness they held, loca sancta needed to invoke elsewheres in contrast.

When one arrives at a center of Christianity, what is evident in the crowds is how many other places and peoples there are in the world. While all roads may lead to Rome, when in Rome all roads lead elsewhere. Rather than containing meaning and power in specific places, pilgrimage functioned to share sanctification between loca sancta and even the margins that their centrality eschewed. The attraction of loca sancta for those on the margins is that they might share in the sacredness of another place and that the effects of its grace would travel with them back home. Loca sancta turned from close circuits into nodes in a network of power. "A complete map of medieval pilgrimage, were such a thing conceivable, would have to consist of a number of maps, on very different scales,

45 Webb, xv. 46 MacCormack, 18. 343

superimposed on one another or visualized simultaneously.”47 Pilgrimage as physical journeys and narratives set up networks of power that run through those who connect the centers with the margins. Each place, even those on the margins, for those who live or travel there becomes a kind of center. As a result, the enactment of pilgrimage as a ritual and narrative creates many maps with many centers. These locations compete for power yet share a common need to encourage the constant flow of matter and meaning, people and power across the many divisions of space.

Yet in the Middle Ages, as today, not everyone was equally able to engage in space. Because of the physical and social environment that works differently on different bodies (especially women and people with disabilities), the road was not as open to them as others (especially able bodied Christian men). Coleman and Eade write, "pilgrimage can be seen as involving the institutionalization (or even domestication) of mobility."48

Who is allowed to travel becomes just as critical as how the travel occurs and what costs and changes it enacts on those who go on pilgrimage. As a result certain bodies became synonymous with certain places because they lacked the physical and/or social mobility to leave. Amazons and Hermaphrodites become associated with their Isles, while

Mandeville is free to travel between them. Likewise, the experience of world and space was a privilege in contrast with those whose world was only as far as the next town. "Different groups disposed of different resources and also different degrees of freedom, both of which affected the capacity to make long journeys. Female participation in pilgrimage was, of course, conditioned by all these variables. All the indications are that men considerably outnumbered women as long-distance pilgrims, but there picture at

47 Webb, xii. 48 Coleman and Eade, 17. 344

many local shrines was very different."49 In other words, ablebodied cisgender men could afford to become-foreign, become-perergrini, while other bodies could only experience this through narratives brought back. Thus while Mandeville looks on trans and intersex bodies within his book, can we imagine how trans and intersex people look back at his body; or indeed how they may read his book? Might he and his travels be as much of a marvel to them as they were to him? Often pilgrims would collect and transmit badges, souvenirs, or else stories and their own bodies as evidence of contacting the divine presences in these loca sancta. The narrators came to embody this power by their ability to claim and narrate their contact with loca sancta, making their body and texts transmitters of grace or secondary relics.50 Reading a text or speaking with someone who walked the places where Christ walked may not be as powerful as going there in person, yet these pilgrimage objects carried with them special significance as intermediaries.

Establishing the lands of trans and intersex peoples as wonders worth one setting off on pilgrimage to see is not a move exclusive to Mandeville and reflects a more fluid relation in the Middle Ages toward non-binary genders than may be expected. By the early Christian era, literary discourses on intersex seem to have opened up among writers such as Augustine so that hermaphrodites were an emergent element of God's living

Creation. Augustine is concerned with the origin of hermaphrodites and suggests the likelihood that intersex people are descended from the line of Adam and Eden. Yet the

Christian writer is not so much interested in locating intersex in a mythical past but in meditating on the diversity of God's creation in the present. Augustine gives the hermaphrodites a special locus of consideration in Book Sixteen of his meditation on the

49 Webb, xiii 50 MacCormack, 21. 345

City of God. "As for the Androgyni, or Hermaphrodites, as they are called," writes

Augustine, "though they are rare, yet from time to time there appears persons of sex so doubtful, that it remains uncertain from which sex they take their name."51 Calling them by the combined names of the Greco-Roman gods, i.e. Hermes + Aphrodite = hermaphrodites, Augustine’s language suggests the pagan sacredness of intersex, even as he connrects it to the diversity of God's creation which imagines all things and all places together in a great mappa mundi. The worldview of Augustine's Christian God does not locate intersex in an elsewhere or eslewhen but as a dynamism and diversity arising out of human procreation and God's divine Creation. Although rare, he writes, hermaphrodites are the children of humanity and the children of God.

Augustine condemns the idea that hermaphrodites are monsters, failures of embodiment to be eschewed to the margins. Whether or not intersex persons are human or another race of people entirely, they are members of God's world. To call hermaphrodites disordered in their embodiment is to critique God their Creator.

Augustine writes, "what if God has seen fit to create some races in this way, that we might not suppose that the monstrous births which appear among ourselves are the failures of that wisdom whereby He fashions the human nature, as we speak of the failure of a less perfect workman?"52 As Creator, God works in diverse ways to produce diverse forms of life. Yet if Christians are to believe that God creates all things according to a divine mappa mundi, then one must admit that the diversity of genders beyond the binary of man and woman are also part of God's plan. If hermaphrodites exist, they are a part of

God's created world and share in that sacred co-existence with all other embodied lives.

51 Augustine, XVI.viii. 52 Ibid., XVI.viii. 346

Following Augustine’s logic, the seeming flaw that social discourse claims to see in hermaphrodites is rather a flaw in the social discourse. The problem is not in the true lives of the hermaphrodites but in the environment that misunderstands them and fears sharing the world with them. "He who cannot see the whole is offended by the deformity of the part," writes Augustine, "because he is blind to that which balances it, and to which it belongs."53 By turning from the marginalized to the marginalizers, Augustine flips the script of shame. This blindness is not a sign of lack that leads to bad information but an insistence on a certain kind of information, the gender binary, so that people cannot see the world in another way. This boundary inhibits our ability to see those who cross or exist between categories of gender and place. The hermaphrodites are not flawed because they fail to exist within a binary gender but rather the binary gender system is flawed because it fails to account for hermaphrodites. If people can see the world in a hermaphroditic way, they could better see the diversity of gender in creation. Space and gender turn from a set defined categories in which bodies exist into a dynamic discourse that changes as the world changes.

The world that Augustine arrives at in the end of his thoughts on hermaphrodites is too big for humans to fully know in advance. This does not mean that there is no truth, but that the fullness of Truth is God's alone. "For God, the Creator of all, knows where and when each thing ought to be, or to have been created," writes Augustine, "because He sees the similarities and diversities which can contribute to the beauty of the whole."54

God's World will always exceed any map humans make of the world, there is always more diversity than any system can contain. Creatures can learn of God's mappa mundi

53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 347

through encounters with the world but cannot possess that knowledge beforehand. The world does not fail because of having hermaphrodites in it but a worldview without hermaphrodite fails. Gender as a form of knowing is not ended because intersex disproves the gender binary. Truth is more complex because new truths are continually added. Creation is bigger because God continues to create new and different forms of life.

In a sense, God and the World is most active on the margins of existence and knowledge whereas those who remain rooted in their loca sancta will daily become further from the whole Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of Creation. The implicit command then is for pilgrims to travel and on the road have their conceptions of self and society, center and the margin, boundaries and crossings, place and space continually expanded and diversified. If hermaphrodites are monsters on the margins, they point in the direction pilgrims must travel to find the sites that will transform them and the world.

In the later years of a pilgrimage, the wonders of the margins may begin to rise and draw power, travelers, and narratives from the centers. After Mandeville successfully walks from one edge of the world to its center in Jerusalem, he feels the call to continue his pilgrimage and his story back into the margins. And many readers are glad he did. For the second pilgrimage is in many ways more interesting than the first and fulfills the promise he made in the start of his book and repeats again as the thesis for his second journey, "now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple."55 By inverting the power structure of place, Mandeville and his Book become bigger and stranger than they were.

Mandeville encounters foreign places and peoples, like Amazons and Hermaphrodites, only to return home with a body and text that reflect the hard work of becoming-foreign.

55 Mandeville, 1379-80. 348

2. The Book of John Mandeville

A. Introduction: Anti-Loca Sancta

The Book of John Mandeville (also called the Travels of John Mandeville, among other diverse versions and critical editions) presents the protagonist as an embodiment of pilgrimage’s ability to define places and the bodies that are made to occupy them. The pilgrim thus also embodies a key tension of the genre: the one who moves through space has the greatest ability to define place. As will be shown, Mandeville’s Travels is effective at using this power of pilgrimage to redirect the center of the western world towards the margins and to bring some of the diversity of the margins back to the center.

Nonetheless, Mandeville remains mobile and speaking while most of the subjects he describes remain silent and stationary. A key example of this contrast exists in the Isles of the Amazons and the Hermaphrodites. While both share a location in the isles at the edge of the world, the Amazons are described as having far more movement and voice than the

Hermaphrodites, reflecting a potential for trans bodies to claim some of the power of cis society by replicating its motions only to leave others, like intersex persons, behind.

The Book of John Mandeville is effectively two books and two pilgrimages. The first half of the book, lines 1 to about 1,425, concerns Mandeville's travels from England to the Holy Land.56 The second half of the book, 1,425 to about 2,850, tells the story of a new pilgrimage, starting from the center of the Christian world towards India, China, and various islands.57 In many respects, this is a reversal of the standard pilgrimage genre

56 Mandeville, 1-1425. 57 Ibid., 1425-2850. 349

followed in the first narrative, where he moves from the margins towards the center of the medieval mappa mundi, to the loca sancta of and around Jerusalem. Erring from this established flow of biopower, Mandeville walks down and away from the holy city on the mount to explore elsewheres, moving from the center to the margins. During these treks,

Mandeville visits various prominent lands with the major kingdoms being given one or more chapters devoted to them. Chapter Thirteen, "Dyverseteis of Peple and of Contreis"

(Diversity of People and Countries) stands as a representative of the major mission and theory of this second pilgrimage.58 Not only does it begin with Mandeville offering what constitutes a new introduction, much like the one given in chapter one, but contains more lands than any other chapter, in excess of fifty-four individual islands. Chapter thirteen is particularly large, making up around 18%, approximately 1/5, of the whole Travels.59

Bringing his first pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem to an end, Mandeville begins chapter thirteen with a new commission that would take him from Christianity's loca sancta towards places on the margins; in a sense, inverting the proper flow of bodies in space. "And sithen Y have devysed byfor the Holy Londe and contrees ther aboute, and many weyes and to the Mount Synay, and to Babyloyne, and other places," recounts

Mandeville of his many travels to the conventional places of religious significance, "now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple and bestes”(And I have said before much about the

Holy Land and the countries around it, the many ways to get there, and to Mount Synai, and to Babylon, and other places… now will I tell of the isles of diverse peoples and beasts).60 The "now" marks in time the moment of departure on a new pilgrimage with new goals. Rather than privileging the central places and forms of embodying Christian

58 Ibid., 1378-1941. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., Ln. 1378-1382 350

ideals, Mandeville will be leaving these peoples and places behind to show the diversity of the world; which has been shoved away elsewhere, to the margins. The need to tell of these places and people are evident because of their alienation from central Christian public life and discourse. Other pilgrimages and travels may make note of monsters and wonders, showing them off as freak-shows, places of interest that one may pass on the way to proper loca sancta. But Mandeville makes a point to announce the margins not merely as curiosities of the road but as goals in and of themselves. In this way, he establishes the margins as a kind of second, alternative loca sancta. These places and people become "anti-loca sancta," attracting pilgrims away from the center of the world and culture and thus establishing through movement a reorientation of values.

Many of the lands are named and many are not. At one point, Mandeville is devoting one or two sentences per isle in an attempt to cram as many in as possible. Yet while as narrator, Mandeville is quite loquacious in describing the diversity of peoples and places, even he is unable to contain the great number referenced in chapter thirteen.

After going through a litany of places, each given shorter and shorter descriptions, at last he puts a pin in the project. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle," writes Mandeville by way of confessing how much of the diversity of the world is left out of his book (So many other people exist thereabout, there are too much to tell).61 While the center of the world is structured to remain the same, gaining its power through its definite orientation place, the power of the margins is that they keep on going. The people of the center enter into a kind of siege position, cloistered in the mechanisms that work to make the structure of embodiment and location fixed. Yet those at the bottom of the social order, along the edges, can keep on moving and

61 Mandeville, 1389-1390. 351

changing. Rome must be fixed and tangible to maintain power, while Paradise and its islands can keep on cresting just over the next horizon.

While the mountains of Jerusalem collectively form the loca sancta of

Christianity, an implicit and integral part of Mandeville's second pilgrimage to the margins is based on the potentially superseding holiness of Eastern sites for the faith.

Jerusalem may be located in the center of the “T and O map” but Paradise is positioned in a privileged place is at its top. As Mandeville moves away from the earthly Jerusalem, towards the margins, he moves towards the earthly Paradise. The Garden of Eden is imagined in other medieval sources as the Anti-Locus Sanctum to Jerusalem and Rome.

Dante's Divine Comedy positions Paradise high atop a mountain on the far side of the world. Yet like Dante, Mandeville's journey to Paradise is not direct but wandering.62 "A te convien tenere altro vïaggio," says Virgil, warning Dante to take an indirect path ('It behoves you to take an alternative way,’).63 While the center of the Christian world is fixed, or should be if the geopolitical world was a settled thing, the elsewheres open up a vast variety of possible trajectories and modes of narrative emplotment. A fourteenth century reader knows what to expect from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, indeed Mandeville has already gone through many of those motions by the midpoint of his Book. This second pilgrimage towards Paradise is not as familiar a tale. Mandeville is not as constrained by convention either as a literary narrative or as a supposed historical pilgrimage, although he has plenty of sources from which to draw ideas. As Mandeville's second set of loca sancta, these alternative pilgrimage routes can amalgamate a vast diversity of places and peoples; expanding the narrative world map in the process.

62 Italian from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia. Arnoldo Mondadori ed. (Firenze: Casa editrice Le lettere, 1994). English from: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, (NY: Liveright Publishing, 2014). 63 Dant, Inferno, Canto 1. 352

In the introduction of his second pilgrimage, Mandeville draws a strong association between the diverse places and peoples he will be visiting with the earthly

Paradise in the utter East. "For ther beth many diverse peple and bestes and contrees, which beth departed by the foure flodes that cometh out of Paradys Terrestre," claims

Mandeville (For there are many diverse people and beasts and countries that are divided by the four rivers that from the Earthly Paradise).64 Diversity itself seems to flow out

Paradise as the waters separate places and peoples from one another like the precious stones said to be deposited by its outlets. Indeed, Mandeville tells of these stones and their power of healing but only if the carrier holds them on his left side, pointing them towards the East.65 Paradise calls its scattered stones back to itself with interest in the form of the bodies it brings back with them. The East calls bodies from the Center (Rome and Jerusalem) for a different kind of healing if they are willing to move toward Anti-

Loca Sancta. Paradise in this way functions as an opposing signifier for the Holy Lands.

Eden represents a wholeness that breaks apart into division, whereas the mountains of

Christ's death and the mountain of the Vatican represent the place where division is brought back together. All roads may lead to Rome but all rivers lead away from

Paradise. The common descent of diverse peoples, including monsters, is a key component in Augustine's examination of hermaphrodites in De Civitate Dei (the City of

God).66 It is likely that the author of Mandeville's Travels was aware of this discussion when this narrative was composed. Following the project of imagining elsewheres,

64 Mandeville, 1378-1382. 65 W.T. Fernie, Precious Stones: For Curative Wear and Other Remedial Uses: Likewise the Noble Metals. (London: Simpkin, Hamilton, Kent, and Co., 1907), 69. 66 Augustine, XVI.viii 353

Mandeville's narrative mapping echoes Augustine's assertion that monstrous peoples share a common descent from Adam and his choice of hermaphrodites as a key example.

Between the mountain of the first Adam, Eden, and the mountain of the second

Adam (Christ), Golgotha, is located a way station where the first humans mourned their tribulation.67 In the eastern islands, near the Isles of the Amazons and Hermaphrodites, writes Mandeville, "[t]here is a mountain in this land and in the middle of this mountain there is a plain with a great pool with a large quantity of water in it. Local people say that

Adam and Eve wept on that mountain one hundred years after their expulsion from

Paradise, and they say that the water is their tears.”68 This mountain top pool of sorrow shared a bitter similarity to the mountain of Hermaphroditus, where sits the cursed waters where the child of Hermes and Aphrodite was raped and transformed. These anti-loca sancta are not always places of joy. Sometimes places can become sites of pilgrimage out of the great sufferings, confinements, and exiles that occurred there. These places become troubled middles in stories that do not always have an evident end. They become places of pause, where the divisions of life can be contemplated. It is perhaps not so surprising that Mandeville soon turns to peoples such as the Hermaphrodites and Amazons, those who seem stuck on their islands, unable to move beyond their place on the margins.

Indeed, as in the anti-queer, anti-trans, and anti-intersex arguments of many doctors, these peoples seem stuck in what may now be called, "disorders in sexual development."69 Such medical professionals see transgender and intersex as diversions or delays in the progress towards normate forms of embodiment and masculinity, towards

67 Mandeville, 489-495. 68 This translation from the Middle English comes from John Mandeville, The Book of Marvels and Travels, Anthony Bale trans, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85-86 69 “Intersex Conditions. ISNA.org. www.isna.org/faq/conditions, (Accesssed 1 May 2017). 354

the central norms of society; sometimes due to personal trauma. In recent years, Critical

Transgender and Intersex Studies in and outside of medicine have debunked the trauma theory of gender in favor of a diversity or liberation model. As the ISNA states, “people with intersex conditions and folks who identify as transgender or transsexual can and should continue to work together on human rights issues.”70 Yet there remains a draw to return and dwell with places of isolation and exile that long defined gender alterity even as the movements work to gain the power to live elsewhere.

The Islands of the Amazons and the Hermaphrodites are two key places described in chapter thirteen but around them are the accounting of over fifty-four islands that imagine the great diversity of possible genres of embodiment. These numerous islands were confederated under a single ruler operating out of the Island of Dodyn. "The kyng of that ile is a gret lord and myghty," writes Mandeville, "and he hath under hym 54 iles, and ech of hem hath a kyng” (The king of that isle is a great lord and might and he has under him 54 isles, and each of them as a king).71 Within the King's own land, "ther / beth many diversytees of men" (There is much diversity of peoples).72 Yet his Kingdom was marked, as are many other places on the margins, by cannibalism. Cannibalism has a variety of significances in the Middle Ages and particularly in early European narratives about far off peoples. Among these meanings include a lack of civilization; civilization usually equated to proper Christianity and Western Patriarchy.

Under the King are the fifty-four islands that are not all directly described as cannibals but who challenge the limits of human embodiment in other ways. Directly

70 “What's the difference between being transgender or transsexual and having an intersex condition?” ISNA.org. www.isna.org/faq/transgender. (Accesssed 1 May 2017). 71 Mandeville, 1885-1900. 72 Ibid., 1869-1870 355

around the Isle of Hermaphrodites, Mandeville describes people with holes for mouths that consume food through straws. One people have "oon eye, and that is in the myddes of her forhede" (One eye and that is in the middle of their forehead).73 Another, have

"noon heed, and her eyen beth in her shuldres" (no head, and their eyes are in their shoulders).74 Another have "a plat visage withoute nose and eye, but they have two smale holes instede of eyen" (a flat face without a nose or eye, but they have two small holes instead of eyes).75 In each case, the placement and kind of eyes are prominent. Among the islands described, there is a fixation on the diversity of faces. The face is a key signifier for humanity. In traditional Islamic art, there is a directive not to illustrate eyes because it too closely resembles the act of giving life reserved for God. For Mandeville and his readers, there is an anxiety that while one gazes on the freakshow of the East, the freaks may be looking back at the center. The intermixing of hermaphrodite bodies with other monstrous peoples puts intersexuality within the spectrum of crip embodiment and marginalization. Hermaphrodism is yet another way to be a monster, a freak, or an infirm.

Modern intersex and disability politics further the implicit argument nascent in

Mandeville's islands: there is not intersex and non-intersex bodies nor disabled and nondisabled bodies, rather there is bio-diversity. While the definition of the ideal body promised by the loca-sancta of pilgrimage is the goal of much travel and salvation, the definition of marginalized bodies includes more diversity than can be contained in a single book. There may be one way to be the same yet countless ways to be different.

Throughout the genre, pilgrimage continually plays with the tensions of unity and division, subordination and liberation. While pilgrimage operates by drawing bodies from

73 Mandeville, 1885-9. 74 Ibid. 75 Mandeville, 1890-1. 356

the margins to loca sancta, thereby subordinating bodies to the dynamics of place, there is a privilege in being able to move. It is by movement that power systems of place are reinforced or challenged. Thus a second level of subordination is enforced by pilgrimage between those who move through space and those who are rooted in place. As a mover,

Mandeville distinguishes himself from the places and peoples he observes in his second pilgrimage. They may orient and attract his movements but are themselves immobile. The people around India—Including the Hermaphrodites and Amazons—are effectively disabled by their environment. "For they / dwelleth under a planete that men clepith

Saturne... And for Saturne is of so late steryng, therfore / men that dwelleth under hym and that clymate haveth no good wyll to mech / styryng aboute," writes Mandeville (For they dwell under a planet that men call Saturn… and because Saturn is so late in rising, thus men that dwell under the planet in that climate have no drive to do anything).76 The freaks, monsters, Hermaphrodites, and Amazons are all disabled by the place where they live and the planet that governs it. This in part explains why Mandeville is permitted to travel to see them while they remain rooted in place. He is socially, physically, even astrologically able to move because of the affects of his environment. "[I]n our contré is all the contrarye, for we beth in a clymate that / is of the mone and of leyght styryng, and that is the planete of way," writes Mandeville. "And therfore / hit gyveth us wyll to be moch steryng and to go into diverse contreis of the worlde, / for hit passeth aboute the worlde more leyghtlych than another planete" (Our country exists in a contrary state, for we are in a climate of the Moon and sturring light. This [the Moon] is the planet of movement. And therefore it gives us a drive to do much and go into the diverse countries

76 Ibid.,1543-50. 357

of the world for it passes about the world more lightly than any other planet).77 Although

England and the Eastern Isles are both on the margins, they exist under different astrological powers. It is thus by the authority of the natural environment that the English are empowered with mobility and the peoples of the East are said to be disabled. The

English may enact the power to reify or resist the structuring of space while the bodies of

Indians, Hermaphrodites, and Amazons are bound to their place. In this way, the Isles are anti-Loca Sancta to the Holy Lands but also to England.

The second pilgrimage of Mandeville to the fifty-fourt isles will be full of contradictions. The implicit message is clear: the English may go visit the margins, even bring some of what they see there back with them, but should not mistake themselves as being like those in the margins. Even the marginalized are not all alike as is demonstrated in his descriptions of two gender non-normative peoples such as the Amazons and

Hermaphrodites. As will be shown the Amazons are described as a transitioned people, those who came to occupy a non-binary transgender identity but who were onece much like western patriarchies in terms of gender roles and may be again. In contrast to the

Amazons, the Hermaphrodites are reduced to a silent and stationary people whose intersexual gender is given no history or political description.

B. The Isle of the Amazons

A close reading of Mandeville’s descriptions of “the Land of Amazons,” and the rhetorical framing of its land and people, through a trans lens, allows for critiques of how the text defines forms of embodiment and the physical environment through refigured

77 Ibid., 1550-1553. 358

and reinscribed gender systems. As will be shown, the Isle of the Amazons was imagined as a trans place on the edge of shared space with land-bridges and social histories that connect the normative with alternative, suggesting the potential for the reintegration or rehabilitation of medieval trans places. The Amazon’s liminality is far more pronounced than the water-locked “Isle of the Hermaphrodites,” which seems less able to be integrated into patriarchal forms of embodiment and power.

Centuries before modern gender theory, Mandeville knew that one is not born an

Amazon but becomes one. In a process analogous to the surgical transition undergone by some trans men, Mandeville’s Amazons are social and physical constructs, surgically formed by a mastectomy to the right or left breast. Mandeville writes, “þei don awey þat on pappe with an hote hiren” (they did away with one breast with a hot iron) and a child is made an Amazon.78 While the gender designated at birth determines who may become an Amazon and live on the island, or leave to be raised with men, nonethless it is not until surgery that gender is set. Surgically refigured, a child gains entry into the place of an

Amazon. The surgical aspect is not accidental or unimportant. The word “Amazon” comes from the Greeks who explain it as being derived from “a-” (without) –“mazos”

(breasts); “Amazon” names a person who has undergone top surgery.79 Thus while

Amazons play a role in the history of strong and/or butch cisgender women, they may have more genealogical connections with trans men than previously imagined.

In the modern cultural imagination and also in modern medievalist readings, the

Amazon has been taken as what Karma Lochrie in her excellent book Heterosyncrasies, calls “stone butch” women, embodying concepts of “female masculinity,” which prepare

78 Mandeville, 1488-90. 79 "Amazon, n," OED Online. (accessed January 30, 2017). 359

the way for a trans intervention while not yet moving beyond cis womanhood.80 In her study, Lochrie acknowledges the trans-humanism of one Amazon’s embodiment, citing,

“Camilla’s desire for the helmet,” in Lydgate’s Laud Troy Book, as an Amazonian orientation toward a “masculine prosthetic.”81 This prosthetic impulse points towards the reconstruction of the Amazon’s gender, through physical as well as social forms of life, reflect a kind of trans masculinity that goes beyond merely the drive for power or erotic enjoyment. Amazons enact what Lochrie calls “the breakdown of sexual difference,” yet do more than simply disturb gender; they construct as much as they deconstruct.82

Yet the reconstruction of gender does not end with surgery, as Amazons are divided further into sub-genders: the upper-class knights and the lower-class archers.

These divisions reflect medieval patriarchal concepts on embodying hierarchies. There are those born to be rulers and workers in the medieval imagination, even in a gender divergent society. Mandeville writes, “ȝif it be a womman of gret lynage þei don awey the left pappe” (if it be a woman of great lineage, they do away with the left breast).83 The surgery has physical and symbolic effects. Madeville claims that the left breast is removed for material purposes, “þat þei may the better beren a scheeld” (that they may better hold a shield).84 Through this surgical transition, a child is marked as an

Amazon in general and as upper class in particular. This further division of society according to constructed forms of embodiment demonstrates how medieval understandings of gender and class are pliable discourses that can be made and remade.

80 Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota 2005), 103-4. 81 As quoted in Lochrie, 118. 82 Lochrie, 131. 83 Mandeville, 1488-90. 84 Ibid. 360

The shielded Amazons represent the island's biopower in a way that reflects figurations of medieval patriarchy, specifically the armored class of knights who ruled much of Europe. The island of England, from where Mandeville supposedly derives, is lorded over by knights who are visually distinguished from other lower orders of troops as armored riders. Furthermore, such shields came to be adorned by coats-of-arms. These shield symbols sub-divide the knightly class further as these coats-of-arms signified the great families, martial orders, and deeds of its user. Thus, a shielded Amazon might be distinguished further by "gret lynage," even from other shielded Amazons. The whole apparatus of the shield functions physically and symbolically to defend the structure of the Amazon's body, as well as the island as a physical and cultural place.

Next, Mandeville goes on about the lower classes, “ȝif it be a womman on fote þei don awey the riȝt pappe” (if it be a woman of a foot soldier they do away with the right breast).85 The description of the second class of Amazons, those "on foot," is culturally telling of by their relationship and division beside the first class. Following the reading that those Amazons of “gret lynage " and holding "a scheeld" reflect the medieval mounted knights makes sense in contrast to the author describing those supposedly not born into privileged families in a like manner as those in Europe who fight on foot. These

Amazons represent a less wealthy class. This puts them on a physically lower position than the mounted Amazons, suggesting subordination. While Amazons evidence what

Lochrie calls a “self-determining desire,” the liberation from patriarchal social divides is not complete.86 Rather, gender and class distinctions between the bodies and social positions of Amazons are reconstructing rather than simply deconstructing traditional

85 Mandeville, 1486-1488. 86 Lochrie, 121. 361

patriarchal distinctions. As in patriarchal readings of women’s lack of a penis, particularly of trans women’s (sometimes) lack, the lower order of Amazons becomes signified by physical and social castration. The foot soldier class is first defined by a lack of the right breast and of a horse. Because the removal of the left breast facilitates using a shield, left breasted Amazons likely do not carry shields or possess coats-of-arms. The removal of the right breast is supposed to have a material as well as social function, "for shetyng with a bowe" (for the use of bows).87 The tactical role of archers in medieval warfare was as quick and lightly armored attack forces drawn from the lower classes. As an enforcer of the physical and social structure of the place of the Amazons in the world, these archers are at once the most vulnerable and the most distant relationship to the shared political space of the battlefield.

As the surgical refiguring and re-inscribing of the Amazon’s body shows the potential for hierarchical divides to be reconstructed in trans embodiments, so too do descriptions of the Amazon’s physical environment suggest ongoing contingent relations with traditional medieval patriarchies. Mandeville writes of his arrival at the Isle of

Amazons. “This lond of Amazoyne is an Ile aƚƚ envirouned with the see saf in II places where ben II entrees” (This land of Amazon is an isle all environed with sea except for two places where there are two land bridges).88 Looking on the isolated place of the

Amazons, his descriptions suggest that part of the difficulty of penetrating into the

Amazonian world is that it is nearly cut off from the rest of the world by water. Unlike the Isle of Hermaphrodites, which is bordered on all sides with water, by land bridges

87 Mandeville, 1489-90. 88 The description here is from the Cotton version. John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Services, 2003), 103. quod.lib.umich.edu. The Defective version includes the coming and goings on the island of men and state the island “is all closed with water” but does not mention the two land bridges. 362

Amazonia retains a shared space with the continent. This description of place seems to reflect the cultural meanings associated with the people. Contingency physically suggests contingency socially.

In his descriptions, Mandeville seems to suggest significance between the

Amazon’s relation to patriarchal forms of gender and the Isle’s relation to the continent.

Mandeville writes, “ beȝonde þat water duellen the men þat ben here [the Amazons’] paramoures & hire loues, where þei gon to solacen hem whan þei wole” (beyond that sea dwells the men that are Amazon’s lovers, where they go to do with them what they will).89 Using the land bridges, the Amazons continue contingent relations with the patriarchies, keeping them as socially close as they are physically. The physical relations of the island suggests contingency in two ways. First, as points of material coextension, given that contingency comes from the Latin roots, “con-“ (meaning “together with”) and

“–tangere” (meaning "touch"). 90 In short, contingency means the way in which things touch one another. Second, the contingency of the land bridges reflects how the social relations between Amazons and patriarchies occur in controlled and limited ways.

The contact between the isle and the continent along the land bridges shows a kind of pseudo-symmetrical reflection, even inversion of the patriarchy on the Amazon’s side. “For the wymmen of that lond beth all good werryours and beth ofte y-souded with other lords,” writes Mandeville, “the quene governeth that lond well,” (The women of the land are good warriors and often attack by men, and the queen governs them well).91 The land and people of the Amazon are oriented towards the governing of one monarch, as in

89 Also from the Cotton version. Mandeville, 103. The Defective version states that the men live in another country but do not include the statement “beyond the water,” suggesting less interest in geography. 90 "contingent, adj," OED Online. (Accessed 1 May 2017). 91 Mandeville, 1490-2. 363

patriarchies. Yet this subordination comes through an act of collective will. This was the ideal in many patriarchies as well but often the realities were otherwise. Such a hierarchal system demands the constant expression of physical and social power against patriarchies that continue to threaten the autonomy of the woman governed matriarchy.

The place and identity of the Amazons are not as naturalized as some patriarchies but must continually constitute themselves by enacting power through war and economic success. “And þei gon often tyme in sowd to help of oþer kynges in here werres for gold

& syluer as otℏere sowdyoures don,” writes Mandeville. “And þei meyntenen hemself right vygouresly” (And they often go in force to assist other kings in wars for gold and silver as other kingdoms do)[22].92 These exercises of physical strength “meyntenen” demonstrate the Amazons’ power while affirming their contingent alliances with other lands. These exercises are not radically different from other patriarchies but because of the newness and contingency of Amazon society these performances are demanded. This reflects how trans persons are continually called on to hyper perform binary genders, so that trans women enact high femme dress or trans men demonstrate physical butchness.

The emphasis on the Amazon’s replication or ongoing contingent relations with patriarchal ways of life is heightened by the relatively isolated, singular, and abridged descriptions Mandeville gives the Isle of the Hermaphrodites. "In another ile beth peple that beth bothe man and womman, and have membres of bothe," writes Mandeville (In another isle is a people both man and woman, with sex characteristics of both).93 The dangerous power of these intersexual bodies seems to fascinate and repulse Mandeville, who examines their bodies in only three sentences over four lines without noting

92 Once again, the Cotton version contains more of the geopolitical life of the Amazons than the Defective version that mentions their marshal prowess but lacks such details of ongoing alliances. Mandeville, 103. 93 Mandeville, 1892-1900. Also mentioned in the Defective version, XX.III. 1.134. 364

anything of their culture or history; in contrast to the nearly twenty lines the Amazons are given. In effect, the Hermaphrodites are isolated from the ongoing marking of time as they are imagined on an island, disconnected from public space, while the Amazons retain contingent lands, histories, and relations with the patriarchal gender-divided world.

The greater emphasis on the Amazons may be considered a result of an imagined closeness to western medieval gender roles. Just as the land bridges make the place of the

Amazons an incomplete island so too the trans figures seem to be more able to be integrated (back) into the patriarchal forms of life. As Lochrie observes, medieval texts often imagine the potential for “the Amazon’s [re]assimilation into courtly femininity, as unstable, even queer, as that assimilation may be.”94 The act of transition for the

Amazon’s body suggests that at one time they were bodies that could have potentially been submitted to normative gender hierarchies. Likewise, contingency of the land provides the means for the re-conquest of the Amazons. Indeed, the history of the ongoing flow of blood, money, and semen from patriarchal lands through the passage of the land bridges into the Amazon’s land seems to reflect how this trans society reproduces itself through via continual intercourse with and replication of the patriarchy.

Just as the Amazons were once in a patriarchal system, they may be again. Unlike the Isle of the Hermaphrodites, imagined as a naturally segregated place and people, the

Isle of the Amazons is denaturalized by Mandeville providing a history of how the Isle and the form of gender came to be. Mandeville writes, “þat reme is aƚƚ wommen & noman, Nogℏt as summe men seyn þat men mowe not lyue þere, but for because þat the wommen wil not suffre no men amonges hem to ben here souereynes” (that land is all women and no men not as some say because men may not live there but because the

94 Lochrie, 116. See also: Mandeville, 24. 365

women will not suffer men to live among them there).95 The Isle did not naturally generate the Amazons. They were socially constructed. “For somtyme was a kyng in that lond,” (for some time there was a king in that country), writes Mandeville, until the kingdom was embroiled in a war where most men of power were killed, “all the good blood of his lond” (all the good blood of his land).96 In many senses, it was a revolution, a turning of Fortune’s Wheel, which brought the rise of the Amazon as a land and people.

The history given by Mandeville suggests that the undoing of the patriarchy, not simply men, is what gave rise of the matriarchy. Mandeville writes, “the quene, when she herde that and other ladyes also, that the kyng and her lordes wer slayn, they gadred hem togedre and slow all the other men that were left at hom in the lond” (when the queen and the other ladies heard that the king and lords were slain, they gathered together and slew the other men that were left home in the land).97 The bloody rise of the Amazons evidence that it was not a populist movement but the work of matriarchs - led by the queen and noble women - against the remaining men of lower birth. While the rise of the

Amazons changed the orientation of space and society, it replicated patriarchal hierarchies. There remained a monarch and ruling class, their bodies reflecting the structure of the island as a divided and subjugating space where each body has its place or else is excluded.

Rather than simply being a movement of liberation, breaking down barriers, the

Amazons’ power comes through the continual exclusion of genders viewed as too male.

Mandeville writes, “fro þat tyme hiderwardes þei neuere wolden suffren man to dweƚƚ

95 From the Cotton version, Mandeville 1.103. The Defective version contains the history but no mention that there is a common mistake as to why there are no men among the Amazons. 96 From the Defective version, Mandeville, 1476-1483. Same as the Cotton version. 97 Ibid., 1481-1483. 366

amonges hem” (from that time afterwards they never would suffer men to dwell among them).98 The Amazon’s first self-definition came from expelling men and the expulsion of men (or would be men) continues to serve as central to the personal and collective power of the island; allowing men to enter only to send them away again. When the

Amazons choose, “they sendeth for hem into another contré that is neygh to her lond.

And then men cometh and beth ther 7 other 8 dayes, other also long as the wymmen liketh, and then they go agen” (they send for them in another country that is near their land. And then men come and stay there seven or eight days, or as long as the women want, and then go again).99 Just as the land of the Amazons touches the land of men but also defines itself against it, so too the Amazons retain contingent relations with men of the patriarchies. The travel of the men into and out of the island reflects the goal of their visit: the penetrative entrance into and out of the body of the Amazon. This sexual intercourse (the movement between gendered places) is instigated and structured by the

Amazons as not only an insistence on the need for consent but as an expression of the power to exclude.

Mirroring the transition children identified as girls into one of two kinds of

Amazonian identity, the island ejects children identified as boys from the Amazon’s body and island. Mandeville writes, “if they have knave chyldren, they sendeth hem to her fadres when they con eete, go, and speke. (if they have a man child, they send him to his father when they can eat, walk, and speak).100 The child who would be a boy (like his father) enters the Amazon's body, stays for a time, and leaves. In being birthed and

98 From the Cotton version, Mandeville, 1.103. Defective version says there are no men but lacks the reason that the women will not allow them to stay, thereby diminishing the Amazon’s agency. 99 From the Defective version, Mandeville 1484-1488. 100 Ibid. 367

removed, the child becomes a boy. Boyhood is defined as when the boy begins to have agency, able to eat, walk, and speak on his own. It is a process of unbecoming-Amazon just as his sisters undergo one of two processes of becoming-Amazon. For a moment, before their gender and place in the world is assigned, they occupy the liminal space of the womb, like the Island's land bridge, dwelling for a time at the transition point that extends outward towards one of several possible genders. This movement and change marks even the boys of the Amazons with a contingency and trans relationship to embodiment and space.

There is dangerous power—power even to create something new—the ability to erase the past and excluding undesired elements of gender, as modern Transgender

Studies knows. Reading personal transgender histories, Stone explains how transitioning

“makes the world safe” for the new gender “by erecting and maintaining an impenetrable barrier” between the new and the old, “reinforced again and again.”101 What Mandeville presents in the Land of Amazon’s history is a public, collective practice of the same order as building borders and denying mixture in order to secure new forms of gender. If the power of the patriarchy was to subjugate female bodies and deny access to spaces of influence, then trans movements may yet fall into such a groove of change by exclusion,

“[t]he highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase his/herself, to fade into the ‘normal’ population as soon as possible.”102 The Amazonian matriarchy becomes a mirror image of the patriarchy. The trans masculine is attained at the cost of the liberation of other genders.

101 Stone, 7. 102 Ibid., 11. 368

The continued reproduction of patriarchal access, bodies, and social systems is at odds of the Amazon’s movement, meaning that it needs to cover-over aspects of its past and operations; making history safe for future politics. “Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history— learning to lie effectively about one's past,” writes

Stone.103 Likewise, Transgender Studies needs to take responsibility for all of its history and practices of denial, the putting up of walls around the past or around identity only to replicate the practices of subjugation and exclusion.104 Scholars, feminist utopias, or Isles of Amazons, can set defending turf against male impurity at the expense of liberation and histories; be they butch or Amazon, transgender or intersex.

C. Isle of the Hermaphrodites

The difference between the description of the Isle of the Hermaphrodites and the

Isle of the Amazons demonstrates how in the Middle Ages, as today, there are narratives that present trans bodies are marginal but more able to be integrated into gender binary frameworks than intersex bodies. While the Hermaphrodites and Amazons are both island peoples on the margins of the world, the intersexual bodies are more marginal, more isolated, and more elided in Mandeville’s supposedly diversity-loving pilgrimage to see the diverse lands on the edge of the map. By studying the rhetoric of Mandeville’s narrative, medieval scholars can better understand the long tradition of locating intersex as more out of the way and inconvenient to society’s histories than certain transgender bodies. In order to facilitate a critical reading of Mandeville’s hermaphrodites, it is

103 Ibid. 104 Cristan Williams, “You Might Be a Terf If…” 369

necessary to consider Intersex Studies and theory not only to frame how the intersex community might look at their own lives and histories but how they might offer a look back not only at patriarchal western traditions in feminism but also Transgender Studies.

In a foundational Intersex Studies essay, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” Cheryl

Chase asks, “Why... have most first-world feminists met intersexuals with a blank stare?”105 Why are intersex bodies not only misunderstood but also outright ignored?

What has led to the erasure of intersex from discourse? To answer this blankness and incomprehension, Chase examines the spatial logic that has literally and metaphorically marginalized intersex biopolitics, locating it in foreign places, out of the way of the globalized western community. While the compulsory surgical reconstruction of intersex children ebbed in the 1990s, afterwards seeing a decline in intersex visibility and activism in certain arenas, at the same time the publication on such practices still occurring in post-colonial places such as in Africa remained pervasive. The inability to read intersex bodies is not an inherent anonymity between discourses of gender but an active shift in the conversation from a local to a foreign issue. “First-world feminist discourse locates

[intersex politics] not only ‘elsewhere...’ but also “elsewhen” in time,” notes Chase.106 As a result of the western public slowly erasing intersex in the shared global space, it is re- imagined and forgotten as a problem of another time and another place. This movement from “the here” to “the there,” and from “the now” to “the then,” functions as a figurative and literal marginalizing of intersex. In his Book, Mandeville knows the history and culture of the Amazons as though he has been on the island but gives only a glance at the

Hermaphrodites as though they are neighbors elsewhere across the sea. Thus, while

105 Chase, 312. 106 Chase, 311. 370

Amazons, and to a lesser extent trans politics, take on twenty-first century identities, the figure of the Hermaphrodite seems locked in the past, in a far island, or doctor’s theater.

What can Medieval Studies (scholars of elsewhen times and elsewhere places) say to current refusals to read intersex with anything but a blank stare? To answer this, I will chase after Chases’s "hermaphrodites with attitude" to argue that today’s marginalizing laws have genealogical roots in medieval pilgrimage as a narrative and social practice.

Chases’s use of the word "hermaphrodite" is key to this work. An outdated medical term, hermaphrodite points to a critical intersex and critical medieval cultural models for genders and genres of boundary crossing. I take seriously the medieval cultural model that states hermaphrodites are the children of Hermes (the God of Travel, from the word

“herma” which means 'boundary stone')107 and Aphrodite (the God of Beauty and Love).

Such signs mark intersex people as wonders that spur travel and lust (if not love) for difference. I assert that the genre of pilgrimage, as embodied by the Book of John

Mandeville, uses herma-aphroditism (boundary-lust) to marginalize intersex, while drawing cisgender men from the loca sancta of patriarchal models of sex, creating anti- loca sancta that disorient the flow of power and desire from centers to margins.

In medieval maps and pilgrimage narratives, hermaphrodites functioned as the children of Hermes, set as boundary stones (herma) on the edge of the world. For medieval pilgrims who reference T in O maps, such as John Mandeville, the Mountains of Jerusalem operate as the center of Mappa Mundi.108 In the process of establishing centers of geopolitics, subjugated peoples and places become eschewed to the margins.

This marginalization occurs when locations considered central to public life are framed in

107 "Herma, n,". OED Online. (accessed January 30, 2017). 108 Mandeville, 2838-2848. 371

the center and less central locations are framed on the edges. These marginalized places are sidelined in parts because of who lives there and those who live there are sidelined because of where they live. Transgender, disability and ecological scholar, Eli Clare proposes "Mountains" as places par excellence, loca sancta, that by their centrality displace difference to the margins. Clare asserts, “The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people. How many of us have... measured ourselves against it… lived its shadow?”109 In this biocartographic line of thinking, the concept of such

“places” works to take intersex bodies out of the shared “space” of gender conforming persons, placing them in an isolated elsewhere. Intersex people are not pictured on public signs or maps because they are not considered to be the common, normative, or ideal embodiment. Instead, medieval and modern biocartography uses cisgender forms of embodiment to represent different gendered spheres and those who may pass through them. Intersex bodies, if signified at all, are imagined as outliers, existing as non-essential and non-central being in relation to public places and politics. Intersex bodies are considered extraneous and their representation peripheral to centers of biopolitics. As a result of being marginalized on medieval maps, hermaphrodites come to signal the failure of embodiment and narrative if you wander too far from centers of patriarchal control.

In other critical ways for medieval maps and pilgrimage narratives, hermaphrodites functioned as the children of Aphrodite, hyper-sexualized as untouchable, if beautiful, wonders on which the public may gaze. Pictured on texts such as Hereford's mappa mundi, intersex bodies are drawn on islands in the margins. Care is taken to represent intersex as a doubling hybridity of male and female. Usually, as in the

Hereford map, one side is drawn with breasts and a vulva while the other side is

109 Clare, 1. 372

flatchested with a penis. Rather than representing intersex bodies as whole genders according to their own standards, the message of such images is that intersex is literally half-male and half-female. The unknown is signified only by what is known. The marginal are signified only in relation to what is central. Such biocartographic alienation is evident in pilgrimage stories that recreate these visual cues in their narrative maps.

Within this translation of visual to verbal logic, texts like Mandeville's not only mirror the physical sex of the mappa's hermaphrodites but the marginal isolation of the Isle on which they live. Unlike the Amazons who maintain sexual relations with continental men and live on islands with landbridges that facilitate this intercourse, the Hermaphrodites are sexually segregated in culture as well as place on a completely water-locked island.110

Mandeville writes of the Hermaphrodites’ self-enclosed sexuality, "they gete children when they usen the mannes membres, and they bereth children when they use the membre of the womman."111 While it does not preclude mating with the continent, the text gives an impression that Hermaphrodites exist in a closed genealogical system.

Without other bodies pictured among them, including Mandeville’s, readers are led to conclude: Hermaphrodites only fuck other hermaphrodites. Despite the Amazons’ independence, they interdependently mate with non-Amazon men. Hermaphrodites on the other hand can exist as an enclosed people. On one level, this signifies a sexual power withheld from the Amazons. On another level, the danger of this lack of dependency is that it can be an excuse to withhold relations between the Isle and the rest of the world.

On the surface, the medieval practice of using Hermaphrodites as boundary stones, limits on proper gender embodiment, seems just as bad or worse than modern

110 Mandeville, 1892-1900. 111 Ibid. 373

habits of excluding intersex bodies from discourse all together. Setting the isle on the margins, the farthest distance from Jerusalem, these maps establish hermaphrodites as distant objects to be glimpsed but not identified with in body or space. Distance and alienation work together to marginalize intersex bodies. As a result of becoming wonders just beyond the normate world, Hermaphrodites become monsters who lurk on the boundaries of public space. Gazing outwards from the inside is safe but suggests underlying fears of those on the outside desirously, even jealously, gazing in on those who enjoy the privileges of world society. As in Freudian theory, Mandeville's text seems haunted by patriarchal fears of trans, intersex, and cis women who might envy cisgender men's phallic embodiment and will attack him for it. Of course the fear is not only a reaction that protects the exclusivity of male embodiment but also its social position at the center of public life and on the top of patriarchal structures of power. By locking out other genders, the patriarchy is not only securing their sex but their biopolitical control over place and narrative.

Can we imagine other ways that medieval maps and pilgrimage narratives position Hermaphrodites as children of Hermes, calling pilgrims to travel to the margins?

In the second pilgrimage, Mandeville moves from the center of Christianity to the margins, observing that there “beth peple that beth bothe man and womman, and have membres of bothe."112 Mandeville puts intersex bodies on the margins of his world map yet becomes caught in their gravity, pulled across boundaries of center and margin, man and women, to dwell among those who emphatically “beth.” These are at once hybrid bodies with two natures, man and woman, represented by the repetition of the word

"beth" and "bothe," as well as whole beings that exist between definable states. Instead of

112 Ibid., 1892-1900. 374

recalling the great sacred places of Christianity, the loca sancta, Mandeville details the wonders of the intersex places and peoples as sorts of anti-loca sancta; i.e. alternative destinations that lead away from rather than to the center. Stated another way, these marginalized places become centers in their own right. They "beth" for their own sake and call others to share in their existence. The mappa mundi becomes reframed and pilgrimage is disoriented.

Can we imagine other ways in medieval pilgrimages that Hermaphrodites are children of Aphrodite, bodies that call us to love the diversity of gendered embodiment?

Despite isolating them on an island, Mandeville leaves intercourse between the continent and Hermaphrodites an open question. The pilgrim does not give a history of intersex culture but does detail the sexual capacity of the Hermaphrodites; sexual capacities which could give grounds for other kinds of social, economic and political intercourse. In his imagined world, a Hermaphrodite could mate with man or woman.113 The reproductive capacity of Mandeville's Hermaphrodites could leave them hyper-isolated or hyper- relational. The difference between intersex as disability and hyperability depends on whether or not the cisgender community permits permeable borders. If intercourse is allowed and Hermaphrodites are allowed to share space and sexual life with the public, then they could radically diversify possible sexual identities and relations.

What would Mandeville call a ciswoman who loves a Hermaphrodite? What would he call a cisman-intersex relationship? What would his name be for

Hermaphrodite-Hermaphrodite relations? Going beyond a physical description of the

Hermaphrodite's bodies into the socio-sexual implications of intersex life and culture immediately disorients the supposedly set gender binaries. What begins as a crisis of

113 Ibid. 375

category turns into a demand for a new system of sex and society based around critiques implicit in the island and gender of the Hermaphrodite. In the end, Mandeville's silence on intersex culture may arise from fear of his own desire for joining with them.

There may be much lost and gained by being children of Hermes and Aphrodite.

Such a vision is imaginable in Mandeville's medieval map of a world full of diversity, yet has roots in Augustinian thought. Regarding the existence of Hermaphrodites and their place in the world, in the City of God Augustine argues that God's mappa mundi is greater and more inclusive than ones made by the world. “For God,” writes Augustine,

“the Creator of all, knows where and when each thing ought to be, or to have been created, because He sees the similarities and diversities which can contribute to the beauty of the whole. But he who cannot see the whole is offended by the deformity of the part, because he is blind to that which balances it, and to which it belongs.”114 From

Augustine to Mandeville arises a premodern literary tradition that challenges readers to visit (even imaginatively) and desire such loca sancta as the Isle of Hermaphrodites.

Hermaphrodites affect much in literature, even as they are limited and contained within a few passages about an isolated island. Intersex bodies in literature do not simply challenge the binary of gender, falling between two established sexes, but force readers to imagine a world map big enough for many kinds of gender and a world narrative big enough to find meaning for and through them all. Such veering suggests that if intersex is placed in the margins, then that is where we should go. From the margins, the anti-loca sancta of hermaphrodites, we see an alternative vision of a common world.

Through the critical imaginative work that medieval pilgrimage tales such as

Mandeville's, demand, we can return to a more dynamic and diverse relation to space.

114 Augustine, XVI.viii 376

This is an important goal. With intersex children are continually being born, arising out of the ever changing forms and genealogies of human gender, the ability to see diversity not only in marginalized places but also all around us is just as critical in the fourteen century as it is today. The result of this cultural work is to form a more livable relation between gender and space, as Chase writes, “to create an environment in which many parents of intersex children will have already heard about the intersex movement when their child is born.”115 By imagining the anti-loca sancta of hermaphrodites, these alternative elsewheres and elsewhens can turn intersex from an insular minority into living evidence of the diversity of gendered embodiment around the world. In the end, as the isles of trans communities and histories move to become assimilated into the framework of the wider world, will they loose their shared position and struggles with other non-binary gender communities? Will the Amazons join the patriarchies in their exclusion of the Hermaphrodites? These questions prompt a consideration of what it means to return from the margins back to the center.

D. Conclusions: End Points

The second pilgrimage from the center to the margins of the medieval map inverted the orientation towards the center yet largely left the division of space into gendered loca sancta (or anti-loca sancta) in tact. As a pilgrim, Mandeville had the privilege to enter into a state of fluid space and experience the diversity of the world. Yet once he returns to the center of the western world, he does not bring the Amazons or

Hermaphrodites with him. No bridges or roads are built for them. Mandeville addresses

115 Chase, 203. 377

his Book to the various western European nations in which it is translated. The Book was written among the fifty-four islands but their residents do not get to read it. Modeling scholars who travel, research, and write from a position of privilege about a culture not given the ability to speak for themselves, Mandeville comes to embody the pilgrimage, a sign of the diversity of the world, a stand in for excluded Amazons and Hermaphrodites.

Chapter thirteen ends with an admission that his quest to physically travel and represent all the diversity in the world is a failure. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle" (Many other manner of people exist thereabout, of whom there was too much to tell).116 It is significant that this admission comes directly after his description of the Hermaphrodites in lines 1892-1895. It is as though the Hermaphrodites, while not being the last of the diverse people he describes, sit in the exact middle or cross beyond of the available tools of categorization (both meanings for the prefix "trans"). After the Hermaphrodites, Mandeville has reached his breaking point and has to stop speaking. Mandeville's silence, the absenting of a voice that has dominated and structured the world through narrative, acknowledges the other peoples in the world and the other voices that may now be allowed to speak for themselves. In Anthony Bale’s translation of the Defective Middle English version,

Mandeville admits his limitations for containing diversity by leaving room for other travelers and writers. "I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe, things I haven’t mentioned or described, because many people very much like and desire to hear new things."117 From the onset, Mandeville's second pilgrimage was motivated by the desire for diversity that

116 Mandeville, 1896-1897. 117 Bale, 124. 378

he calls the desire "to hear new things." In one sense, Mandeville has accomplished this in the goal of his journey to the margins. He has described many things pushed away from the bodies and imagination of England. Yet in another sense, he can only accomplish this goal by stopping his narrative and allowing other voices to speak. To hear new things means not only to hear about them, but to hear from them directly.

Mandeville cannot and does not speak for the hermaphrodites.

The sentiment about listening for diversity is not found in the other versions of

Mandeville’s Travels, yet its meaning is found in similar statements about leaving room for others or there being too much to say. Indeed, the number of different language translations made during the fourteenth and fifteenth century as well as the number of different versions within each language testify not only to the desire to read about the diversity of the world but the diverse needs and desires of different places who wish to access that diversity. The Defective Version is so called for eliminating a section of the text largely focused on Egypt. For certain Middle English audiences, Egypt was perhaps less desirable to hear about than the fifty-four islands. Indeed, some versions offer more or less detail about the Isle of Amazons and Hermaphrodites reflecting different desires to hear about difference and the different accessibility to the travel such texts provide.

Mandeville choses to end his narrative travels, yet the text goes further, suggesting that no man, even a powerful, ablebodied, cisgender Christian man, can physically embody the diversity of the whole world by speech or deed. In the Defective

Version, which seems more interested in accounting for other readers, when Mandeville ends, at last, as though gasping for air, he concludes by admitting that his pilgrims narrative cannot possibly contain all the marvelous things in the world: “Ther beth many

379

other contrees and mervayles which Y have noght y-seye, and therfor Y can noght speke propurly of hem” (There are many countries and marvels I have not seen, therefore I can’t describe them correctly). 118 Despite giving the impression of semi-omnipresence and omniscience in his mapping of places and peoples, it is at the end of his journey that he finally confesses the limits of being a body moving through space. He is becoming conscious of the instruments and methodologies of his pilgrimage. Mandeville has limited vision; he can only see in his way and cannot see other things, in other ways.

Furthermore, he is limited in his ability to speak. His words do not reveal all things as an object truth but are shaped by the limits of his capacity to know and communicate. More information would require the gaze and voices of other people. “[A]lso,” adds

Mandeville, “on contrees wher Y have y-be beth many mervailes of which Y speke noght, for hit were to longe tale” (moreover, in countries which I have visited there are marvels that I haven’t described, as it would take too long).119 Mandeville's pilgrimage produces mappa mundi but is limited and distorted by the shape of his travels. Pilgrimage does more than follow static maps but rather embodies the movement and limitations of space so as to trace the shape of place. Mappa mundi and the pilgrim change from nouns with pre-determined forms, objects of transcendent truths, into the actions and productions of mapping, worlding, embodying, peopling, and pilgriming.

In fact, reversing the traditional promise of the first pilgrimage to the center of the

Christian world –which is supposed to make a person healed and whole—the conclusion of the second pilgrimage to the islands of the anti-loca sancta makes Mandeville into a broken and diverse embodiment of the margins. By the end of the second pilgrimage, he

118 Mandeville, 2827-2828. 119 Ibid., 2828-2829. 380

has not only stopped speaking but he has effectively lost the ability to speak. This occurs, in part, because he has lost the ability to walk. In the Cotton version of the text, he writes that he has lost the ability to travel because of “gowtes Artetykes” (arthritic gout).120

Losing the ability to move as he had in his pilgrimage takes away Mandeville's power to structure space by transversing through it. Instead, he becomes more like the place-locked peoples he describes, like the Hermaphrodites and Amazons. In any case, his desire to contain difference and his ableist attempt to be everywhere is proven impossible, wearing down his body. Thus, not only does Mandeville become spatially locked like those on the margins but also his body becomes crip, loses its status as ablebodied; one he had when he was living in the center of the Christian world. Mandeville leaves Jerusalem like one of the people of power and returns to it as one of the freaks from the margins. Indeed, it is

Mandeville's choice to offer his body to Rome as an embodied cultural authority that transform pilgrimage from a process of healing into a process of becoming-foreign, of cripping, of freakening. The last work of his pilgrimage is to make Mandeville into a monster, a body that shows the diversity of the world and the diversifying effect of pilgrimage. Rather than merely looking and recording the difference of the

Hermphrodites, Mandeville becomes crip and becomes hermaphroditic.

While the end of the traditional pilgrimage is to return from the center to the margins, the cycle of the second pilgrimage is to come back from the margins to the center of Christianity, "tornyng homwarde to Rome" (turn homeward to Rome).121 While supposedly from England, Mandeville calls Rome home. The margins may give rise to the diversity of crip, trans, and intersex bodies of pilgrims yet Rome or Jerusalem

120 From the Cotton version, Mandeville, XXXV.1.210. 121 From the Defective version, Mandeville, 2840. 381

continues to signify "home" for many Christians. These Loca Sancta are the physical embodiment of the City of God on Earth. Indeed, the allegory of the pilgrims journey is the leaving behind of the earthly point of origin to end at last in Heaven, portrayed, perhaps most famously, in the 17th century Pilgrims Progress.122 However Mandeville challenges the norms of the pilgrim's journey by traveling from the center of the Christian world to the margins, he nonetheless ends his travels and his narrative back in Rome.

This return marks the limits as well as the strategy of Mandeville. He can challenge but not totally resist that power Rome has to orient space and bodies toward it. Yet throughout his narrative, Mandeville demonstrates the ability to turn expectations towards alternative agenda. Although Mandeville returns to Rome, he is not the same man. Mandeville has become different, become crip, become hermaphroditic, transgressing boundaries of place and embodiment. In returning to Rome, Mandeville presents himself to central authorities in order to evidence that his loop is more like a spiral, containing more every time it leaves and never totally resolving back into itself.

The purpose of the trip back to the centers of Christianity is for Mandeville to present himself and his Book as proof of the diversity of the world, "to showe my book to the holy fader, the pope, / and telle to hym mervayles whoch Y hadde y-seye in diverse contrees" (to show my book to the Holy Father [the Pope] amd tell him marvels which I have seen in diverse countries).123 Mandeville and his Book have effectively become

"monsters," working to show the center the diversity that exists on the margins. In turn,

Mandeville hopes that the central authorities of the Christian world would verify his account of diversity, "so that he, / with his wise / consayl wolde examine hit with diverse

122 John Bunyan, Pilgrims Progress (NY: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909). 123 Mandeville, 2840-3. 382

peple that beth in Rome" explains Mandeville. "For / ther beth in Rome evermore men dwellynge of diverse nacions of the worlde" (so that he, in his wise consul, would examine it with diverse people in Rome. For ever there are in Rome more men from diverse nations of the world).124 Unexpectedly, Mandeville’s trust in Rome to verify his embodiment of diversity is based not on the innate centrality and wholeness of the people there but because the center itself has become a collection of diverse peoples with whom the Pope can seek advice. By the end of Mandeville's second pilgrimage, perhaps as soon as the conclusion of chapter thirteen, diversity has turned from a quality to escape into a point of authority. Mandeville's vision of authority is a council with the diverse nations, from the various peoples and places of the world. Does this include representatives from the Island of Amazons and Hermaphrodites? The monsters of the world move from the margins to the center of knowledge and Mandeville's hope is that this world council will authorize that his Book embodies that diversity.

At the end of the Book, the need for this authorization teaches readers that no one body or pilgrimage can embody the whole diversity of the world, "for as moche as many man troweth noght but that they se with her owen / eye other that they may conseyve with her kyndely witte" (for there is so much more for a man to know and see with their own eye than they could conceive in their mind).125 "Kindly wit" reminds readers of the power of generosity to perceive others and of the limits of a mind to comprehend difference only in terms to what it knows and is, of what is of like "kind" to it. The movement towards Others, anti-loca sancta, is an encounter with a difference that challenges and breaks down traditional forms of knowledge, yet the return to the center

124 Ibid., 2838-2848. 125 Ibid., 2838-2839 383

acknowledges that this difference will be framed and distorted by the kinds texts and contexts that frame it. The radical "troweth" of the other becomes limited by the "eye" and "witte" of the self. Indeed, despite the diverse peoples present to consul the Pope and authorize Mandeville's second anti-Loca pilgrimage, the final word on his narrative is premised on a pre-existing text in Rome that prefigures (and predetermines) all he says.

In Rome, after Mandeville presents his challenging account of the world, the central authorities offer him a book of their own, “or he sayde he hadde a book uppon

Latyn that conteyned that and moch more, after which book the mappa mundi ys y- maked, which book he shewed to me” (a Latin book containing all this and much more, according to which the book Mappa mundi is made, a copy of which book he showed to me).126 Even the vernacular English (as well as other languages) being used in various versions to describe the new content must be translated and confirmed by authoritative

Latin texts. Only after this pre-text confirms the new text is its veracity known, “therfore the holi fader, the pope, hath ratefied and confermed my book in alle poyntes” (Therefore the Holy Father the Pope has ratified and confirmed my book in all topics).127 For the medieval mind, it was not the new and innovative that is trusted but the old and traditional. The center (Jerusalem, Rome, God) functions like a quilting point, returning back only to extend out again among new and unheard of peoples and places. Put another way, Rome functions like the Latin Book to which all authorities must reference: the

Bible. As far as Christian authorities travel to include more and more into its world, in the end the Christian world must find room for it all in the pre-existing text at the center of the Faith. In returning to the Book and the City at the center of it all, it changes each time

126 Ibid., 2845-2847. 127 Ibid., 2847-2848. 384

the pilgrim returns to it from some Anti-Loca Sancta with new eyes and wits. With each turn and return, the pilgrim sees the center and the margins in new ways.

An image of this center, an able-bodied white Christian male, Mandeville is nonetheless drawn across boundaries, longing to contain differences that will always escape him, suggesting the cyclical nature of the pilgrim himself as at once one and multiple, like and unlike, here and there, center and margin. Without explicitly identifying with all different places and peoples, Mandeville nonetheless rejects static boundaries for the self or the world. He may not be "transgender" but he may be "gender fluid," rejecting a definitive place, orientation, physical state or national State for his body. In this sense, he is "trans." Instead of an orthodox English or Christian nationalism, he exhibits trans-nationalism, a cross identification with peoples of other nations. In the process Mandeville's narrative imagines him as a man of crossed, straddled, and blurred boundaries. He shows himself on the road as pilgrim working towards becoming-diverse, becoming-crip, becoming-Amazon, becoming-hermaphrodite.

Yet by replacing the presence and voice of the Amazons and the Hermaphrodites with his own, the pilgrim also represents a danger of breaking through social barriers while leaving others behind. This is a warning for Transgender Studies as it pushes toward greater representation in scholarship in the medieval and modern world: beware excluding or trying to represent the total diversity of gender communities. In the silence of the archives, the Isles of Amazons and Hermaphrodites may stand together but we should fear that one be read without the other or read as though they are the identical. A study of transgender in pilgrimage narratives does a disservice if it ignores Intersex

Studies, which it neighbors and cuts across, on the road to public discourse. Following

385

Mandeville, then, there is worth in calling for a turn to Medieval Intersex Studies that intersects with the turn to Medieval Transgender Studies. The medieval world is big enough to demand more pilgrimages and more pilgrims, so that any push toward a greater sense of shared space also makes one keenly aware of the place one occupies.

III. Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride

A. Introduction: The Mountain

The medieval genre and tradition of pilgrimage continues for many transgender persons who move between places and fight to break into public space. Eli Clare’s memoir, Exile and Pride, recounts just such pilgrimages, wherin he loses his place as a tomboy in his Washington hometown and finds some critical queer, feminist, trans space in California. Throughout the book, Clare is intimately aware of how his pilgrimage exists in tension with a world that marginalizes difference yet calls the marginalized to rise, travel, and reach some social center. Thus, although he works to liberate and revivify his own life, Clare rejects the absolute certainty of progress. The medieval Amazons and

Hermaphrodites exist in the same orbit as the modern freakshows.128 Clare understands this cycle of pilgrimage by the metaphor of mountains, loca sancta that he tries to escape but which continue to reassert a hold across the centuries on those living in the margins.

Exile and Pride begins by considering “the Mountain” first as a figurative place and then as a material place that orients the bodies of marginalized people. "The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose

128 Clare, 78-87. 386

bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. How many of us have struggled up the mountain, measured ourselves against it, failed up there, lived its shadow?"129 The Mountain orders not only our understanding of the world but the way we relate to each other. "We hear from the summit that the world is grand from up there, that we live down here at the bottom because we are lazy, stupid, weak, and ugly."130 The physical differences in our relative location to the Mountain, and to each other, begin to take on meaning as a position within society. As with other loca sancta, the Mountain is not only taken as central, but also, through metaphor, the people who live on it are considered central. By another extension of metaphor, height becomes the high ideal. By yet another metaphor, centrality comes to mean the norm. By contrast, bodies and habits from the margins are coded as other, lower locations become low class. "We speak the wrong languages with the wrong accents, wear the wrong clothes, carry our bodies the wrong ways, ask the wrong questions, love the wrong people."131 By movement of metaphoric logic, the lower and the marginal become signs of the past, places we are leaving on the road to the city on the hill.

As travelers set off from the margins towards and up these mountains, they reinforce their centrality in the physical and social geography, as well as metaphorically connect pilgrims that have followed the same well worn paths from the medieval period to today. At once a physical act of moving from one place to another, it takes on the symbolic meaning of the universal pilgrimage, embodying personal and social progress.

As the center of orientation it is the impossible ideal and future to which we continually return. "We decide to climb that mountain, or make a pact that our children will climb

129 Clare, 1. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid. 387

it."132 Failure is coded into the metaphor. "The climbing turns out to be unimaginably difficult… Maybe we get to the summit but probably not," writes Clare, but even when we turn away we are pulled back.133

While the margins become a place where the past is permanently embodied as backwards, childish, recalcitrant, retarded, innocent, paradisal, the Mountain itself becomes haunted by ghosts of all those who have came before and failed. "The body as home, but only if we understand that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, stregnthened, haunted by many other bodies."134 Different versions of ourselves, our ancestors real or imagined live on the Mountain. This is how mountains become metaphors par excellence. Like the pilgrimage tale, it stitches together bodies and draws them into the cyclical story of the Mountain. The space and time of the pilgrimage, while promising progress, reverts to the cycle form. Try, follows try. Pilgrims come from the margins to the center, only to find themselves back on the margins. "We find the path again," writes Clare, "decide to continue climbing only to have the very people who told us how wonderful life is at the summit booby-trap the trail. They burn the bridge over the impassable canyon. They redraw our topo maps so that we end up walking in circles."135

The genre of pilgrimage is about creating repetition. There is no once and for all journey.

The path to the center always leaves something or someone out, creating ascendency by leaving others in the margins. This is the double motion of metaphor: re-inscribing boundaries as it crosses them. "The mountain just won't let go," writes Clare.136

132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Clare, 10. 135 Clare, 1. 136 Ibid., 9. 388

Yet the double motion of metaphor allows for cross-identification that might increase access across physical and social boundaries so as to begin to move power back the other way. Subsequently identifying as a trans man, in 1999 when Clare first wrote about the Mountain, he had not yet identified as such, but remained open such identification. "How could I possibly call my body home without the bodies of trees that repeatedly provided me refuge? Without queer bodies? Without crip bodies? Without transgender and transsexual bodies?"137 Clare articulates an identity that one body is not a home in itself but contains multitudes that continually form, change, and cross in and out of its boundaries. "The body as home, but only if it is understood that place and community and culture burrow deep into our bones."138 Born along the margins, later moving into the central cultural location of the city, Clare identifies with both, with the trans, metaphoric boundary and meaning crossing.

Along the margins, Clare came to understood himself as defined by the terms of the center, of the Mountain. "The body as home, but only if it is understood that language too lives under the skin," writes Clare, "I think of the words crip, queer, freak, redneck.

None of these are easy words. They mark the jagged edge between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized people and how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile, living on the metaphoric mountain."139 To live in the margins or as a marginalized body is to have boundaries of identity and place inscribed on the body and internalized within it. This constitutes a kind of exile, a division of bodies. "The body as home, but only if it

137 Ibid., 10. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid., 11. 389

is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us."140 The

Mountain, the center of power, is not a place anyone can fully occupy.

Yet the uncertainty of the margins allows for new queer monsters to come into being outside the purview of the center. "The body as home, but only if it is understood that the stolen body can be reclaimed."141 The body is divided, but this multiplicity opens up the self to a de-centered locus for identity. "I spent my childhood," writes Clare about growing up in Oregon, "a tom boy, not quite sure of my girlness. Queer without a name for my queerness… When I found dykes, fell in love for the first time, came into queer community, I felt that I had found home again."142 Opened up to new possibilities for identification and boundary crossing, the pilgrim is more flexible and relational after each return. In this way, pilgrimage makes all bodies hermaphroditic, divided and yet excessive, monstrous and yet relational, born on the margins yet ever crossing borders.

B. Losing One’s Place

Loca sancta can be overcome as one crosses gender and geographic boundaries and get lost in the wide open spaces, nonetheless the lifetimes of inscribing certain places, be they real or ideal (or some mixture of both) create standards by which trans pilgrims continue to measure themselves against today. Some distant mountains loom behind, like the hills of Rome and Jerusalem that Mandeville mounted, other mountains lay on the horizon, like the dream of a successful life as an openly accepted transgender or intersex person. These ideas of tradition and progress continue to work on us even as

140 Ibid., 12. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., 10. 390

we find ourselves losing our sense of home; either because we realize that our lives cannot be sustained by such small deliminated categories of gender and space or because we are not accepted in those places. There are many reasons one finds themselves on the road, by choice or force, dream or violence, and in the process of becoming lost, these mountains teach lessons to the Amazon and the Hermaphrodite, the transgender and the intersex person who find themselves crossing boundary lines.

A Mountain that continually draws Clare throughout his life is the locus sanctum of his hometown. Growing up in Port Orford, Oregon, near Route 101, Clare felt at home with the land but alienated from the society that defined the place and those who lived there. A coastal town, it is located near Siskiyou National Forest; an environment that long provided logging jobs for Clare's family and many in the area. As he walked home along a road following the Elk River, Clare would watch logs float down the waters and fisherman dipping in their lines. These walks through the woods or up mountains were among the moments where Clare felt most at home. Yet in the community of the logging town, the young trans youth often felt like an outsider. "I watched and listened to the girls in my school talk about boys, go behind the equipment shed to kiss them, later in algebra class about fucking them," recounts Clare of his school days, describing his emotions as a metaphorical wall between himself and the the girls of the town, "I watched from the other side of a stone wall, a wall that was part self-preservation, part bones and blood aloneness, part impossible assumptions I could not shape my body around."143 Although he lived in the same forests as his schoolmates, he was unable to feel welcome because of the cisgender and heterosexual norms of girlhood that organized the lives in the town.

Clare puts these feelings into metaphors drawn from around him. Walls, especially made

143 Ibid., 124. 391

of stone, were all around him. They defined the physical place. Yet it was his social place, being raised as a girl that his body resisted in Port Orford.

The effect of these stonewalls was to turn this small Oregon town into a kind of machine that produced and housed proper cis heterosexual girls. Despite feeling alienated in his social environment, Clare recounts trying to survive in the town by allowing himself, to degrees, to submit to its production of straight feminine girls. "I pull out an old photo of myself from the night of my high school graduation," Clare recalls looking at on old album of his childhood home, "I wear a white dress, flowers embroidered on the front panel, the plainest, simplest dress my mother would let me buy. I look painfully uncomfortable, as if I have no idea what to do with my body, hands clasped awkwardly behind me, shoulders caved inward, immobilized, almost fearful beneath my smile. I am in clumsy, unconsenting drag. This is one of the last times I wore a dress."144 While the physical space of Oregon makes no special demands of femininity on Clare, the place he lives is defined by such rules imposed on bodies it marks are female. Once described as a wall, the physical and metaphorical boundaries that Port Orford places around Clare's body become as close to him as a flowery dress. The wall metaphor placed Clare on the outside but the dress makes him feel alienated within an encircling embroidered garment.

Inside the linen walls that wrap him in girlhood, Clare feels like a foreigner in his own body. Often trans experiences are compared to drag. Usually this is a conflation of a trans person's post-transitioned inability to pass and a Drag performer's performative gender.

Yet Clare turns this around and suggests that transgender points to the artifice and failure of gender before transition and reveals the socially constructed walls placed around it.

144 Ibid., 136. 392

Being put in the place of a girl, Clare began to feel his body was taken away from him. Port Orford did not feel like a home to him and in time neither did his body. "I do understand how certain clothes make me feel inside my body," explains Clare.145 Certain clothes marked Clare as a girl, as though Clare was not resident, at home, or in control of his body. Meanwhile, other clothes marked his body as in his control, free to move and dress as he will; but these were the clothes marked for men. "For me, Vogue and

Glamour held none of the appeal that Walt Maya did, dressed in his checkered shirt, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hat," explains Clare.146 "I joined the boys in their emulation. I knew early on the feel of boots and denim, knew I would never learn to walk in a skirt." Just as Clare could watch girls from the other side of a figurative wall, so too he could watch boys from the other side of a paneled dress. Had the strict cisgender mechanisms that produced girls and boys been more lubricated, allowing for parts to move more freely, then perhaps Clare could have had an easier time moving from one social position to another. As it is, he experienced a lot of friction as he tried to transition and became marked as a failed girl rather than as a trans man. "I tried to wear skirts my mother sewed for me... I failed," admits Clare. "I loved my work boots and overalls long after the other girls had discovered pantyhose and mini-skirts. But failing left a hole in my heart; I wanted to belong somewhere."147 Rather than be allowed to move from one place, one gender designation, to another, he became marked as defective and felt as though he lost his body, his home, and his place in the world

Stating that gender and sexism is in the environment can bring subtle aspects to the forefront, such as clothing, but this does not discount how personal agents in the

145 Ibid., 135. 146 Ibid., 136. 147 Ibid., 124. 393

ecology can directly and violently control a life. Indeed, Clare names what gave him the deepest feeling of “losing home” as sexual abuse he received from his father. "I could start with the ways my body has been stolen from me," writes Clare. "Start slowly, reluctantly, with my parents. My father who raised me, his eldest daughter, as an almost son. My father who started raping me so young I can't remember when he first forced his penis into me."148 In the grim details of rape, Clare marks a point at which the loss of a sense of home moved from a distant wall, to intimate apparel, and through the threshold of his body as his father violently penetrated him. The father who gave him a place to live, and room to explore his masculinity, chose instead the most direct and penetrative way to vacate Clare's power from his body. "I could start with the brutal, intimate details of my father's thievery, of his hands clamping around my neck, tearing into me, claiming my body as his own."149 However he allowed Clare to wander towards masculinity in public, in private he put Clare in the place of a girl; a girlhood defined by violence. To be put in the place of a girl, in the Clare house, was to have one's body taken.

Although the theft of his body is personal, Clare nonetheless views the rape as a part of the environment’s sexist system. Amidst the details of violence, Clare fears the mechanisms of such power can be forgotten. "I lose the bigger picture," worries Clare,

"forget that woven through and around the private and intimate is always the public and political."150 By examining the rape not as isolated incidents of an unusually violent man,

Clare opens up his story to wider questions of gender and sexuality. "How did my father's violence, his brutal taking of me over and over again, help shape and damage my body,

148 Ibid., 125. 149 Ibid., 128. 150 Ibid. 394

my sexuality, my gender identity?" asks Clare.151 This process worries him because discourses on the relation between rape and queer gender or sexuality usually take the perfunctory form of cause and effect. "Will my words be used against me, twisted to bolster the belief that sexual abuse causes homosexuality, contorted to provide evidence that transgressive gender identity is linked directly to neglect?"152 Rape is often taken as the cause of a girl fleeing femininity to live as a man or else to be sexually engaged with only women. This conclusion however depends on an arrangement of the facts along a particular flow of causation. This is the "twisting" that Clare fears. Such a twisting begins by assuming cisgender and heterosexuality is the natural starting position and transgender and queerness are the artificial; thereby discounting how normative manhood and girlhood are two of the central products of such highly gendered structures of power.

Yet by allowing such questions, asserting there is a relation between sexist environments and rape, Clare can ask other questions as well. "How did his non-abusive treatment of me as an almost son interact with the ways in which his fists and penis and knives told me in no uncertain terms that I was a girl?"153 Opening up the conversation,

Clare is able to turn the tables on sexist assumptions about queerness and rape. Rather than assume that rape causes non-normative genders and sexualities, Clare asks the necessary question if rape is intended to form or fix straight men and women. The masculine behavior came before and around the rape. It was during the rape that Clare was put in a humbled female position. By admitting these questions, Clare points to the lack of easy answers and thus the evident lack of stable genders in the environment where he lived. "How did his gendered abuse - and in this culture vaginal rape is certainly

151 Ibid., 126. 152 Ibid., 125. 153 Ibid., 126. 395

gendered - reinforce my sense of not being a girl?" adds Clare. "How did watching him sexually abuse other children - both boys and girls - complicate what I knew of being a girl, being a boy?"154 Rape is a performance and an act that speaks of power dynamics in the environment. Fort Orford was not simply a place for cis heterosexual boys and girls, but a place where gender was always already unstable and unraveling. The need to put

Clare in the place of a girl emphasized how he was not at home in that place. Taking away Clare's power revealed that he had power to take. Likewise, it teaches how straight, cisgender male supremacy needs to take power from others to maintain its dominance. It needs to police the borders of gender because those who live in the space are not naturally tied down by the sexist laws of place and position.

"I wanted to be a hermit," declares Clare, recalling his overall feeling during his childhood, "to live alone with my stones and trees, neither boy nor a girl.”155 For all the difficulty that his physical body and environment posed for him, it is his social body and environment that made him feel alienated and not at home in either. The matter of his body remained relatively the same but its meaning for him was continually being defined for him by his father and the patriarchy. "My father raped me for many reasons," analyzes

Clare, "and inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy as well."156 The woodlands and the flesh are spaces where many different sorts of lives could have been explored by Clare but in the toxic social environment of

Port Orford, life was continually being put in its place. Yet the rape did not assert the stability of masculinity or femininity but the lack of stability and security in his body and

154 Ibid., 126. 155 Ibid. 124. 156 Ibid., 129. 396

home. "I lived by splitting body from mind, body from consciousness, body from physical sensation, body from emotion," writes Clare.157 "My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile." The gender dysphoria Clare felt, the alienation from his body, in some ways points to the violence and instability of gender in the place where he lived. To be clear, it is not Clare's masculinity or attraction to women that came from this toxic environment but rather the suffering that walled off his transition to these places and yet also painfully made sure he never felt at home in femininity or attraction to men. The suffering did not put him in the place of a man or girl but took from him the power to feel at home in any place. It made him an exile.

Theft and exile does not mean the annihilation of the valued objects, be they bodies, land, or power. Rather the loss of home is a rearrangement and cordoning off of objects in the space. The logic of stealing a place is not about just destroying lives but about controlling them. "We live in a time of epidemic child abuse, in a world where sexual and physical violence against children isn't only a personal tragedy and symptom of power run amok," concludes Clare, "but also a form of social control.”158 Putting up walls around land, a community, a person, or a story, does not fundamentally change what is being contained or excluded, rather attempts to control them by making them submit to personal possession. For Clare's father, it seemed less key whether Clare was a boy or a girl, but rather that he could determine when he could claim himself as a boy and when Clare's father could violently claim him as his girl.

There is nothing in the woods or the water that makes Port Orford a place for straight cisgender girls and men, but not queer transgender youth. Nor is it simply that

157 Ibid., 131. 158 Ibid., 128-129. 397

things, like social progress, move slower there by nature. Often when such places are shrugged off by urban queers or defended by locals as obviously conservative, what is meant is that these are places where violent male supremacy, the isolation of gay men and lesbians, and the hatred of trans persons dominate. Such places exist because they are occupied territories and the people living there are subject to patriarchal control. The rejection from female community and the occupation of Clare's body by his father evidence how these places are defined by such power dynamics. "What a better way to maintain a power structure," asks Clare, "than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children."159 Such overt acts of violence may or may not be rare, Clare was subject and witness to many of them, but the lessons of them serve more than personal ends. Rape or the fear of rape, exclusion or the fear of exclusion, are key weapons that keep men and women, boys and girls in their place in

Port Orford. Those who step out of line become targets for abuse. "And here is the answer to my fear: Child abuse is not the cause of but rather a response to - among other things - transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality."160 Clare lived as a boy before he was put in the place of a girl by his mother's dresses or his father's rape. His transgressive gender and sexuality did not come from abuse. Although Clare admits, "I feel safer, somewhat buffered from men's violence against women, walking the streets after dark, knowing my night time outline and stride are frequently read as male."161 Rather, for young Clare, the abuse came in response to his gender transgression. The abuse may have come regardless. Walls are not only put up for those who would climb over them but to

159 Ibid., 129. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid., 127. 398

make a statement: do not try. This is how hatred inscribes itself in the environment and bodies of Port Orford. This is how Mountains hold onto the marginalized.

C. Finding Some Space

Although the Mountain of Progress may draw us away from our communities on the margins, there is reason to resist loca sancta and find routes for ourselves and others to attain a greater degree of liberty. Indeed, as we walk the trails to gender and sexual liberation, transgender pilgrims find the footpaths of those who have come before.

Whether we leave the Mountain of the Past behind or find the Mountain of Progress in our future, trans and intersex folk, Amazons and Hermaphrodites encounter one another on the road. This is the value of Clare’s story of pilgrimage as it gives voice to those travelers other than the white Christian cisgender men like Mandeville. By sharing not only how he escaped his place in the margins and found some space in the world, Clare stresses the community of fellow pilgrims who might share aid and stories on the road.

"But just as the stolen body exists, so does the reclaimed body" declares Eli Clare in the conclusion of "Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart" from Exile and Pride.162

Oakland, California is not so far away from Port Orford, Oregon. One should not expect a radical change in lifestyle based merely on geography. Yet because of the distinct social climates that defined each location, Eli Clare became reborn when he left the woods to attend Mills College in the city. "Queer identity, at least as we know it, is largely urban," claims Clare.163 "The happening places, events, dialogues, the strong communities, the

162 Ibid., 132. 163 Ibid., 37. 399

journals, magazines, bookstores, queer organizing, and queer activism are all city-based."

Certainly, there were physical features, buildings, roads, and the density of population that made the experience of walking down a road in Oregon and California distinct, but it is how these spaces were uses that made the difference in allowing Clare to begin the process of reclaiming a sense of home in a community and in his body. "For me the path from stolen body to reclaimed body started with my coming out as a dyke… I went to dyke events, read dyke books, listened to dyke music, hung out at my first dyke bar, went to my first dyke dance." Were there buildings in Port Orford that could have been used for dancing? Yes. But the social controls over the town would never have allowed it.

"Queer people - using the narrow definition - don't live in Port Orford," Clare states simply.164 Such is the environmental definition of identity and place. Clare once lived in

Port Orford but he could not be queer there. He could not be himself. And so, even when he occupied space there, and his body was occupied by the force of others, he, a queer, did not live there. If one follows how one toxic place can take lives, one must next examine how another place gives life again in order to get a fuller worldview of the social divisions of space and how bodies may move and be moved through it.

An examination of Clare's sexuality in rural and urban places could be undertaken, mapping his relations to other bodies, yet his world puts gender and the love of self rather than desire for others in the forefront. The claim that Clare discovered himself as a dyke complicates this reading by using highly sexualized and woman- oriented gendered language. Yet Clare insists that this was for him the first stepping stone out of a rigid cis definition of gender towards a pluralistic mode of categorizing genres of embodiment. "Simply put, the disabled, mixed-class tomboy... didn't discover sexuality

164 Ibid., 30. 400

among dykes," clarifies Clare, "but rather a definition of woman large enough to be comfortable for many years."165 The invocation of space here is critical. The physical place of the dyke bar was "big enough" for him both because it allowed him be materially present but the greater shift was that the lack of patriarchal controls; which allowed him to be present in other ways. He was able to feel "comfortable." "Comfort" comes from the

Latin "com-" meaning "together" and "-fort," meaning "strengthened."166 It was a place where Clare felt able to extend towards other possibilities for embodiment and desire and in turn others extended toward him. "And somewhere along the line," observes Clare, "I pulled desire to the surface, gave it room to breathe."167 In response to the desire of others for him, he learned how to desire himself and in time to desire these intimacies of touch.

There is a folding together of queer space and bodies. The place gave Clare room to breath in it and in response Clare was able to make space inside himself to allow in the vitality of the queer environment.

"In queer community, I found a place to belong and abandoned my desire to be a hermit," recalls Clare.168 The restructuring of free space into a defined place can be a tool of violence and oppression, walling in bodies from traveling or changing. Places like Port

Orford may be able to sustain systems of violence in its making genders and sexualities.

Yet not all places are so toxic that queer and transgender persons are forced to become hermits in order to survive. In places like Oakland, in dyke bars and bookstores, Clare was able to breath in his body and in his space. Over time, he was able to come out of the shell that he built to protect himself and begin the process of reoccupying himself and

165 Ibid., 133. 166 "comfort, v,". OED Online, (Accessed 1 May 2017). 167 Clare, 134. 168 Clare, 134. 401

building a life around him. It was in such a place that Clare built himself back up from the wreckage of Port Orford and began to feel pride in what he found and what he made.

Thus armed with dignity and confidence, Clare became better able to explore desires and freely identify with others. The shape of this unfurling could be seen in the transformed image of himself. Clare recalls the joy of watching himself dress in the clothes that helped him feel at home in his body, "in the mirror, dressing to go out, knotting my tie, slipping into my blazer, curve of hip and breast vanishing beneath my clothes."169

Through the support of queer loca sancta, dyke bars, Clare was able to reclaim a sense of home in himself and his environment, including others who shared the space. He had places to go, people to see, and a body he wanted to be seen. At last he was able to dress and determine the modes by which his body would be accessed (or not) by others.

Yet this relocation—losing and finding home—would not have been possible without the ability to travel between places and identities. Not all potential hermits are able to escape places like Port Orford in order to come to breath the free dyke air of

Oakland. Clare admits the particular circumstances that gave him the slippage he needed. "I think about my disabled body, how as a teenager I escaped the endless pressure to have a boyfriend, to shave my legs, to wear make-up," writes Clare.170 "The same likes that cast me as genderless, asexual, and undesirable also framed a space in which I was left alone to be my quiet, bookish, tomboy self, neither girl nor boy." This asexuality is for many people an oppressive part of disability. They are denied the gender and sexuality they work to express. Yet for queer trans men like Clare, the asexuality imposed on him by his environment gave him room enough to be liberated from many of

169 Ibid., 123. 170 Ibid., 130. 402

the compulsory demands to be a heterosexual girl. It is in this between-state (one might say a crip trans-state) of life as a hermit that assisted Clare in coming to Oakland. "I was

18 and had just moved to the city," he writes.171 "I didn't want to be a girl, nor was I a boy. I hid my body, tried as much as possible to ignore it." Although this asexual identity kept Clare's body at a distance from himself and others, it gave him some safety in escaping the attention and touch of unwanted aggressors. By going less noticed, he did not develop the deep roots in Port Orford that would have kept him from leaving. These clothes that hid his body functioned in one place like the robes of a gender hermit and became in his escape the garment of the transgender pilgrim.

The circumstances of Clare's life, the often intersecting but sometimes competing oppressions of disability and dysphoria, gave him enough distance from gender norms to slip away into an asexual hermitage for a time and later to become a pilgrim to the city.

"But listen, if I had wanted to date boys, wear lipstick and mascara, play with feminine clothes - the silk skirts and pumps, the low-cut blouse, the outrageous prom dress - I would have had to struggle much longer and harder than my nondisabled counterparts," confesses Clare.172 The lessons of Port Orford was that Clare's gender and sexuality was not his own. They were prohibited, prescribed, and enforced in violence on his body. His recollections of living as a hermit in his home and his body were not merely that he was walled off from his later destination of queer and trans masculinity but that he was walled off on the other side from normative feminine gender and sexuality. Even if he had desired rather than begrudged dresses, he might have never have felt at home in them because the markers of disability which dismissed his power of femininity. Disability and

171 Ibid., 132. 172 Ibid., 130. 40 3

the disabled are not supposed to be desirable and so are not supposed to flaunt their sexuality. He was forced at times to submit to the sexual dominance of others but would not be allowed to embrace his own even sexuality even if he had felt normative desires.

Furthermore, notes Clare, the demands of such high femme attire are largely not made with the particularities of his CP embodiment in mind. The precision needed to put on make-up and the delicate fabrics demonstrate that much of feminine standards of beauty are intended for non-CP persons. For Clare, the environment offered the hermitage of asexual and agender as the path of least resistance. It was a place where he was willing for years to hide out until he could plot his escape.

The narrow paths that led to Clare's escape from the place that was not home for his body or transgender society only emphasized the high cost of moving from exile towards pride. Clare found among the anti-loca sancta of the city, the dyke bars, room enough to allow him to sit in a queer and trans environment. It gave him the freedom to share space without being put in any specific place in the community. He could be or not be, move and change, all essential powers for growth and free breathing. "And what if that definition [of gender] hadn't been large enough, what then?" asks Clare.173 "Would I have sought out hormones and/or surgery?" The space of city did not make demands on

Clare to immediately claim an identity even as he eschewed the chains of Port Orford.

Now that he could have sexuality, he was not pressured to affirm allegiance as a lesbian.

Now that he no longer had to be a girl, he was not forced to be a man. Yet not all alternative queer and transgender spaces are so free. There are places, many places, where transgender persons are only embraced if they have defined themselves according to one of the two binary positions: a trans man or a trans woman. Often in such cases

173 Ibid., 133. 404

social assistance is only given to transgender persons to transition if they undergo the full range of treatments for gender identity disorder, now called gender dysphoria. Such treatments include hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery (now called gender affirmation surgery), legal name and gender change, as well as psychological diagnosis and therapy. Such care is usually very expensive. Transgender transitions are often mapped like roads with these treatments as waymarkers that authorize access to an alternative gender. The cost for transitions becomes the price demanded if people are allowed to escape their gender and sexual confines.

For Clare, transgender is not a destination nor a fixed place but a liberating movement. In referencing "the trans movement," Clare seems to suggest both the political drive for change and the hard personal wanderings. "The trans movement suggests a world full of gender and sex variation, a world much more complex than one divided into female-bodied women and male-bodied men," explains Clare.174 The road for a transgender person intersects a wide range of possibilities, some of which are not yet named. The open road and unmarked footpaths of gender and sexuality can seem like chaos. Those who are most invested in the structures of power to order specific places and forms of embodiment express such queer and trans alternatives as empty or completely unorganized. The fear may be sincerely felt or it may simply be a scarecrow, yet another boundary marker to keep people in their place and from exploring the free world beyond. Yet Oakland is a place with structures and systems of its own, only with space enough to allow queer and trans bodies to breath.

The transgender movement as a whole is not aimed at destroying the loca sancta that are home for many who live there. Rather, transgender simply gestures to the road

174 Ibid., 128. 405

and offers assistance on the way to other places. "Many trans activists argue for an end, not to the genders of woman and man, but to the socially constructed binary."175 Tearing down the walls that enforce strict gender norms or forcibly enact sex on subjugated bodies is not the same as living in a world without a place to call home. Rather it turns such walls into bridges, it opens gateways, breaks chains, and also makes maps, founds cities, and offers resources to wayfarers who might want to enter the wilderness of gender where few have yet trodden.

In the conclusion to "Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart" in particular, and

Exile and Pride in general, Clare returns to the metaphor of the walls that define space and place, home and exile. Yet this time, Clare imagines himself not as a hermit but as a pilgrim. The wall becomes a bridge that he can cross or straddle, hanging his legs on both sides at once, dwelling in a between space. "In the end, I will sit on the wide, flat top of my wall, legs dangling over those big, uncrackable stones, weathered smooth and clean," writes Clare.176 Clare's pilgrimage is not offered only as a personal story but as a map for others to join with him in wandering. Clare imagines and invites others to imagine themselves on the wall next to him, reveling in multiplicity and the liberty to change.

[I] sit with butch women, femme dykes, nellie men, studly fags, radical ffaeries, drag queens and kings, transsexual people who want nothing more than to be women and men, intersexed people, hermaphrodites with attitudes, transgendered, pangendered, bigendered, polygendered, ungendered, androgynous people of many varieties and trade stories long into the night... Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.177

In the end, Clare positions his story as one among many. Each place in the spectrum of gender he crosses and occupies are but nodes that connect with wider trans networks of

175 Ibid., 128. 176 Ibid., 138. 177 Ibid. 406

possibility. "The stolen body, the reclaimed body, the body that knows itself and the world, the stone and the heat that warms it; my body has never been singular."178

The world of the trans pilgrim is one that invites a change in how we view our environments and the bodies that occupy, shape, and escape them. On one level, the movement seeks to reveal the diversity of wildlife living in our backyard, the other forms of gender and sexuality turned into hermits and exiles. "Trans people of all varieties say,

'This is how we can be men, women, how we can inhabit all the spaces in between,'" writes Clare.179 The revelation of Exile and Pride is not that Port Orford is a straight cisgender place and Oakland is full of queer and transgender people. Rather the world we live in is a lot wilder and dynamic than we expected. The ground shifts beneath our feet.

On another level, attention to the personal stories and scars of the road are critical. "Harder to express how that break becomes healed, a bone once fractured, now whole, but different from the bone never broken," writes Clare.180 "How do I mark this place where my body is no longer an empty house, desire whistling lonely through the cracks, but not yet a house fully lived in?" Scars can be used to tell tales and incite social change. Importantly, toxic environments are not set by nature and unchangeable. More often, the problem is in the social environment and not only in the individual, the place and not only the person needs to be transformed. This may mean physical changes need to be made to environments but it also means that social changes need to be made in who and how the world is structured. Returning time and again to the narratives of others who have faced these Mountains, these obstacles, and pressed on give trail advice and motivation for other trans pilgrims to leave their place and enter the wild. May we all

178 Ibid., 137. 179 Ibid., 132. 180 Ibid., 132. 407

learn to hear the call and read the signs of those who have come before, be they medieval or post-medieval, Amazon, Hermaphrodite, Englishman or Washingtonian.

Conclusion: Swerves and Swervers: Towards a Premodern Trans Studies

“Swerver. And that’s what I am like it or not. A man in body, a woman in soul.

One day a he, the next a she, a stiff cock for some, a tight arse for others. Provided they could pay, Eleanor would do all and be all for her loyal Jakes, and she had plenty who liked taking and giving it every which way. Sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes as both at once, though that could get complicated.” Bruce Holsinger thus narrates Eleanor Rykener’s internal dialog in his 2014 historical novel, A Burnable Book.

In the fictional recreation by a respected medievalist, Rykener assists John Gower (author of Confessio Amantis, see Chapter 2) in the solving of a mystery that includes the dealings of Geoffrey Chaucer (author of The Canterbury Tales, see Chapter 1). In addition to being a suspenseful detective story, Holsinger’s book also serves as a creative imagining of the late fourteenth century England of Rykener (from which John

Mandeville supposedly derived, see Chapter 4). In the process, the author plays upon historical and literary expectations about trans persons. The story of trans sex workers is one as old as time, as well as a common feature of crime dramas, yet the fictional

Rykener adds to the literary trope and the historical person by making her as much a protagonist in the solving of the mystery as she a twist in the narrative. Throughout

Holsinger’s portrayal of Rykener, she earns the title he gives her, inventing a bit of medieval slang for trans persons: swerver. The medieval trans woman at once turns heads

408

in her own time on the streets of Cheapside and turns the heads of students in today’s classroom (much like Margery Kempe, see Chapter 3). Yet Rykener also turns her head, swerving gender in the Middle Ages, touching queer scholars in the 1990’s, and jumping into the writing of a medievalist turned novelist in the 2010’s; sometimes medieval sometimes post-medieval, sometimes both at once, although that can be complicated.

A medieval scholar, Holsinger is presenting an implicit argument that has wider implications on the fields of history and literature. Written in 2014, while using the term

“swerver,” which Holsinger made up but which sounds sufficiently medieval to casual readers, most would be able to recognize Rykener as representative of trans identity.

While many of the events are fictional, Holsinger’s novel presents historical details that provoke readers to imagine fourteenth century England as a place in which trans lives could have been and were lived. As art, A Burnable Book invites other authors to pursue trans literature and as historical fiction it encourages readers to explore premodern transgender further. As a work of scholarship, this project has sought similar outcomes.

The title of this work, “Trans Literature: Transgender Histories and Genres of

Embodiment, Medieval and Post-Medieval,” reflects the goals of the project. It does not create new narratives nor introduce new archives but rather calls for a swerve in literary and historical study towards erased or recast trans lives, offering genres of embodiment as a method for thinking through how gender is textually expressed and how gender might be culturally embodied across time. Holsinger’s fiction asks, what trans lives might occupy the unwritten events before and after Rykenor took the stand? This project asks: how might we reexamine what has been written in order to get a better understanding of the social environment in which Rykener lived? Both ask: who or what else is out there?

409

Ultimately, the goal is not just to look again at the trans person but to get inside their head, to look through their eyes and culture to see who else they might help us recognize.

Four genealogies were explored in this work, each reflecting a distinct trans cultural history and embodiment. In “Exempla of Transsexuals,” the genre of the example was unpacked for its rhetorical power and tradition in framing transitioning bodies from

Chaucer’s London to Sara’s New York City. In “Confessions of Dysphoria,” a sacred and later secular tradition of revealing personal troubles to public authorities was considered for its narrative structures which offer different trajectories for trans lives under question: first, the model of confessions which isolates and controls suicidal trans teens, and, second, those confessions which help her society speak-together with the cries of other trans youths, from the medieval stories of Gower, until today. In “Hagiographies of

Transvestites,” the trans genre of memoir is considered within the history of religious stories about exceptional people set apart for their trans embodiment, those who become reclaimed as saints in a tradition; a genre that touches upon the writing of medieval women in white dresses and post-medieval trans men who vow never to wear a dress again. Finally, in “Pilgrimages of Hermaphrodites,” the scope of the project widens through an anaylsis of Middle and Modern English travel narratives in order to unpack how discourses of gender and space bring certain bodies towards the center of public life, while pushing others to the margins, such as trans crips, Amazons, and intersex lives. As a whole, all four chapters combine to make “Trans Literature” a not insubstantial work, in length or aspiration. Intentionality was given to look closely at the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century, as well as the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries, in order to give historicized evidence to justify broader transhistorical connections being made between

410

them. Yet, for good reason, the last chapter concludes with the question, who else is not being included in our trans and Medieval Studies?

For all the genealogies it explores, “Trans Literature” aims not to be exhaustive but rather invites further swerving toward and with Rykener, as well as offers a method by which more histories and genres might be traced. While this work chiefly limited itself to religious genres, or secular genres rooted in medieval Christianity, a range of non- religious genres exist in the long history of trans literature, including the trans knight in

Chivalric Romance, represented by literary characters such as Silence from Roman de

Silence, historical personages such as Joan of Arc, as well as modern retellings such as the adaptation of Sir Tristan of King Arthur’s court as a trans woman in a late twentieth graphic novel, Camelot 3000. Furthermore, not nearly enough has been explored on gender queer, androgynous, and other non-binary genres of embodiment. Although intersex was touched on in the final chapter, the project of connecting Medieval Studies on Hermaphrodites and modern intersex politics contains stories yet to be fully told.

A key figure in this study calls out to be considered more closely through a trans literary lens: Eleanor Rykener. Even in a study that begins and ends with her, the Swerver escapes final verdict. We do not know what happens to her after her trial, she disappears from historical record, yet her story continues to be told and turn heads towards trans lives. The future of the past remains likewise, without a concluding sentence. The future swerves and so does the past. As history continues to say through head turning examples, confessions, pilgrimages and lives set apart: however fixed our histories and narratives of gender may become, however bleak our present, nonethless things transform. There ever

411

remains in our past and future, “a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structural sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.”802

802 Ibid., 231. 412

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