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A. W. Strouse MISOGYNISTS AS QUEERS in LE LIVRE DE LA CITÉ DES DAMES1

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A. W. Strouse MISOGYNISTS AS QUEERS in LE LIVRE DE LA CITÉ DES DAMES1 Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny A. W. Strouse MISOGYNISTS AS QUEERS IN LE LIVRE DE LA CITÉ DES DAMES1 hristine de Pizan, in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405), insinuates Cthat misogyny is, as it were, a little queer. At the beginning of the City, Christine becomes duped into believing that women are monstrous, and, in opposition to this way of thinking, Lady Reason appears and begins to describe to Christine how misogynistic convictions themselves are in fact quite abnormal. To inoculate Christine against misogyny, Reason intimates that chauvinism might inspire a queer gender performance; she says that misogynistic texts have made Christine like a cross-dresser: “Tu ressembles le fol, dont la truffe parle, qui en dormant au molin fu revestu de la robe d’une femme” (1.2; “You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women’s clothes while he slept”).2 With this analogy, Reason compares Christine, who holds misogynistic sentiments, to a foolish man who dresses like a woman. Reason implies that misogynistic texts produce a kind of drag on their readers. Reason’s queer metaphor is not at all trivial. A close reading of the City shows that her maneuver is part of a broader pattern in the text: Christine’s main rhetorical strategy in her critique of misogyny is to associate misogynists with what we would now call queerness. “Queer” is, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it, an “open mesh of overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent element of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (8). In this sense, queer does not refer to literal homosexual relations or 1. This article began as a thesis written at the Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University. I would like to thank Susan Dudash for advising that thesis and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown for her helpful criticisms of it; and I am grateful to the community of medievalists at Fordham, particularly Maryanne Kowaleski, for their support. I also wish to acknowledge the editorial advice of Steven F. Kruger, and I am indebted to the editors and reviewers at the Romanic Review for their thorough, thought-provoking comments. 2. All citations of the Middle French are from Patrizia Caraff and Earl Jeffrey Richards’s edition of La Città delle Dame. For quotations in English, I rely on Richards’s translation. The Romanic Review Volume 104 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 254 A. W. Strouse identities. Rather, the term is far less specifc, and even equivocal. Throughout contemporary scholarship it is, in some sense, always provisional (O’Rourke 10). As Carolyn Dinshaw argues in Getting Medieval, we might think of queerness as always contingent: it is not known a priori but is “a relation to a norm, and both the norm and the particular lack of ft will vary according to specifc instances” (39). Paying attention to the ways in which medieval discourses fabricate queerness is, as William E. Burgwinkle (2006) suggests, the current task of medievalist queer scholarship (84). Instead of standing as a given, queerness involves instability and disruption, sexual desires and gender performances that, by their very existence, challenge prevailing notions about sex and gender. “Queer,” then, attends to the nonnormative, though its referents may vary, hinging on a particular text or culture. Of course, the fact that this word can stand for “any nonnormative behavior” might lead to some imprecision; but by limiting the scope of our discussion here to nonnormative behaviors that relate to sex and gender, our reading of Christine can be held to some defnitional limits while still embracing the term’s fexibility. That is, I use the term to refer to behaviors and characteristics that are defned in Christine’s text as aberrant and that are implicated in what we think of today as sexual identity, a nexus of gender performances, desires, beliefs, and acts—but that are not necessarily aberrant vis-à-vis contemporary norms that regulate sex and gender. Using the term here in a somewhat limited but still fexible way can help us to illuminate how Christine’s critique of misogyny pushes against old norms while trying to advance new ones. This article attends to the opening portions of the City through a queer lens. As I argue, Lady Reason mocks misogynists for having unmanly bodies. She also disparages their sexual desires as unnatural. Reason likewise ridicules misogynists as being practitioners of transgressive gender performances, and she suggests that misogynists are socially abject because of their emasculated bodies and deviant desires. It would seem, then, that Christine queers misogyny.3 Of course, when we speak about queerness—especially with regard to a ffteenth-century work—we raise a whole host of academic questions. First of all, the debate rages on between constructionist and essentialist approaches to the history of sexuality.4 Simultaneously, the nested issue of anachronism remains unsettled (Hollywood 174). Meanwhile, a growing body of scholarship explores issues of sexuality and gender within Christine’s particular corpus: scholars remain divided about the convoluted questions of Christine’s own 3. “To queer” something is to question its sexual legitimacy, as defned by Butler (232). 4. For a thorough discussion of the historiography on sexuality, especially debates between essentialism and constructivism, see Halperin. Christine de Pizan’s Queer Critique of Misogyny 255 politics5 and especially about her commitment to feminism,6 which itself is a term caught up in the problem of anachronism.7 These questions of course can bear tremendous intellectual fruits; yet we might momentarily bracket out such considerations, for the simple reason that, even though the term queer is problematic, its use can be productive. In the case of Christine, we might fexibly use the term to understand how Christine’s critique of misogynists operates. As outlined above—and as I describe more fully below—Christine’s misogynists are peculiar in a great variety of ways, all of which pertain, somehow or other, to sex and gender. It is precisely such a confuence of libidinal, morphological, behavioral, social, ideological, and hermeneutic oddities—all related to sex and gender—that the word queer is meant to cover. Indeed, Christine’s misogynists require a rather more fexible term of analysis—a rather more imaginative reading—than is offered by other, less anachronistic descriptions of their abnormalities. Some of the misogynists whom Reason describes are, she says, contre nature, and a historicist might very well prefer this term. But “unnatural” does not describe the sum total of ways in which these misogynists are odd. They are morphologically unmanly, sexually deviant, intellectually perverted, gender nonconforming, and socially abject; and the City does not work toward relating such characteristics to nature alone. Instead, they are attacked from multiple angles: put into play within the City are social mores, religious teachings, literary conventions, and all of these accrue into a queer identity that is not just “against nature” but queer in relation to multiple norms (a multifaceted way of being). Christine’s misogynists exist—to use Sedgwick’s phrase—in an “open mesh,” caught in a net of meaning that overlaps with many different discourses. The opening passages of the City offer up a view of misogyny that articulates it as a queer phenomenon. As this article demonstrates in its frst section, Reason associates misogynists with queer desires, beliefs, activities, social 5. See Brabant; and Forhan. For Christine as a political propagandist, see Quilligan and also Lynn. Other scholars have opposed the portrayal of Christine as a political writer: see Pinet; and Mombello. 6. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scholars wrote extensively about Christine as a feminist; see McLeod, as well as Fenster and Reno. Later scholars have debated whether Christine is in fact a feminist. The bibliography on the question is quite extensive, but major contributions to this debate include Delaney (“‘Mothers to Think Back Through’”) and Reno (“Christine de Pizan”). 7. Beatrice Gottlieb shows the importance of seeing Christine’s feminist sensibilities while also pointing out the dangers of applying modern terminology. On the other hand, Mary Ann Ignatius attempts to relate Christine’s feminism to contemporary feminist movements. See also Kelly (“Refections”) and Richards (“Sexual Metamorphosis”). Natalie Zemon David sees the City as part of an unbroken line of feminist writing. 256 A. W. Strouse identities, and physical bodies. The second section describes how Reason, in providing counsel on the proper way to interpret misogynist texts, identifes misogynist literature as hermeneutically queer. Reason’s Characterization of Misogynists as Queers As I have shown, Christine’s Lady Reason associates misogynists with queerness from the very beginning of the City. Reason hints that there is something queer about misogynist worldviews when she compares Christine with a cross-dressing fool. To review that passage at length: Tu ressembles le fol, dont la truffe parle, qui en dormant au molin fu revestu de la robe d’une femme et au resveiller, pour ce que ceulx qui le moquoyent lui tesmoignoient que femme estoit, crut mieulx leur faulx dis que la certaineté de son estre. (1.2) [You resemble the fool in the prank who was dressed in women’s clothes while he slept; because those who were making fun of him repeatedly told him he was a woman, he believed their false testimony more readily than the certainty of his own identity.] Christine, who has read misogynist philosophy and come to believe it, is caught like Boethius in a melancholy stupor. Christine is not exactly a misogynist herself, but at this particular moment, she takes as true the doctrine that women are monstrous and inferior to men.
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