Several of the articles I currently have lined up collide to produce an emergent theme of how apparently transgressive motifs can be seen as resolving in ways that reinforce the heteronormative status quo. This current article points out that cross-dressing narratives in medieval European literature may flirt with the creation of homoerotic possibilities, but always resolve to heterosexuality. Further, the homoerotic possibilities in these narratives are always f/f. (I'm taking the authors word for this because I don't have the research background in male-centered stories to have an opinion on the conclusion.) Unlike the cross-dressing heroines like Silence and Yde, romance heros who take on a female presentation never find themselves unexpectedly desired by men, rather their story is about how they convince a woman to accept f/f desire as a bridge toward transfering that desire to their "true" male self. In contrast, when the disguised Blanchandine and her lover Tristan are teased by Tristan's male companions about their relationship, all parties are "in on the secret". The superficially m/m couple is given textual approval because everyone knows it's "really" a heterosexual relationship.
There are no stories about an assigned-male character presenting as female, being desired by a man, and then being magically transformed into a physiological woman to resolve the moral conflict. There are no literary stories (as opposed to real-life case studies) where an assigned-female person presents as male in order to pursue erotic attraction to a woman. (There are a few Renaissance-era plays with a motif where a cross-dressed woman deliberately pays court to another woman, but the underlying motivation is presented as deception or revenge, generaly revolving around a triangular relationship with a male third party.)
One of the other articles I have lined up examines the legends of "transvestite saints" and comes to similar conclusions about how the underlying message is not about women breaking free of arbitrary social gender conventions, but rather about women accepting social attitudes about women's limitations and "becoming male" to escape them, without challenging those attitudes (and, indeed, sometimes reinforcing misogynistic attitudes in their encounters with other female characters in the stories).
This pattern of the reinforcement of misogyny and heteronormativity presents a continuing challenge to those of us who mine historical motifs for creative purposes. If we adhere too closely to the historic exemplars, we find no space in which to create positive homoerotic resolutions. (And only a very narrow set of positive transgender resolutions.) But when we re-make the historic exemplars into stories that have more resonance for us a modern authors and readers, we necessarily make choices as to which elements we contradict or discard. One of the most fraught contexts in which this conflict is currently playing out in genre literature is over "ownership" of the motif of "assigned-female person presents as male, engages in a romantic relationship with a female-presenting female-assigned person, and the story resolves with the couple presenting the social appearance of a heterosexual couple." The motif occurs time and again through history in literature and case studies.
The literary examples typically apply a "magical" bodily change to create a heterosexual reality. But although the resolution supports a transgender understanding of the story, the lead-up to that resolution rarely does so, in that the transitioning character has not been presented as experiencing gender dysphoria. (One can argue that Silence does express something interpretable as gender dysphoria, but Silence is not given a transgender resolution.) The non-literary case studies rarely offer us unfiltered insight into the subject's interior motivations and self-understanding. ("Rarely", not "never.")
The long history of scholarly analysis that focuses on cultural subjectivity (the "they had different categories/understandings" position) or lack of approved evidence (the "we can't really know" position) in order to erase both transgender and homosexual interpretations of the past has had the unfortunate byproduct of making these motifs into contested ground between groups that might more productively be allies against the pervasive heteronormativity and misogyny of the source material. But in an atmosphere of "resource scarcity"--both with regard to that source material and with regard to the ways it is being reworked in modern genre literature--too often any particular interpretation is seen as a theft of cultural property from the group not reflected in that specific interpretation. I wish I had a productive answer for the conundrum, but my only fallback position is to continue to point it out.
Comments