“Thus Yde, daughter of Florent of Aragon, married Olive, daughter of Othon the emperor of Rome.”
As a queer woman looking for identification in the past, and especially as an amateur medievalist active in medieval re-creation events, try to imagine how the simple existence of this sentence in a 13th century French manuscript affects me. In my research and my re-interpretation of the past in fiction, I've learned to cherish moments like this, and not to dismiss them for failing to be a perfect reflection of my modern identity. The medieval French imagination was not capable of encompassing the possibility of two women marrying and living happily ever after as female spouses...but it was capable of encompassing the possibility that a woman might fall in love with and profess her loyalty to another woman. It was capable of encompassing the possibility that--if carefully manoeuvered into an inescapable choice--two women might marry each other. It was capable of imagining them kissing and embracing and taking joy in that.
Yde and Olive cannot truly be considered a "lesbian story" in a modern understanding of the term. This is true, even if we set aside the Foucaultian position on sexual identity. The "lesbian" reading exists for a few brief lines when both women know each other's truths and before their "outing" demands a different resolution. At the same time, Yde and Olive cannot truly be considered a "transgender story" in a modern understanding of the term. Yde never expresses a sense of male identity prior to the transformation, only an embracing of male performance. I haven't read the next episode regarding Croissant to know for certain, but if Yde's self-identity follows that of our other transgender French romance protagonist, Blanchandine, we can expect an unquestioned change to male self-identity. Function follows form. In one of the other variants of Yde's tale, the resolution of the conceptual conflict of same-sex marriage is to disrupt the marriage of Yde and Olive and marry both women off to each other's fathers. The change of physical sex is not, itself, embedded in the romance's essential structure. Rather it is one of the possible outcomes to avoid an acceptance of "impossibilities," like the outcome of bringing two identical magnetic poles together.
But in the same way that I find identification and validation in the moments of the story that align with "lesbian," those who look for transgender identification and validation in the past will find similar moments in Yde and Olive, perhaps in "God in his benevolence has given him everything that makes a man." Yde can be both a wave and a particle, and perhaps that makes the story even more delightful in its ambiguity.
Comments