Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre recently announced that it will be putting on an original play in which Joan of Arc, world-famous crossdresser and military hero, will be portrayed as non-binary. Predictably, this has aroused right-wing culture warriors and transphobes more generally, who consider the very notion of a genderqueer Joan to be an abomination — and an insult to women.
Transphobic propagandist Matt Walsh had this to say:
In the right-wing American Thinker blog, meanwhile, Monica Showalter declared the as yet unseen play to be “repugnant.”
“Is nothing sacred to the left?” she wrote.
Suddenly, St. Joan of Arc has been rewritten into a transgender icon, according to wokester elites in the arts, who’ve decided to culturally expropriate the Catholic saint and national patroness of France for the god of transgenderism … Instead of being the Maid of Orleans, the Liberator of France, and a great symbol of feminine chastity, beauty, innocence and courage, she’s now some creature whose bravery consists of contemplating her genitals and displaying her wokeness in the trendy new definition of heroism.
NewsBusters dismissed I, Joan as a
new woke piece of garbage play … which views the warrior saint through the funhouse perspective of modern gender silliness. … Shakespeare’s Globe perverted a Catholic saint and molded her into a woke monstrosity. Get woke, please go broke.
“Joan of Arc has been cancelled,” proclaimed Paul Joseph Watson on Infowars. (Whatever that means.)
But what exactly is the problem with a play positing a genderqueer Joan?
Theaters aren’t history classes. Every play based on a historical figure is fictionalized to some extent, because that’s how plays (and movies. and novels) work. Even the most realistic plays involving historical figures have to stuff the unruly facts into a dramatic structure. And sometimes playwrights (and screenwriters, and novelists) like to deliberately play around with the historical facts — to play a game of “what if?”
Did anyone else enjoy the movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? I did, even though as a trained historian I am aware that Lincoln did not, in fact, hunt vampires.
The Globe theater is asking a much more realistic “what if” question than many history-inspired works of fiction, looking at a famous female crossdresser — who was literally burnt at the stake for refusing to dress in women’s clothes — and asking to what degree we can see her as queer.
No, Joan of Arc was not “nonbinary” in a contemporary sense, because that concept didn’t exist in her time. And even if she had been genderqueer in all but the name, she would have understood herself in a different way than contemporary genderqueer folks do. As she saw it, God had told her to cut off her hair and don men’s clothing, and she was simply obeying his orders.
But that’s not the end of the issue. Did she see herself as wholly female or wholly male, or some mixture of both? Was her crossdressing a way to assert her not-exactly-female self, or merely a convenience for someone wearing armor and going into battle? We don’t know; we can’t know. But it is an interesting question to ask, and one way to ask that question is to write a play in which she’s imagined as non-binary.
Transphobes tend to assume that no one was trans until about, well, 14 seconds ago, historically speaking, and that transness is some sort of modern affliction exacerbated by the internet and funded by George Soros. as part of a devious plan to destroy Western civilization. The people of the past didn’t have time for that nonsense, transphobes often argue. But the fact is they did. Joan of Arc wasn’t even the first crossdressing saint, as Wikipedia notes in an extensive page on “Cross-dressing, gender identity, and sexuality of Joan of Arc.” In Medieval times women who dressed themselves as men in order to become monks were accepted as “holy transvestites”
A saint especially popular among the common people in Europe from the eleventh century on … was Saint Uncumber. She was a Portuguese princess who refused to be married to the heathen King of Sicily, and prayed to God to be saved from this fate. Her salvation was unusual; she suddenly grew a beard.
History is much weirder and more interesting than right-wing culture warriors — and other transphobes — would have you believe. I have no idea if I, Joan will be any good. But it’s already got people thinking.
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@Mediocrites
Yes, and Alucard counts into “whatever the hell that thing is, I want to have sex with it”
@Anonymous
I am actually quite sympathetic to this idea and your position. On History Hit on YouTube, one historian said her pet hate is films/stories that are highly accurate but change a few key details, because she thinks that confusing to the viewer and creates widely-believed myths. So I guess her position would be you go full historic fiction (eg. Inglourious Basterds) or stick as much as you can to the facts.
Where I start to disagree is I genuinely don’t believe its possible because history, even just dry “this is what happened” history, is an interpretation of sometimes equally valid sources and its *very* hard to create a narrative without assumptions.
For example, if you want to tell a story about the downfall of Anne Boyelyn, you have to make some decisions about the information we have available to us. Did Jane Boyelyn actually testify that her husband and Sister-in-Law (Anne) committed incest? If so, can we glean from the sources what some historians believe, which is that she had an unhappy marriage? For narrative satisfaction, we need to know her motivation, but then we are also making the logical but in-no-way-provable assumption that Anne DIDN’T sleep with her brother and Jane was lying.
Even recent history, like Hitler’s last days depicted in Downfall, which benefit from a rich catalogue of sources, testimonies etc, have to fill significant gaps with “what probably happened” because the information isn’t there. We know the Goebbels murdered their kids – how the actors presented that moment is down to their feelings about their characters. We also only have the testimony of a SS dentist who said he administered morphine but not the cyanide that killed them – its unlikely but that might not be true for all we know. Another source says the children were given something to drink, not capsules, for example.
So I personally think if we are going to tell stories about our history, accuracy is probably not an achievable goal.
@Lollypop
It is nevertheless a goal worth striving towards. Perhaps we cannot attain it, but we can grow progressively closer to it.
@Anonymous
So your problem with I, Joan, is that it does not even try to discern the true from the false, which we must always do? It’s failing in “our duty”? I am always very leery of people who try to tell me what my duty is, because it invariably ends up being a mechanism to control me in some way.
I also am here to tell you that your view of history is why people fight the innocence project so hard. “Well all those sources/records/people can’t have been wrong! They must be guilty!” And in fact we find out people are framed or just mistakes are made all the frikkin time. Your “simple” dismisses the absolute control and isolation an abuser can have, rewriting the history of a person so that they become the bad guy to everyone else.
I do appreciate the kind note that asexuality is highly unlikely to be mentally disordered though. Means the world to me.
@Big Titty Demon
II’m not speaking about legal matters (and indeed, my view is that the entire legal system as we know it is only intended to serve the ruling class and the state- it should be disposed of and replaced with more viable methods of conflict resolution that are better able to account for context and are less focused on blind punishment, which we will need to develop on our own), more in the sense of the more basic “In the year X, Y happened”. For example, we may not be able to know for sure why the Great Fire in Rome happened, but we can at least be sure that there was a fire that burned down most of Rome during Nero’s reign. I do not expect outright omniscience from the records or the record-keepers, but in terms of past events we do not have the luxury of going back in time to see how they really turned out and we cannot start from a position of total ignorance.
I should also warn you that your suggestion unintentionally opens the way to the opposite extreme in which objective reality does not exist. No matter how many people I can convince that I’m able to fly, when I jump off a cliff everyone involved will be able to see that I cannot in fact fly. This is also why I emphasized multiple sources, as it reduces the risk of any one of them being tainted and it is highly unlikely that every single source is unreliable. Naturally, sources outside the “official” account can be helpful there so long as they’re not barking mad- if anything would be able to address your concerns about abusers rewriting history, it would be that.
Perhaps duty was not the right word, then. I was attempting to express that if we don’t press for the truth, we allow falsehoods and deception to flourish. That is how I feel and I do what I can to live my life in accordance with that principle. If you do not feel that way, then so be it.
I am hardly an expert on these matters, but I personally believe that so long as it doesn’t cause you any distress in itself and has no risk of causing harm to yourself or others, it’s a harmless variation. The people I mentioned also fall in that category despite their having what could generously be called some very uncommon fetishes that may or may not be physically possible to fulfill.
I’m surprised that a true conservative would have time for a person whose sainthood were so in doubt that she was not canonised until 1920….
@Anonymous:
I think the issue Big Titty Demon seems to be having isn’t necessarily with your general preference for accurate history; it’s that people whose positions are indistinguishable from yours in a one-sentence description have then gone on to reinforce inaccurate descriptions of events. They do this by accepting the biased narrative of people at the time who had something to hide, and then requiring a higher standard of evidence for anything attempting to overturn that narrative.
Drawing from multiple sources of information is a good idea in general; unfortunately in practice a lot of those ‘multiple’ sources may have all drawn from the same original source. Conspiracy theories are often a classic example of that; one idea gets tossed out at one place, other people write about it, and soon enough you have people going ‘these hundreds of people saying the same thing can’t all be wrong’. You have to spend time tracking down sources and verifying that they actually are independent, and that’s not always even possible.
Heck, it’s generally accepted that three of the four Gospels are all based on the same original document, though whether any of the three is actually pretty much the original or there was some other fourth document they’re all descended from is more contentious. One of them even looks like it was written by someone who couldn’t speak the original language and was working from at least two different later translations and trying to create a translation into a third language while dealing with the fact that the intermediate translations had chosen different words to describe things that were the same word in the original. And those are also very much cases of the writers trying to make a case.
Striving for accuracy is laudable. Understanding that it’s not always possible has to be dealt with; and sometimes minor inaccuracies make for a better story, so if you can make minor changes to reinforce the main issue it can be worth it. People remember stories, not facts: that’s just human nature.
@ jenora
I’ve just had a really weird experience of that; but it very much illustrates your point. I posted what I thought (and still think) was a pretty innocuous tweet last week. Someone commented on it; someone else liked that comment; and now it’s all gone ‘send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.’
It’s been especially ironic as people have been commenting to me “Hey, have you heard…!”
@Gerald Fnord: And that they’d care about a Catholic saint, since most of them still think the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon.
Seriously, there’s some people alive who were born before Joan finally was sainted (500 years late), and probably a few who might remember it.
My favourite saint…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Guinefort
@Jenora Feuer
I know it isn’t always possible, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anyway.
And in a way your example of the Gospels actually proves my point- as no evidence exists that any of their authors lived even remotely close to the time Jesus did (to say nothing of the fact that their intent was almost certainly to edify existing Christians rather than to document his life as it really happened) none of them can be considered reliable sources. At most, we can say someone called Jesus existed who made a name for himself as a holy man and was crucified- the rest (especially his supposed teachings) is likely to be words put into his mouth by Paul or other early Christians (none of whom were around to know what he actually taught either).
While that stripped-down sort of history may not be especially appealing to read or learn about, it’s better than falsehoods or simply shrugging one’s shoulders and saying “we don’t know anything about it”.
I will note once again that this is not a popular opinion, but I believe that when it comes to history we should leave the stories to the novels and focus on the actual course of events as much as possible. Just because we remember the stories better than the facts is no excuse for disregarding truth.
@ anonymous
When I did RE A level we did a lot about the synoptic gospels and their possible sources and origins.
You may enjoy this. I really like this guy’s stuff.
Current best guess is that the historical Jesus was an itinerant doomsday preacher — basically, one of those guys on street corners with the cardboard signs except for being all the way back in the early Iron Age — who railed against the corruption of the religion (that would be Judaism, not Christianity which didn’t exist yet) by its elites’ kowtowing to the Roman regime and their taking monetary indulgences. (The latter has been a recurring thing; the Catholic Church would later take indulgences, and get hit with its own protest movements making splinter sects; and now we have Protestant “prosperity gospel” megachurches…) Eventually he got enough of a following and said enough anti-Roman-state things that the local Roman governor put him to death for being, not so much a serious national security threat, but a thorn in his paw. A nuisance.
@Alan Robertshaw:
When I mentioned ‘conspiracy theories’ I was thinking in particular of ‘The Philadelphia Experiment’, where there are several books and stories that cross-reference each other, but as far as anybody can determine the whole thing started with one man’s written ravings to a UFO enthusiast publisher, and all the rest of it blossomed out from there. (And the real-world ‘experiment’ involved degaussing the ship to make it ‘invisible’ to torpedoes that used magnetic sensors to track ships.)
@Jenora Feuer:
When I mentioned ‘conspiracy theories’ I was thinking in particular of ‘The Philadelphia Experiment’, where there are several books and stories that cross-reference each other, but as far as anybody can determine the whole thing started with one man’s written ravings to a UFO enthusiast publisher, and all the rest of it blossomed out from there. (And the real-world ‘experiment’ involved degaussing the ship to make it ‘invisible’ to torpedoes that used magnetic sensors to track ships.)
Is this what you’re referencing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sharpe_Shaver
(A lot of current UFO mythology and conspiracy theory has its roots in [racist by default] early 20th-century fantasy and science fiction; I may have mentioned that the Snake People trope beloved of David Icke originated in the works of Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame.
That’s also where the popular notion of Set as a serpent god came from—an idea utterly unsupported in actual Egyptian mythology; in fact, one of Set’s divine functions was to help Ra battle Apep, the Serpent of Chaos.)
@Full Metal Ox:
No, entirely different UFOlogist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_K._Jessup
There’s a mention of the Philadelphia Experiment interaction on that page.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary page goes into rather more detail, though is obviously less ‘neutral’ in its tone.
And yes, a lot of the UFO fascination at the time (particularly the ‘ancient astronaut’ line) had some pretty fundamentally racist roots in the sense of ‘those primitive people couldn’t possibly have created something that magnificent on their own, they must have had help’. A lot of it was also just rebranding a lot of the older occult fascination and giving it a shiny new and less easily-debunked coating. In some cases, where people were ‘channeling’ psychic aliens rather than ancient spirits, the coating wasn’t even particularly thick.
As for Fantasy/SF… yeah, sadly a lot of it was racist as well; a lot of the early stuff had pretty openly colonialistic themes. Didn’t help that at least one of the better-known gatekeeper publishers was in the category of ‘not just a man of his time, but considered somewhat racist and misogynist for his time‘ as well as a big fan of psychic powers and other forms of pseudoscience; that helped set the tone for most of a generation of SF writers.
@ Jenora Feuer
John W Campbell? He fits the bill from what I know of him.
@Jenora, Jazzlet: As was famously said a few years back, “John W. Campbell was a fucking fascist.” Whereupon after it was said (by a non-white woman) and applauded (by a probably mostly-white audience), voila, an award named for him wasn’t about 4 days later.
(Also, who changes the name of their magazine from Astounding to Analog right when analog was going out and digital coming in?)
Meanwhile, Von Daniken, Mr. Chariots of the Gods himself was a multiply-convicted (and jailed) thief, fraudster, embezzler — and the book was heavily rewritten by the guy who was the editor of the Nazi Party newspaper. Charming, no?
@Jazzlet, GSS ex-noob:
That’s who I was referring to, yes.
With regards to the award… honestly, that had been building up for years, and I suspect the people who ran the award of a bit of cowardice there. They likely already had plans to rename the award (the Lovecraft bust had been retired as the World Fantasy Award trophy just four years earlier, so they almost certainly knew something like this was coming) but they were waiting for sufficiently public complaints and show of support so they could portray themselves as ‘bowing to popular pressure’ and any blowback from the same sort of ‘usual suspects’ who complained about Lovecraft being removed would be directed at the public complainers rather than them. The change came together way too quickly after that speech to be something they hadn’t already been thinking about.
@ Jenora, GSS ex-noob
Yeah, I agree they must have had a name change in the works, organisations just dont respond that quickly, but however it hapened that it happened is good. The complete lack of character and agency of the women characters in the works of many of the authors he fostered, along with the whole “the future will be white America in space” thing held back science fiction for decades in my opinion. It makes so many of the “classic” authors in SF difficult if not impossible to (re)read, well for me anyway.
Somewhat related to this, I’ve just been finally getting around to Robert E. Howard’s complete Solomon Kane works (in audiobook form), and it provides an interesting look at how Howard changed and matured over his 20s. This was a man who had spent basically his entire life in early 20th-century Texas, and while his writing’s treatment of POC started off as what you would expect, by his mid-20s African and African-American characters were treated with what was, for Howard’s background, an astonishing amount of dignity and sympathy. Just compare the early Solomon Kane story “Red Shadows” to the later “Hills of the Dead.”