גבריות ונשיות - כביצוע של טקסט

[chameleon9]

גבריות ונשיות - כביצוע של טקסט

אני מקפיצה את ההודעה הזו לכאן, על מנת שלא תלך לאיבוד בנבכי השרשור המבוזבז שהתחלנו בו למטה בענייני ביקורת על התהליך הפסיכולוגי. אחת התאורטקניות החשובות והמרתקות בעיני, טוענת שבכלל אין דבר כזה נשיות או גבריות מולדים. הכל - ביצוע! (פרפורמנס) כלומר - התרבות ניסחה, וכל תרבות גם ניסחה זאת באופן שונה, מה נחשב "גברי" ומה נחשב ל"נשי" וכולנו בעצם חוזרים ומשחזרים את הטקסט התרבותי הזה, ללא שום קשר לביולוגיה! ראיתם פעם טרנסווסטיט מושלם כמו האישה הכי יפה בסביבה? או אישה בתפקיד גבר שכזה? על מנת לסיים את הפוסט הזה בנימה מאתגרת אספר לכם סיפור אמיתי, שהיה בתחילת המאה ה 18 בצרפת. בכל מקרה, מדובר בסיפור אמיתי: היה בצרפת אביר בשם ד'און. אותו ד'און התוודה בפני מקורביו שבעצם נולד כאישה, והוריו גידלו אותו כבן בשל רצונם ביורש עצר, אבל ברצונו לחזור ולחיות כאישה. הכל ריחמו על גורלו, ועל מנת להישמר מן הבושה, עבר ד/און לאנגליה, שם חי את שארית חייו כאישה מכובדה. כשמת והכינו את גופתו לקבורה, התגלה כי בעצם היה גבר. ולמי שממש מעוניין הציטוט המושלם יהיה בהודעה הבאה. אשמח לשמוע פרשנויותיכם.

 

[chameleon9]

(1)Real life: Monsiur d'Eon

In a case from recorded French history, in the eighteenth century, the Chevalier d'Eon (a friend of Beaumarchais, the author of The Marriage of Figaro) turned out to be a man who pretended to be a woman pretending to be a man. This is the story: Once upon a time, more precisely on October 5, 1728, a child named Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste Andréa Thimothée d'Eon, also known as Charles de Beaumont, was born to a low-ranking nobleman in the town of Tonnerre in Burgundy. The child grew up to have a distinguished career as a diplomat and spy and a captain in the Dragoons, and was honored with the title of Chevalier for his bravery in the Seven Years' War. In 1770, rumors that he was a woman began to circulate in France and England, and in 1776 Louis XVI officially announced that d'Eon was, and had always been, a woman. The Chevalière, as she now became known, left France and lived the rest of her life as a woman in London. When she died, on 21 May, 1810, it was discovered that she was anatomically male.6 After d'Eon announced that he was a woman, he insisted that he did not want to wear women's clothing but had the right to wear his Dragoon's uniform. Still wearing men's clothing in France, masquerading as himself, he encouraged people to conjure up the two negatives that cancelled one another out, leaving him as he appeared to be, though regarded as doubly disguised. He was able to project his fantasies upon the people he fooled; he never actually changed anything, but just made other people imagine him differently. In this period of transition, he was a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. Then he dressed in women's clothes, only, he insisted, at the king's insistence, but since he continued to cross-dress when he was in exile in England, with no French king to make him do it, one is inclined to believe that he did protest too much, rather like Br'er Rabbit begging Br'er Fox not to throw him into his beloved briar patch. It was, and still is, widely believed that "he first disguised himself as a woman in Russia in order to gain access to the empress and subsequently 'disguised' himself as a man,"7 but at least one biographer, Gary Kates, regards his cross-dressing in Russia as a "fantasy."8 In this experience (or, perhaps, fantasy) of drag in Russia, he was a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Kates points out that if d'Eon went to a cross-dressing ball (and there were many at that time), "he would not have to pose as someone else, but rather, his original self would now be regarded by others as female."9 But what was this "original self"? As if that were not enough, "At many salons, women began to masquerade as d'Eon, telling risqué stories and flirting with male guests."10 But what were they masquerading as? Here the mind truly boggles.

 

[chameleon9]

Real Life: Monseiur D'Eon (2)

The double double cross-dress, or sexual switch back, explains how d'Eon got away with it. Apparently, as long as no one with any status in Paris had any knowledge of d'Eon's male anatomy (and the strange thing is that no one, apparently, did), he was safe from accusations or rumors from people who had known him in the provinces. (Half of his names are girls' names, but the French do that). Well, his mother lied for him, and he must have been extraordinarily discrete about his private life, but the truth was that he set it up in such a way that he could not lose. People later remarked, with surprising surprise, that he had actually looked more feminine in his uniform than he did later in a dress. Like the fools in the tale of the Emperor's new clothes, who persuaded themselves and one another that they didn't see the Emperor's nude body, the French courtiers imagined that d'Eon's invisible nude body was what he told them it was and discounted what they actually saw. The Chevalier created a social fiction which no one dared to challenge. Even when he later cross-dressed and "behaved in an unabashedly masculine fashion," so that people remarked that d'Eon "still seems more like a man than a woman,"11 even when they noticed that the Chevalière shaved, had a beard, a voice, and a chest like a man, and urinated standing up12, still they went along with it. Kates sums up the situation well: What is amazing about the reactions of Boswell and Walpole is that they did not follow their instincts and declare that d'Eon was actually a man dressed as a woman. Rather, despite what they perceived, they identified d'Eon as an Amazon, a thoroughly masculinized woman. They assumed female in what they could not see; they perceived male in what they could see. To them, d'Eon was anatomically female, but socially a man.13 In fact, he was anatomically male, but socially female. Politics, too, supported the masquerade. D'Eon was a spy for many years, living what Kates calls a double life14 and I would call a double double life, as "spy and diplomat, as man and woman." As a spy he knew how to be what later came to be called, appropriately, a "double penetration agent," like Guy Burgess. In London, too, he played into the scenario of political double entendre: an article published in England referred to him as "this amphibious being, male in London, female in Paris,"15 while a piece of doggerel in Paris argued that it was believed (presumably in France) that he was male, but England declared him to be female, a little girl.16 Each nation feminized the other, and blamed the transvestism, like syphilis, on the other. This is a story out of history but about fantasy, sexual fantasy, and d'Eon's autobiography is a masterpiece of that genre. At times his life reads like a French comedy, and there is much irony in the fact that one of the players in this drama was Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, the author of "The Marriage of Figaro," the play that was the basis of Mozart's opera. Beaumarchais not only thought that d'Eon was a woman but spread the rumor that he and d'Eon were in love and contemplating marriage and, later, that d'Eon was trying to marry him.17 Most significantly, Beaumarchais negotiated the document in which Louis XVI announced that d'Eon was a woman.18 But the true genre of the work of art that d'Eon made of his life was not slapstick or opera buffo, but myth. D'Eon "created the mythology of his birth and childhood [and] invented the fable" of the cross-dressing in Russia; "What he needed, then, was an explanation--a myth--derived from an imaginary childhood."19 The story he told was the widespread tale of a girl whose impoverished parents made her dress as a boy.20 This is a myth in the classical sense of the word--a story that has been told, and retold, for many centuries in many cultures:

 

[chameleon9]

Real life: Monsieur D'Eon(3)

[A]ccording to d'Eon, his father squandered whatever he found in his wife's dowry, and by the mid-1720's was in debt up to his ears. The way out of debt, it turned out, was to have a son. Françoise's family will stipulated that a large inheritance of some 400 louis would go to the d'Eon family only if Françoise had a son. . . . . Although born female, the new infant was to be raised from the start as a boy . . . . Thus according to d'Eon, he was born female, but he never knew what it was like to exist as a girl because from the first breath his family raised him as a son.21 But of course, none of this was "true." Even the least suspicious of hermeneuts can see that d'Eon was projecting onto other people (his mother and two other women) his own fantasy of self-recreation. There is an overlap between the acknowledged fiction of the autobiography and the brazened-out fiction of the life. D'Eon's autobiography is a fairy tale in more ways than one, and there are other fairy tales like it. Indeed, the central image of d'Eon's androgyny was recognized as mythical even at that time; in September 1777, a London magazine had a picture of d'Eon "with a kind of gender line running vertically down the middle of his body,"22 just like the depiction of sacred androgynes in India. Myth or history, the Chevalier d'Eon's cross-dressing led to the eponym "eonism," coined by Havelock Ellis in 1928 and enshrined in the OED: "Transvestism, esp. by a man. So Eonist, one who wears the clothes of the opposite sex." Ellis had written: "It was clearly a typical case of what Hirschfeld later termed 'transvestism' and what I would call 'sexo-aesthetic inversion,' or more simply, 'Eonism.' . . . The Eonist (though sometimes emphatically of the apparent sex) sometimes shows real physical approximations towards the opposite sex."23 And in 1970 the Times of London called the Chevalier "an a-sexual transvestite" and eonism nothing but a "minor deviation."24 After all, he was French. Oddly enough, the victim of another man who pretended to be a woman pretending to be a man was also French: Bernard Boursicot lived for two decades with a Chinese man named Shi Peipu, who persuaded him that he was a woman pretending to be a man. 25 Like d'Eon, Shi Peipu didn't have to do anything different, just tell people to imagine the switch on and the switch back; he never even had to change out of his trousers. The French continue to worry about d'Eon. Jacques Lacan, in his seminar on Poe's "The Purloined Letter," speaking of self-referentiality, remarks, "We generally deem unbecoming such premature publications as the one by which the Chevalier d'Eon put several of his correspondents in a rather pitiful position." The notes do not tell us what the particular publication was,26 but it may well have been not a document but merely the public statement that he was a woman who had pretended to be a man, the double-back of the male d'Eon masquerading in plain sight like the letter.