Early-Modern (Trans)gender
“Transgender” as a term was first used as an adjective in 1974 and a noun in 1987 (Oxford 2017). Clearly, neither Erauso nor d’Eon would have ever thought of themselves as “transgender” but they were seen as violating the gender rules of their time. However, what these gender rules actually were is a matter of some debate, a debate I examine in this chapter in order to prove that firstly, Erauso and d’Eon were transgressive and, secondly, to demonstrate that the translator has the power to maximize or minimize this transgression.
Following his ideas on the death of the author, Roland Barthes might claim that what was or was not seen as transgressive in Erauso’s or d’Eon’s time is of no consequence because it is the reader’s context that matters: he states that the author “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing” (Barthes 1977, 145). While this may work for contemporary texts, there has to be a different way of looking at texts from the distant past. We should not just look at Erauso’s, or d’Eon’s, texts in the here and now without considering the then of their lives because we can attempt to excavate the historical ontology of early modern texts and this excavation has implications for translation choices. Understanding the gender system operative during Erauso or d’Eon’s times is important background work for any translation, not that my goal is to ‘understand’ Erauso or d’Eon’s behavior. This chapter aims to show that because of these conceptualisations, Erauso and d’Eon would have been seen as transgressive and therefore had limited means to present their identities to the world around them, making their writing central to their performances. This call to examine or reconstruct the past is complicated, however, by conflicting opinions on what the gender systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually were.
I shall now take a look at some of these opinions to show how I come to my own conclusions regarding early-modern gender; they are conflicting because during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries theories of gender and how the body worked “were drawn not only from experimental anatomy but also from earlier medieval and classical belief systems” (Gilbert 2002, 35). Thanks to these classical belief systems, sex was conceptualized in two ways: the first was based on Hippocrates’ writings from the fifth century BC. In this position, which was taken up in the early medieval period, male and female were seen as on a continuum, they were not binary opposites. It espoused a fluid system of sexual differentiation based on a “one-sex” model. Following the Hippocratic position, Thomas Laqueur (2012, 802) states that “before the eighteenth century men and women were regarded not as two opposite and distinct sexes but rather as hierarchically ranked versions of each other”. This meant that, according to Laqueur (802), “there was a time before what we now call gender (a set of prescribed behaviors, legal standings, social arrangements, and much more) was grounded in what we now call sex.” Gary Kates sides with Laqueur; he claims that “d’Eon conceived of the distinctions among the sexes as fluid, mutable, and elastic” (Kates 1991, 185–86). Nerea Aresti (2007, 406) also appears to buy into the one-sex model, saying that, in Erauso’s time: “The female body was unstable and deficient, but might change towards the masculine form under the influence of extreme physical effort.”
This theory is backed up by Eva Mendieta (2009, 172-3): “The body was seen as something less fixed, more mutable, and thus made the transformation from one sex to another appear to be plausible. If the body of a woman was a natural transvestite, containing male organs within it, was not transvestism only a natural social extension of ‘the myth of mobility’ intrinsic to this sliding scale?”. Cross-dressing, however, was illegal. Though it would appear that a woman could escape prosecution if her cross-dressing was for the purpose of bettering herself (in the image of Christ) and not for usurping a male role: Erauso was protected from punishment despite hir participation in the exclusively masculine activity of warfare because of hir virginity (Mendieta 2009, 167; see also Rex 2016, 40) and, because of hir fame. Readers of Erauso’s biography can see hir masculine identity as a kind of fiction: “even as her readers are following along with Erauso’s very macho adventures as an agent of empire, the foreknowledge of her subject position as a virginal nun prevents her audience from […] buying into her performance of lo masculino as a natural, fixed identity” (Rex 2016, 37).
The idea that Erauso was somehow going against hir “essential” female self made hir a natural rarity in hir time to be collected by the royal court (along with hermaphrodites, dwarfs and eunuchs). Indeed, Aresti (2007, 405), who espouses the anti-essentialist position seen above, claims that “the real reason for [Erauso’s] eventual popularity and recognition was precisely the difficulty of categorizing her in terms of the binary oppositions that underpinned that particular society.” While the Hippocratic, the one-sex model represents a continuum and men and women were still opposed: men were at the top, women, the biological inverse of men, were at the bottom while hermaphrodites were in the middle (see Lester 2017). However, binary oppositions are much more pronounced in the two-sex model.
The one-sex model did eventually give way to a two-sex model; doubt, however, surrounds the question of when this took place. Some believe, like Laqueuer above (2012), that it was in the eighteenth century (see also Lester 2017, 74–75 and Mendieta 2009, 172). Others believe it was much earlier: studies carried out by Ruth Gilbert on the early-modern period and Robin Headlam Wells on the Elizabethan period challenge the idea that Erauso and d’Eon’s gender fluidity would have been considered natural, or a product of biology, at the time. Gilbert (2002, 40) argues that in the thirteenth century, many returned to Aristotle’s fourth-century BC declaration that male and female were fundamentally binarized based upon their essential oppositions. The Hippocratic position became popular again in the sixteenth century but, despite this, it “intersected still with elements of the Aristotelian tradition” (Gilbert 2002, 36). Gerald Callahan (2009, 19) believes that the one-sex model gave way to the two-sex model after the discovery of the clitoris in the fourteenth century: “It seemed to contradict the one-sex hypothesis then popular […] How could a woman have ‘two penises’ and still be the perfect homologue of and basically the same as a man? That rattled the foundations of then-current thought […]. Where certainty had ruled for nearly two thousand years, a seed of doubt began to sprout.”
Headlam-Wells (2005, 6) also disproves the popular belief that in the sixteenth century “Shakespeare and his contemporaries were anti-essentialists. That is to say, Elizabethans are thought to have had no general theory of humankind as a species: human beings had no existential ‘center’; they lacked any kind of unifying essence.” According to Headlam-Wells, there is no evidence that the Elizabethans felt this way.
Erauso and d’Eon presented themselves in a manner which contradicted their biological makeup (they were either rejecting their “essential” centers or these centers were out of kilter) and this made them unusual. The overriding impression we get of how Erauso and d’Eon were seen by their contemporaries is that they were both curious spectacles. The question of d’Eon’s “true” gender caused such a sensation in 1771 that bets were taken on the London Stock Exchange “in the form of life insurance policies that paid out (or not) depending on whether d’Eon was found to be of one or other gender” (Conlin 2010, 50). After Erauso had been discovered to be a woman, ze could not walk the streets for people wanting to see hir: “We entered Lima after nightfall, but nonetheless there were more people than we could cope with, all curious to see the Lieutenant Nun” (Erauso 1992, 113, my translation). D’Eon knows that the renegotiation of hir character is transgressive which is perhaps why, as we have seen, ze claims to have been forced to dress a certain way by hir parents in hir memoir. Choisy also hopes to diminish and explain hir transgression by seeing hir identity as rooted in the fact that hir mother dressed hir as a girl in childhood; ze portrays hir penchant for the feminine as a “weakness” ze is powerless to resist, as can be seen at the start of the chapter.
While we can assess the contexts in which Erauso and d’Eon were writing, problems arise when attempting to portray these contexts as they were because reading is subjective: we read from where we are. However, just because we read from our own position does not mean that we cannot grasp the historical or cultural position of someone from the past. Though, of course, we can never wholly grasp that past, as demonstrated by the ongoing debate surrounding early-modern sex and gender. The reader’s modern knowledge must be taken into consideration as well and in this book I ask, along with William Spurlin (2014, 205): “How do we work with translating terms for naming genders and sexualities in comparing texts and cultures of the past which may not be translatable to modern understandings of gender or to contemporary understandings of gay, lesbian, bisexual or queer difference?” As proved by Michel Foucault in his volumes on The History of Sexuality, sex is much more than a biological “fact”. What sex has been in the past directly feeds into what sex is (and consequently how we see ourselves as gendered beings) now: “in the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex. Not so much to sex as representing nature, but to sex as history, as signification and discourse” (Foucault 1978, 78).
I assert that the past is translatable to modern understandings if we see the translation of very old source texts as a rewriting of the past; indeed, this helps us to see that all translation, no matter how old the source, is a rewriting of the past: the source text is not a historical artefact but a living body of words. Through translation, the source text can be “reinserted into a vivid here and now as an active intrusion” (Scott 2014a, 29). The translator is an intruder on the source text who can rewrite an original from any perspective they choose. Is it, however, going too far to rewrite a text written in a time when “transgender” and “queer” did not exist as terms, from a transgender perspective, or with a queer agenda?1 Feminist translation theorist Sherry Simon (1996, 15) asks, “what would be the result of a translation which blatantly redirected the intention of the original text, consciously contravening its intentions?” She goes on to state that “feminist translation implies extending and developing the intention of the original text, not deforming it” (Simon 1996, 16).
However, translation is always a “deforming” of the original text as it can never be wholly “faithful” to it. As Venuti (2000, 469) has said, every translation – however foreignizing – is domesticating as well, since there is no way to provide a completely foreignizing translation. Translation is a political act; a manipulation. Comparatively, we can appropriate texts through translation for political agendas. A re-translation of Erauso’s or d’Eon’s texts can counter the fossilization of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century gender identifications but can also be a locus of trans engagement today by allowing past conceptualizations of gender to engage with modern ones. A translation with a queer agenda is not about “faithfully” portraying the source text but about using that text and appropriating its content to influence how people see gender today. To use d’Eon and Erauso to shine a light upon gender today, it is necessary to look more closely at their own gender identifications in their writing and how they used their writing as part of their identification.