Cross-dressing, Gender Identity, and Sexuality of Joan of Arc - Modern Perspective

Modern Perspective

One of the first modern writers to raise issues of gender identity and sexuality was novelist Vita Sackville-West. In "Saint Joan of Arc", published in 1936, she indirectly suggests that Joan of Arc may have been a lesbian. She cites Simon Beaucroix's testimony, "Joan slept always with young girls, she did not like to sleep with old women."

Rebuttals were forthcoming and are widely mentioned. The most prominent of these was the common medieval practice of women sharing beds with one another; bed sharing had no connotations in regard to sexuality. Bonnie Wheeler of the International Joan of Arc Society called the book "dead wrong but fun".

Pernoud credits Joan's clothing to necessity and her belief that it was ordained by God. Among other things, Pernoud cites large amounts of testimony, including Guillaume Manchon from the Rehabilitation trial: "... at that time, she was dressed in male clothing, and kept complaining that she could not do without it, fearing that the guards would violate her in the night; and once or twice she had complained to the Bishop of Beauvais, the Vice-Inquisitor, and Master Nicholas Loiseleur that one of the guards had attempted to rape her."

Warner argues that in pre-industrial Europe, a link existed between transvestism and priestly functions, hence justifying the historical viewing of her as both a witch and a saint. Warner further argues for Joan as not occupying either a male or female gender. "Through her transvestism, she abrogated the destiny of womankind. She could thereby transcend her sex. ... At the same time, by never pretending to be other than a woman and a maid, she was usurping a man's function but shaking off the trammels of his sex altogether to occupy a different, third order, neither male nor female". Warner categorizes Joan as an androgyne.

Under the direction of L’Académie française, the Centre Jeanne d'Arc in Orleans has been working on a reedition of Jules Quicherat's Procès de Jeanne d'Arc. According to Bouzy, Quicherat's work forms the basis of most modern scholarship on Joan, but has been discovered to contain a number of errors, selective editing, and use of "originals" that were often highly edited or manipulated versions of earlier documents. Relevant to Joan's crossdressing is Jacques Gelu's treatise, one of the theological treatise ordered by Charles VII for her rehabilitation. Quicherat criticized the text as "uninstructive hodgepodge", and, according to him, "made it considerably shorter, taking out parts of the passages where points of religious dogma are discussed." As Bouzy, a member of the Centre working on the project notes, "This text has hardly ever been consulted by historians, although it provides interesting evidence for the way the fifteenth-century church perceived Joan. The text stresses the problem of Joan's cross dressing—this shows that in 1429, even the prelates who supported Charles VII were reluctant to accept a young girl dressed as a man. Apparently, Charles VII decided in favor of Joan only because his confessor, Gérard Machet, was convinced that Joan was the girl whose coming had been announced in a prophecy by Marie Robine, a hermit from Avignon; and even then, Charles required that she be thoroughly examined. Several other treatises that have never been translated (apart from Gerson's tract) are likely to hold surprises for us as well."

Weiskopf begins Secrecy, Specularity, and Speculation with the Bourgeois of Paris's recording of Joan's death, where he describes her burning unto death, then the removal of her clothes to show the audience that she was indeed female ("to take away any doubts from peoples' minds"), and the burning of the rest of her body. Weiskoph states, "What "doubt" haunts the crowd in the Bourgeois's description? And what secrets in this quasi-pornographic account are the spectators hoping to discover ... Anne Llewellyn Barstow offers the most literal explanation, linking the Bourgeois's morbid description to the crowd's fascination with and confusion over Joan's sexual identity. Troubled by the notion that a woman could be "a powerful war leader," both friend and foe "thirsted to know whether she was a man or a woman." Barstow's reading of the crowd's confusion over Joan's sexuality is neither the feminine or the masculine pronoun, the Bourgeois writes quizzically of Joan, "What it was, God only knows." Linked solely to her sexual identity or not, much of this uncertainty about how to interpret Joan remains."

In the Journal of Modern and Medieval Studies, Crane writes, "Isolating transvestism from sexual identity risks assuming both that heterosexuality is the only possible position for Joan and that self-presentation has nothing to do with sexuality -- that sexuality is innate and prior to choices of gendered behavior." Crane argues that "an intensified relation to the law produces not her acquiescence in self-correction but instead her persistent effort to distinguish herself from the category of womanhood as she understands it." She notes Joan's repeated justification of her attire that it "pleases God that I wear it" ("il plaist a Deu que je le porte", etc.), dodges a question on whether she would liked to have been male, and comments that the argument that her defenders at the Rehabilitation trial used—male clothing as a protection against rape—does not stand up when considering how she kept herself identifiably female, slept naked both in field and prison, and given large amounts of Joan's own commentary. Crane backs up the distinction between Joan and the holy transvestites, in that Joan lays claim to her virginity and her womanhood instead of burying it, identifying herself not with the traditional religious crossdressers—as Bynum notes, "as brides, as pregnant virgins, as housewives, as mothers of God" -- but as a fighter. "... Her continued engagement in secular affairs and her noninstrumental, secular cross-dressing queer her virginity -- that is, they move her virginity beyond its canonical meanings in ways that suggest a revision of heterosexual identity."

In hir book, "Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman", transgendered author Leslie Feinberg popularizes notion of Joan of Arc being transgender. Under the heading They Called Her 'Hommasse', Feinberg cites Evans and Murray on the "enormous importance" of Joan's male costume to her identity, and states, "Joan of Arc suffered the excruciating pain of being burned alive rather than renounce her identity ... What an inspirational role model -- a brilliant transgender peasant teenager leading an army of laborers into battle." In "Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People", transgendered biologist Joan Roughgarden cites and agrees with Feinberg's assessment, describing Joan as a "male-identified trans person".