A Q&A with Rachel Mesch
Last month, Stanford University Press hosted an online discussion between Rachel Mesch, author of the recently released Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France », and renowned queer theorist Jack Halberstam. The book follows the lives of Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Marc de Montifaud, three gender non-conforming writers who explored their sense of self through a variety of late nineteenth-century discourses. Because attendees of the talk posed far more questions than could be answered in a short amount of time, we invited Rachel to continue the conversation here.
Could you share more of your book’s genesis story? How did you become interested in the topic and in these three figures in particular?
I became interested in the writer Jane Dieulafoy while I was researching my previous book on French women’s magazines in the Belle Epoque, where Dieulafoy stood out in tailored men’s suits alongside her similarly appareled husband, Marcel. I first tried to understand her in the context of my work on fin-de-siècle feminisms, but I quickly realized that what was at stake for Dieulafoy was something different. Two of her novels—Frère Pélage and Volontaire—told of young women who disguised themselves as men and achieved fame and glory, which then allowed them to continue to live as their masculine identities. These narratives mapped right onto Dieulafoy’s own life: she began wearing pants during the Franco-Prussian War and then resumed the practice while on an archaeological mission to the Middle East. I realized that she was working out her own self-understanding through the stories she told— an imaginative process that I recognized from contemporary trans memoirs. This led me to the idea of the “gender story,” which I argue was what constituted gender identity before modern discourses had been developed. I then started to think about other writers I had encountered who were preoccupied with gender and expressed themselves in ways that didn’t fit neatly into nineteenth-century categories.
How were these three figures’ behavior and gender expression seen at the time by their peers and society? Were these individual stories or did Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud have a sense of community or collectivity?
Although they lived in the same place and time, life was different for each of my three subjects. They knew of each other, but they frequented slightly different academic and literary spheres. While they were sometimes mentioned together in newspaper articles about women wearing pants, they weren’t the subject of any kind of collective outcry, in part because there wasn’t an obvious way to group them together beyond the pants-wearing. In the book, I follow their individual lives and the starkly different ways that they each made sense of themselves in relationship to the world around them, showing that not only has gender variance existed for a very long time, but that it has existed in uniquely personal ways.
Dieulafoy was a celebrity because of her successful Orientalist exploits (there is a Dieulafoy room in the Antiquities Wing of the Louvre) and was part of a conservative upper-class milieu. She actually modeled herself on a certain conservative male imperialist culture. She truly avoided controversy, perhaps because everything else about her upheld social structures. Rachilde was seen as a rebel outlaw, and while she first found this reputation painful, she eventually embraced the persona—as well as a loveless marriage— because it allowed her the freedom to behave as she pleased. Montifaud struggled mightily against public perceptions through her many battles with the legal system. She was sentenced repeatedly to prison for her erotic writing and was continually enraged that she was expected to serve time at the women’s prison, where they sent prostitutes, rather than the all-male prison for censored writers and artists. But at the end of the day, she really just wanted to be left alone in the library. She hadn’t been seeking fame in the first place. My point is that these three formulated very distinct gender stories, despite all having lived at the same time, and likely at least brushing past each other at some point on the streets of Paris.
To what extent was the feminist movement developed in France at the time, and how did each of each of these writers relate to the idea of feminism?
There were multiple forms of what we would now recognize as feminism emerging in France during the late nineteenth century, which is actually the moment that the term feminist was coined. The political movement was concerned with issues like better wages, marriage and family law, and educational reform. At the same time, there were women who were striving to achieve in new ways, to be accepted in the public sphere, but who didn’t want to be associated with politics. Those women were the subject of my previous book: they wanted to demonstrate that femininity could be combined with feminism. There were also women seizing sexual freedom in ways that we now recognize as feminist, and those women were actually the subject of my first book. In fact, it was precisely because I am something of an expert in nineteenth-century French feminisms that I realized that something else was at stake for these particular writers, who have been considered almost exclusively through a feminist framework. We misunderstand them when we do that, because we bring the wrong set of questions to bear on their lives, and thereby miss out on exploring the ways that gender identity played an important and specific role in gender history.
Could you speak about your pronoun choices in this book? What do you think of the recent integration of a non-binary personal pronoun (e.g. they) into scholarly writing?
It’s worth noting at the outset that there is no gender-neutral equivalent of “they” in French, and so the crucial linguistic shifts taking place in the US are proceeding quite differently in France and the francophone world. That said, it’s a question that I continue to think about, especially as excellent recent works in trans history (C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides, Emily Skidmore’s True Sex, and Jen Manion’s Female Husbands) offer more points of reference. As writers, my subjects actually grappled with the pronoun question themselves. Rachilde and Montifaud experimented with different pronouns, but neither of them resolved the issue: one of Rachilde’s fictional avatars, Raoule de Vénérande in Monsieur Vénus, uses masculine, feminine, and the third person (masculine) plural, ils. Montifaud had more than one masculine identity (she also wrote as Paul Erasme) and enjoyed when readers assumed that she was male. But much of her personal correspondence was in the feminine. I feared that the use of “they” to refer to Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud would mask the unfinished nature of their questioning. Continuing to use feminine pronouns meant that I could maintain the disjunction of their lived experiences, which felt more historically accurate.
Perhaps even more importantly, I wanted to show that there were many people in the past whom we refer to as she/her (elle), whose identity cannot be fully understood through what we think we know about women’s history and feminism. While I use female pronouns, I don’t refer to my subjects as women. In terms of opening up the history of gender identity, that felt crucial to me: the recognition that just because someone was assigned female at birth or known as “she” did not mean that they saw themselves as a woman, or that every act of rebellion stemmed from a reclamation of their femininity. I want scholars to stop assuming gender normativity as a baseline for the past, no matter what the pronoun in use is.
How did you manage to draw upon new trans theory to interpret your three figures without allowing the theory to overwhelm their stories?
When I began the project, I was reluctant to use the term transgender. I didn’t want to impose modern categories on the past—to be accused of "presentism." But if you think about it, all critical frameworks were once presentist—products of their own time in some way—and to not embrace the most modern articulations of gender identity would be to defer to a kind of expired presentism. Despite how sophisticated we may be in some aspects of our thinking, there’s a progress narrative that subtly underlies a lot of scholarship, which makes us assume that gender non-conformity and what we now recognize as “trans” is a product of modernity, or of progressive thinking. In fact, before we had complex ways to talk about gender, people experienced their gender in complex ways. I would argue that the presumption of heteronormativity and of gender normativity unless proven otherwise are twentieth-century epistemological constructions that we have imposed on earlier time periods. I think there’s a lot more of the non-binary nineteenth century to be uncovered.
That said, I wasn’t using trans theory, exactly, in the book, but rather first person trans accounts and memoirs. I wanted to listen to as many different trans voices as possible, many of them quite recent, because each account that I read (from Jan Morris to Jennifer Finney Boylan) resonated in some way with the stories that Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Marc de Montifaud told. The impulse to writing itself—the sometimes desperate need to translate a life that threatens to resist language into words and narrative—was one of the ideas that resonated through both modern accounts and the nineteenth-century ones. It was actually quite stunning. I let those kinds of points of contact steer my writing of the biographies, rather than contemporary theoretical approaches.
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