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tiamatschild) wrote2010-03-30 12:02 pm
tiamatschild) wrote2010-03-30 12:02 pm
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So evidently I hate sloppiness and inaccuracy in all its forms - including the form which is me shying away from explaining myself and/or explaining myself badly SO.
Here we go. First off, I kind of hate talking about people who lived centuries ago who might very well ID as LGBT if they lived today, because well. It leads to sentences like that. Obviously it's a bit iffy to say that someone was gay or lesbian or trans or bisexual or asexual or genderqueer well before that was the paradigm. They wouldn't have had that language and they might very well not have thought have about themselves at all that way. The thing is, this gets used as an excuse to elide us completely (and it never applies to bisexuals. Apparently we are special and have always existed, even before lesbians, ever since gossip and scandals were invented, and must always be mentioned in connection with such). Queer people? We see no queer people!
...I might be slightly bitter. And we seem to be finally making some inroads on the sexual minority side of things, but not so much the gender minority side. It's still really hard to get historians writing popular books to even acknowledge the possibility. Even people who were almost certainly trans women (nobody works as a laundress for an entire regiment for years on end because they find it sexually kinky or fun performance art, that's clearly a matter of gender ID and what's open to women who need to bolster their husband's pay) get implied to be gay men who fitted into a regionally and actually, I am pretty sure, time period inappropriate subcultures that involved cross dressing. (It's not cross dressing if a woman wears skirts! Unless it's a kilt. Or otherwise feminine inappropriate skirt. If a woman wears women's skirts, it's not crossdressing!)
Anyway, you can't actually say this with any firm assurance, is the thing, because the courts and medical boards and discharge boards and chains of command didn't care how people defined themselves. As organs of authority, they were interested in defining people by authority's standards. Which usually have to do with what's in their underthings, not the life they're living. So often we don't have the testimony of the one person who could tell us, and there are lots of compelling reasons that, historically, cisgendered women have worn men's clothes and done men's work while passing for men.
That doesn't mean that all the people classed as crossdressers in court records actually were.
Sometimes it seems that Olwen Hufton is trying to acknowledge this without saying so explicitly, in words. (Which is its own problem. You can say transgender! It is okay!)
Which almost reads like an attempt to acknowledge that some of this group was cis and some of them were trans. But then, skipping over a sentence...
Which has totally faily quotes, okay, since the point of this whole passage is that the marriage had in fact taken place, everything signed, sealed, and filed, although it was later declared illegal. God, I hate those editorial quotes. Anyway, here it seems that she might think that marrying a woman is further proof of actually being trans man than simply fulfilling a man's gender roles and wishing to continue to do so. Which makes a certain sense, since in the time period in question, marrying a woman was a very vital part of the masculine gender role. But it does imply that all transgender people is straight, which is a silly assumption.
...Though now that I'm closely re-reading this passage, I'm reconsidering that, because she keeps putting "marriage", "wife", and "husband" in quotation marks, as I have just done only not to indicate that I am just listing them, not using them in a sentence to create meaning. The ones in the book are scare quotes. Now that I'm not mentally striking them out in favor of the information, they really change the tone. In a distressing way.
The opening to her next passage says...
Now, this comes directly after a brief discussion of two women who ran a school and brought a libel suit after another woman spread a rumor that they were sexually involved, so it's possible that this is what that last clause is referring to, but it's more probably the group brought up on fraud charges for marrying a woman.
... ... ...*sigh* This got worse the closer I looked at it.
What I am saying is that no. We can't talk to people from the past and listen to what they tell us about who they are. In the case of LGBT+ people, most of the time we only have the writings and evidence of people who didn't want them to be who they were, or act on the inclinations of their hearts and minds. Because of the structure of the medieval and early modern Catholic church we have a fair number of voices of people who might today tell you that they are asexual, but reformist rhetoric has tended to pass these off as voices of people who were profoundly repressed and twisted by their culture, sometimes in ways that are hurtful and triggering. (Ah, the victim blaming of a marital rape survivor that I once ran across in an ostensibly feminist history of marriage. That was fun.)
It's important to recognize that in the sense that naming makes it so, there were no gay people, trans people, cis people, bisexual people, heterosexual people, or asexual people in these time periods. They wouldn't have called themselves these things, although if a rogue time machine snatched one of them from their context and dumped them in a supportive contemporary community, they might use the language to explain. Or they might not! Who knows? Even people raised within this cultural context don't always like the language and the thought patterns that go with.
But at the same time, it's important not to erase gender and sexual minorities. It's easy to do this by saying that we can't see them, and it's easy to do this by classing them all according to the powerful people who didn't see them at the time. It's easy to do this by refusing to recognize even the possibility that they existed. It's easy to do this by saying it's too hard to talk about them because the modern categories and words didn't exist, and I think it's important to guard against that.
And if you're going to say it's too hard to discuss queer women in your huge survey/overview because the words and categories didn't exist, then it would probably be a good idea not to constantly identify people as bisexual, frequently with no other information about them than their name and their most famous lover. I am just saying.
Here we go. First off, I kind of hate talking about people who lived centuries ago who might very well ID as LGBT if they lived today, because well. It leads to sentences like that. Obviously it's a bit iffy to say that someone was gay or lesbian or trans or bisexual or asexual or genderqueer well before that was the paradigm. They wouldn't have had that language and they might very well not have thought have about themselves at all that way. The thing is, this gets used as an excuse to elide us completely (and it never applies to bisexuals. Apparently we are special and have always existed, even before lesbians, ever since gossip and scandals were invented, and must always be mentioned in connection with such). Queer people? We see no queer people!
...I might be slightly bitter. And we seem to be finally making some inroads on the sexual minority side of things, but not so much the gender minority side. It's still really hard to get historians writing popular books to even acknowledge the possibility. Even people who were almost certainly trans women (nobody works as a laundress for an entire regiment for years on end because they find it sexually kinky or fun performance art, that's clearly a matter of gender ID and what's open to women who need to bolster their husband's pay) get implied to be gay men who fitted into a regionally and actually, I am pretty sure, time period inappropriate subcultures that involved cross dressing. (It's not cross dressing if a woman wears skirts! Unless it's a kilt. Or otherwise feminine inappropriate skirt. If a woman wears women's skirts, it's not crossdressing!)
Anyway, you can't actually say this with any firm assurance, is the thing, because the courts and medical boards and discharge boards and chains of command didn't care how people defined themselves. As organs of authority, they were interested in defining people by authority's standards. Which usually have to do with what's in their underthings, not the life they're living. So often we don't have the testimony of the one person who could tell us, and there are lots of compelling reasons that, historically, cisgendered women have worn men's clothes and done men's work while passing for men.
That doesn't mean that all the people classed as crossdressers in court records actually were.
Sometimes it seems that Olwen Hufton is trying to acknowledge this without saying so explicitly, in words. (Which is its own problem. You can say transgender! It is okay!)
A small subsection of the Dutch contingent used the ploy to secure a cheap passage to the East Indies, where they hoped to marry as women. Most, however, clearly rejected their female past, and a handful passed into legend for personal bravery.
Which almost reads like an attempt to acknowledge that some of this group was cis and some of them were trans. But then, skipping over a sentence...
A line must be drawn between these trouser-wearers, of whose sexual exploits nothing is known, and a very small number (five English and a few more Dutch) who dressed as men, led male working lives and "married" women, in some instances more than one.
Which has totally faily quotes, okay, since the point of this whole passage is that the marriage had in fact taken place, everything signed, sealed, and filed, although it was later declared illegal. God, I hate those editorial quotes. Anyway, here it seems that she might think that marrying a woman is further proof of actually being trans man than simply fulfilling a man's gender roles and wishing to continue to do so. Which makes a certain sense, since in the time period in question, marrying a woman was a very vital part of the masculine gender role. But it does imply that all transgender people is straight, which is a silly assumption.
...Though now that I'm closely re-reading this passage, I'm reconsidering that, because she keeps putting "marriage", "wife", and "husband" in quotation marks, as I have just done only not to indicate that I am just listing them, not using them in a sentence to create meaning. The ones in the book are scare quotes. Now that I'm not mentally striking them out in favor of the information, they really change the tone. In a distressing way.
The opening to her next passage says...
Spinsters, trouser-wearing women and those who sought a partnership with another woman clearly did not proceed in the orthodox manner up the ordained ladder of life.
Now, this comes directly after a brief discussion of two women who ran a school and brought a libel suit after another woman spread a rumor that they were sexually involved, so it's possible that this is what that last clause is referring to, but it's more probably the group brought up on fraud charges for marrying a woman.
... ... ...*sigh* This got worse the closer I looked at it.
What I am saying is that no. We can't talk to people from the past and listen to what they tell us about who they are. In the case of LGBT+ people, most of the time we only have the writings and evidence of people who didn't want them to be who they were, or act on the inclinations of their hearts and minds. Because of the structure of the medieval and early modern Catholic church we have a fair number of voices of people who might today tell you that they are asexual, but reformist rhetoric has tended to pass these off as voices of people who were profoundly repressed and twisted by their culture, sometimes in ways that are hurtful and triggering. (Ah, the victim blaming of a marital rape survivor that I once ran across in an ostensibly feminist history of marriage. That was fun.)
It's important to recognize that in the sense that naming makes it so, there were no gay people, trans people, cis people, bisexual people, heterosexual people, or asexual people in these time periods. They wouldn't have called themselves these things, although if a rogue time machine snatched one of them from their context and dumped them in a supportive contemporary community, they might use the language to explain. Or they might not! Who knows? Even people raised within this cultural context don't always like the language and the thought patterns that go with.
But at the same time, it's important not to erase gender and sexual minorities. It's easy to do this by saying that we can't see them, and it's easy to do this by classing them all according to the powerful people who didn't see them at the time. It's easy to do this by refusing to recognize even the possibility that they existed. It's easy to do this by saying it's too hard to talk about them because the modern categories and words didn't exist, and I think it's important to guard against that.
And if you're going to say it's too hard to discuss queer women in your huge survey/overview because the words and categories didn't exist, then it would probably be a good idea not to constantly identify people as bisexual, frequently with no other information about them than their name and their most famous lover. I am just saying.
no subject
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Though I suppose you really only have to check in with that kind of disclaimer occasionally, if you're writing something long.)
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That doesn't mean that all the people classed as crossdressers in court records actually were.
Aaaaaaand sob, this, this right here, this is the reason I can't enjoy "a plucky young woman dresses as a boy to serve her country for great justice!" narratives. :(
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Aaaaaaand sob, this, this right here, this is the reason I can't enjoy "a plucky young woman dresses as a boy to serve her country for great justice!" narratives. :(
Yeeeeah. They really reinforce a totally cis-normative view of history, and do so in part by misrepresenting the historical evidence that exists. Soldiering provided a chance for mobility and a new community group - but so did sailing, and simply moving out of the village into the town or city. That last was an iffier prospect, because higher paying occupations other than soldiering and sailoring generally required apprenticeships, which could be hard to come by without family to arrange them for you. But soldiering can be cast as adventure, and as patriotic service - using it as the center of a narrative about a cisgender woman crossdressing allows for a recasting of many different stories that moved many different directions into one unified narrative that gives us a young, cisgender, heterosexual woman who sows her wild oats in the only way possible: passing as a man. She's always brought back into 'correct' gender relationships and systems by the end. She'll marry a man as a woman, and that's her happily ever after.
I have never read of any historical person whose life followed this trajectory. Ever. And yet... this single narrative is reproduced over and over in modern fiction. It obscures an awful lot of actual history, and the ideological intent behind it is unsubtle. Sometimes feminist versions of it change parts of the narrative, but they don't manage to engage with the deep problematic roots, which is the vast multiplicity of experience, especially the survival strategies of transgender people, that the narrative hides.
/wordy
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And, yes ... that. I haven't words for any other response but "... THAT ♥" because you summed up the conundrum so well right there, and I'm in awe.
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Thank you! *blush*
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