This article looks at four heroines in French literature of the 13-14th centuries whose stories involved either transvestite or transsexual elements or both. What the stories dance around, without treating it directly is homosexuality, both male and female. Cross-dressing motifs, either men disguised as women or women disguised as men are not rare, and create an ambiguous situation where homosexual possibilities can emerge.
France
Covering approximately the region of modern France in western Europe, or to topics relating to French-language culture in Europe.
LHMP entry
Abbouchi tackled creating this edition and translation of the more complete of the two versions of the romance as a master’s thesis. [There are three related texts of the core story of Yde and Olive, two variants as part of the Huon of Bordeaux romance cycle, and one adapted (with different character names) as a miracle play. The second version of the romance is more abbreviated. The three vary in the details of how the relationship between the two women is presented, and in how the “problem” of a same-sex relationship is resolved.]
Bauer examines the discourse around female homosexuality at the turn of the 20th century in the context of the discipline of “sexology”, i.e., the supposedly scientific study of sexual desire and expression. Bauer points out that the dominant Foucaultian approach to historical understandings of sexuality has in many ways marginalized issues of gender, centering the male experience as the default. How does this gendering of sexual theory affect the ways in which sexuality is understood and studied?
This article is an examination of the intersection of private and public morality within the ancien régime of France (i.e., the monarchy prior to the Revolution), and how the image of the family as a “miniature kingdom” created parallels such that transgressions against the state and transgressions against family members could be considered parallel.
A number of historians have concluded that there was a major shift in attitudes toward sex in western Europe in the last decade of the 18th century. Binhammer lays out some of the underlying forces and manifestations of that shift. Although the article largely concerns English attitudes (and any unmarked references can be assumed to concern England) the shift can also be observed in France and other western European cultures.
Lanser opens her article with the bold hypothesis that “in or around 1650, female desire changed.” That there was a conceptual shift in gender relations reflected in literature, politics, religion, and individual behavior in which private intimate relationships between women became part of public life, and that this shift shaped women’s emergence as political subjects claiming equal rights.
The general topic of this article is the ways in which women who had sex with women in 17-18th century Britain were marginalized from the category of “women” via the imagined figure of the hermaphrodite, combining in the image of the tribade who was endowed with a penis-equivalent, either in the form of an enlarged clitoris or sometimes a prolapsed vagina capable of performing penetration. This article traces that image through various genres of literature, both popular and professional.
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme (commonly referred to as “Brantôme”) was a French writer of the 16th century. He was a soldier and courier and wrote several volumes of memoirs and biography, but the most well-known (or at least, notorious) section is known as Vies des Dames Galantes (The Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies) which, contrary to the rather positive title, is a scurrilous gossip-rag focusing on women’s sexual escapades and especially on the topic of wo
[Note: I originally picked this up thinking that it would cover literary female cross-dressing knights as well as male ones. Although the article is entirely about men cross-dressing as women, it helps to round out the picture of how medieval people viewed clothing as a gender signifier and some of the asymmetries of cross-gender behavior.]
Putter looks at the phenomenon of (male) cross-dressing knights, both in historical records and in chivalric romances and considers how the topic contributes to our understanding of gender and sex categories in the middle ages.
The article takes a critical look at the concept of “chastity” as an attribute of the mythical goddess Diana, especially as interpreted in early modern literature and art, and at the depiction of Diana as the focus and leader of a community of women who reject romantic and erotic interactions with men, but engage in those interactions with each other.
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