Reading: Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapters 4-6 related tags: #HNvPtS
“Didn't Joan of Arc wear men’s clothes?” I asked a friend over coffee in 1975. She had a graduate degree in history; I had barely squeaked through high school. I waited for her answer with great anticipation, but she dismissed my question with a wave of her hand. “It was just armor.” She seemed so sure, but I couldn’t let my question go. Joan of Arc was the only person associated with cross-dressing in history I’d grown up hearing about.
I thought a great deal about my friend’s answer. Was the story of Joan of Arc dressing in men’s clothing merely legend? Was wearing armor significant? If a society strictly mandates only men can be warriors, isn’t a woman military leader dressed in armor an example of cross-gendered expression?
The way that this friend brushes off this question is the same way that so many people do when you start trying to figure out whatever you can about history. Even if Joan of Arc wasn't a trans masculine person (I'm not going to speculate on something I don't have much information on), it's still a question worthy of consideration. The same is true of other historical figures who were comfortable engaging in some form of cross-dressing. Why were they doing it? What are the possible reasons? What were the consequences of doing it?
In school, we’d quickly glossed over the facts of Joan of Arc’s life. So I hadn’t realized that in 1431, when she was nineteen years old, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church because she refused to stop dressing in garb traditionally worn by men. And no one had ever taught me that her peasant followers considered Joan of Arc — and her clothing — sacred.
It's only now that I realise the most likely place for where a friend of mine got “Joan of Arc was burned for wearing men's clothing.” I have a feeling that it was less her penchant for wearing men's clothing and more the fact that the French monarchy and aristocracy saw her as a force to be reckoned with. If she could lead a peasant revolt against the English, she could also lead one against the crown and their supporters.
The garb provided an additional excuse, though I have to wonder how upset people actually were by her wearing such clothes. I ask this because I've read numerous stories from the 1400s and 1500s of women hiding by wearing men's clothes, and I don't know how much this was enforced on peasants. Most clothing taboos tended to focus more on wealthier women.
I also say this because:
On April 28, 1429, Joan led a march on Orleans. The next day, she entered the city at the head of her peasant army. By May 8, the English were routed. Over the next months, she further proved her genius as a military strategist and her ability to inspire the rank-and-file soldiers by liberating other French villages and towns and forcing the English to retreat.
This is good for a little while, but what happens when it's turned against the local monarchs? (This is also something that Leslie later notes, when ze said that beneath the charge of cross-dressing was a “powerful class bias” (pg 34).
Many historians and academicians view Joan of Arc’s wearing men’s clothing as inconsequential. Yet the core of the charges against Joan focused on her cross-dressing, the crime for which she ultimately was executed.
This is a grave error that these people routinely make with regards to any 'confusing' gender issue of historical or archaeological remains, though I also may not entirely agree with Feinberg's analysis.
And mostly, I'm going to disagree with zir analysis because I don't personally like appending modern terminology to historical figures. I don't always know what language they had available to describe themselves, and I also don't know the extent of differences between cultures. For instance, Feinberg also mentions:
However, since Joan could neither read nor write, did she know the exact details of what she was signing? This is an important question, because cross-dressing was not a capital offense at that time.
And also before that:
The Church was waging war against peasants who resisted patriarchal theology and still held onto some of the old pre-Christian religious beliefs and matrilineal traditions. This was true of peasants in the area of Lorraine, even in the period of Joan’s lifetime. For instance, the custom of giving children the mother’s surname, not the father’s, still survived there.
If this was true of the region and that the Church was trying to dominate them and place them under their control, then I find that it's difficult to know what gender could look like in this area during this time. As a result, while it is a piece of history that elaborates on the Church's interaction and enforcement of gender on individuals, I personally wouldn't say that Joan of Arc had “transgender expression.”
This is also because peasants (and poor people) have often had different levels of ability to engage in these behaviours. Was it considered socially unacceptable for Joan's hair to be cut short or to wear men's clothing in Lorraine among people of her class? I suspect it wasn't highly uncommon (maybe not entirely common but still something that was practiced, especially because peasants often engage in doing all kinds of manual labour). It was uncommon among the nobility, particularly as the women of that class did not engage in the kinds of strenuous manual labour that peasant women would've.
I'm not going to deny that Joan of Arc can be a glimmer of trans history and history about the development of modern gender and that she does have connections to both of those, but (again) I hesitate to apply modern terminology to someone without knowing how they would've talked of themselves or felt themselves to exist within their own societies.
Feinberg also makes this leap that because Joan's (male) armor was kept and worshiped by peasants... or that people would touch her clothes and believed them to be healing, it means that the people viewed her transgender nature as sacred. But what if the other peasants didn't actually care that much about her gender and it was about her achievements and feats (which maybe they viewed as bettering their lives, to a degree)?
Again, I don't know. I haven't read into this area, but Feinberg doesn't present a compelling argument for me to believe that people found Joan's gender presentation to be the sacred element of her.
In every society in which human labor grew more productive with the use of improved tools and techniques, people stored up more than what they needed for immediate consumption. This surplus was the first accumulation of wealth. Generally, men, who had primarily been wild-game hunters, domesticated and herded large animals, which represented the first wealth. Men, therefore, were in charge of stockpiling this abundance: cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and the surplus of dried and smoked meats and hides, milk, cheese, and yogurt.
The problem with this assertion is that there are many societies in which women and children were responsible for animal husbandry and other tasks related to it. Also, a citation for men being the ones to domesticate large herd animals? This book has citations, so I'd expect one here.