Trans Historical by Greta LaFleur

Author:Greta LaFleur [LaFleur, Greta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501759529
Publisher: CornellUP
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Silence maintains an inner monologue about their sex and gender. In the manner of a psychomachia, a dramatized allegorical conflict within a human soul, the allegorical figures of Nature and Nurture externalize Silence’s self-doubt. They return again and again to debate which of them is truly in charge of Silence’s identity, and this too emphasizes Silence’s competence as an assigned-female person living in disguise as a man. On the one hand, if “Nature” wins out, as indeed “she” does, Silence’s successful life as a man affirms the competence of those assigned female at birth, even if it is only a secret competence. The message of “Nature’s” victory seems to be that if a girl is taken young and taught the martial instead of the marital arts, she can do anything a boy can do, and probably better. On the other hand, if “Nurture” were to have won the debate and triumphed in the course of the narrative, which she comes quite close to doing, that victory would have affirmed the changeability of sex and gender by means of the human will—indeed, through the simple application of the human will to the human body. The possibility of Nurture’s win hovers over the text, tantalizing readers with the thought that the poem could be (even more of a) genderqueer work than it is now.

The Roman de Silence is written as if there truly is a strong counterargument to Nature’s claim that a person assigned female at birth is, therefore, “truly female.” Silence is written as if there is a valid claim to be made that a “girl” raised “as a boy” might become a boy. This claim is supported by any number of mythological and miraculous sources, such as the story of Iphis and Ianthe, familiar from Ovid, or the story of Saints Marina, Eugenia, or even Pelagia.34 Silence is written as if there’s a danger that Nurture may win the argument, in which case medieval thinkers would have had to acknowledge that sex, at least in narrative contexts, is performative—made by discourse, out of the stuff of discourse, reinforced by discourse, and in desperate need of reassuring repetition in order to remain stable in discourse. In other words, the end of Silence, when Nature “wins,” strikes its modern readers as a potential gender-essentialist retort to the Judith Butler of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. It is a retort, an argument against Butler, because its protagonist both fears and desires being unmasked as “actually” or “truly” female while, at the same time, continuing a successful career as a male knight and troubadour. In its final, silent scene when Silence is “revealed” to have been assigned female, a scene where Silence falls silent and remains so, the argument for gender essentialism seems to “win.” Yet it scores a narrow enough victory that, even as it negates the discourse of gender constructionism with its conclusion, Silence deserves to be read alongside recent feminist, queer, and trans theories. In the life of Silence and

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