nano nano

[pauraque_bk]

Yeah, all right, I'm doing Nano. This is me.

I wasn't sure if I was going to do it because I didn't have an outline ready, but I went ahead and started on an idea I've had kicking around for a few weeks. It's set in my conworld, though it is not, of course, actually in a conlang (title aside). It's about a female-assigned person in a Renaissance era society who ends up taking on the identity of a male eunuch. Lately I've become interested in how gender variant people deal/dealt with it in cultures where the transgender narrative doesn't exist -- there is no name for who you are or what you want, yet you still have to figure out some way of being in the world. (And let's be clear -- there are people in this culture whose gender identity is not adequately provided for by The Two Boxes.) I could go on about this but I'd better save it for the book.

Anyone else taking on the challenge this year?

Comments

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Lately I've become interested in how gender variant people deal/dealt with it in cultures where the transgender narrative doesn't exist -- there is no name for who you are or what you want, yet you still have to figure out some way of being in the world.

A couple of real-world examples, because that's a great question and some of my favorite histories deal with it:

A novice nun in a Spanish convent in the late 1500s somehow managed to cut her hair, acquire male clothing and weapons, and get on a ship for Peru, where he spent almost a decade as a swashbuckling conquistador. Eventually he was badly wounded in a duel, and gave what he thought was a deathbed confession to the local archbishop, who grew gravely concerned because if the novice nun was no longer a virgin that would be terrible - nuns are God's wives, so. But so the archbishop had two nuns examine him and they declared him still virginal, so instead of burning him at the stake they shipped him to Rome where he confessed again to the Pope and was granted permission to live as a man in New Spain (present-day Mexico) which he did, running a fairly successful ranch until vanishing from the historical record. His confession to the Pope became a best-selling book of its time, available now in translation as Lieutenant Nun if you're interested. It's short and mostly has to do with duels he fought and insults he got revenge for and relatives he killed. Mostly siblings.

And then there's M. D'Eon, who was a French diplomat, first to Catherine the Great's court and then to London, whose gender became a matter of public speculation until he finally confessed that he was a woman, whereupon he was recalled to France (in the middle of the Revolution at this point if I remember right) and got into all kinds of legal trouble for wearing gender-inappropriate clothes. Eventually she fled back to London where she lived as a woman for the rest of her life, something of a recluse except for a devoted housekeeper. And then she died. And was revealed to have been a man all along. As far as I know she never wrote anything, or at least nothing published, but G. Kates wrote a pretty good book about her life and times titled M. D'Eon Is a Woman..

[pauraque]

Thank you! I am totally going to read those.

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

You are so welcome! I love this topic and these questions. And because I cannot shut up about it:

There's a historical enthnographer named Thomas Abercrombie who thinks that Lieutenant Nun (original name Catalina de Erauso) wasn't unique, either - elite Spanish families dealt with troublesome children of many varieties by packing them off to the colonies where they could live under assumed identities and not ruin the family honor, so there probably were other young women who wanted to live as young men who had the luck to be born into a Spanish noble family.

Similarly, but 350 years later, one of Zapata's most important followers in the Mexican Revolution, a Colonel Amelio Robles, was well understood by his comrades and enemies to have been born with the name Amelia. In his case, the chaos and violence of the war provided an opportunity to insist - at gunpoint - that he be treated as a man. He survived the war and was able to go on living as a man in his Morelos village afterward, with a wife. Eventually he earned the government pension which was offered only to male war veterans and became, to his mild bemusement, a feminist icon of the 1970s as "la colonela." There's a great article about him by Gabriela Cano in a book titled Sex and Revolution.

Oh, and I meant to conclude: so one way that some cultures dealt with the gender-identity-not-like-physical-body issue is that they weren't all that interested in the sex of the physical body. What made the runaway nun a man, what made the diplomat first a man and then a woman, were their clothes. With Colonel Robles, on the other hand, what stabilized his identity was the agreement of the people around him, even if that agreement was coerced. So there, too, the body was much less at issue than the community - if that makes any sense?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

I AM EXCITED.