1. 16:41 11th Mar 2013

    Tags: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumontladiesfellascaptain of dragoonshistory!Bloody ForeignersRobert Windergender ambiguityyou guys know I named my cat Orlando?

    Right now I’m reading “Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain” by Robert Winder. It’s the sort of book I often absently pick up because I like the subject and then never read because, hey, 500 dense pages of nonfiction on the subway: not appealing. But I’m glad I started with this one, because it’s wonderful, brisk and funny but still managing a great deal of depth.  I mention it here because Winder mostly sticks to movements of people, by which I mean group migrations, large and small. But sometimes I think he can’t help himself, and finds a single immigrant who’s just so fucking awesome that he or she gets a whole paragraph. So here, in the mid-eighteenth century, I give you: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont, portrait above: The licence to be dandyish attracted one of the century’s oddest immigrants: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont. The unusual mixture of masculine and feminine names was neither an accident nor a sentimental whim: the child, born in Burgundy in 1728, was of uncertain sex. In a bizarre compromise he was baptised as a boy, dressed as a girl and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as both. From the age of seven he/she was educated as a boy, eventually graduating as a doctor of law. A use was then found for the ambiguity of her/his appearance; she was sent to St Petersburg on a secret mission to the Empress Elizabeth disguised as a woman. When he returned to France, it was as a captain of dragoons. He came to London in 1762, where he lived lavishly and in public as a man. Challenged by the Count de Guerchy to prove that he was not a woman in man’s clothing, he refused to satisfy the curiosity of the authorities. The public, too, was anxious to know the truth, and there was heavy gambling on the subject. In 1774 the case was resolved against him, and he was ordered to wear women’s clothing. A subsequent case was brought by an incensed (and out-of-pocket) gambler. Again the jury decided that Beaumont was a woman. She cut quite a dash, no doubt, in her ringlets and perfume, though she had not forsworn macho adventures: in 1787 she fought a duel, with swords, in her women’s costume. This earned her some useful celebrity, and for a while afterwards she gave fencing lessons. In 1796 she was wounded and retired, but she survived until 1810. She had spent the last thirty-six years of her life as a woman, so it was something of a shock when it was discovered, on her death, that she had been a man all along. The examining doctor admitted that her throat was ‘by no means masculine’ and that her breast was ‘remarkably full’, but there was no mistaking the more obvious evidence: ‘The male organ’, he said, was ‘in every respect perfectly formed’. He was buried in St Pancras. He had been painted twice: once in a dress, once in military uniform. In 1868 his gravestone was lost during the construction of a railway line out of north London. [image source]

    Right now I’m reading “Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain” by Robert Winder. It’s the sort of book I often absently pick up because I like the subject and then never read because, hey, 500 dense pages of nonfiction on the subway: not appealing. But I’m glad I started with this one, because it’s wonderful, brisk and funny but still managing a great deal of depth. 

    I mention it here because Winder mostly sticks to movements of people, by which I mean group migrations, large and small. But sometimes I think he can’t help himself, and finds a single immigrant who’s just so fucking awesome that he or she gets a whole paragraph. So here, in the mid-eighteenth century, I give you: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont, portrait above:

    The licence to be dandyish attracted one of the century’s oddest immigrants: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont. The unusual mixture of masculine and feminine names was neither an accident nor a sentimental whim: the child, born in Burgundy in 1728, was of uncertain sex. In a bizarre compromise he was baptised as a boy, dressed as a girl and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as both. From the age of seven he/she was educated as a boy, eventually graduating as a doctor of law. A use was then found for the ambiguity of her/his appearance; she was sent to St Petersburg on a secret mission to the Empress Elizabeth disguised as a woman. When he returned to France, it was as a captain of dragoons. He came to London in 1762, where he lived lavishly and in public as a man. Challenged by the Count de Guerchy to prove that he was not a woman in man’s clothing, he refused to satisfy the curiosity of the authorities. The public, too, was anxious to know the truth, and there was heavy gambling on the subject. In 1774 the case was resolved against him, and he was ordered to wear women’s clothing. A subsequent case was brought by an incensed (and out-of-pocket) gambler. Again the jury decided that Beaumont was a woman. She cut quite a dash, no doubt, in her ringlets and perfume, though she had not forsworn macho adventures: in 1787 she fought a duel, with swords, in her women’s costume. This earned her some useful celebrity, and for a while afterwards she gave fencing lessons. In 1796 she was wounded and retired, but she survived until 1810. She had spent the last thirty-six years of her life as a woman, so it was something of a shock when it was discovered, on her death, that she had been a man all along. The examining doctor admitted that her throat was ‘by no means masculine’ and that her breast was ‘remarkably full’, but there was no mistaking the more obvious evidence: ‘The male organ’, he said, was ‘in every respect perfectly formed’. He was buried in St Pancras. He had been painted twice: once in a dress, once in military uniform. In 1868 his gravestone was lost during the construction of a railway line out of north London.

    [image source]

     

  2. 17:44 22nd Jun 2012

    Notes: 1

    Tags: ladiesVIDAfeminismwritingthe atlanticsheila hetihow should a person be?no seriously. how should a person (lady) be?

    ladies’ week

    On Monday, it was the VIDA/Riverhead fundraiser at the Brooklyn Brewery. I’ve got this brutal hacking cough that alternately sounds like deep bronchitis and wheezy consumption, so I was an ideal party guest. Particularly at a party where ladies were assembled to meet and champion other ladies. I followed a friend around, kind of a networking wingwoman, because handing cards out looks more sensible when you’ve got a friend to introduce. She blew me away—I’ve never seen anyone hustle so hard for poetry. I met an extraordinary woman who writes for places that I admire, and when I finally put two and two together, I realized she’d written pieces I admire, too. I left Williamsburg feeling like my feathers had been ruffled, like I’d been slowly startled into awareness. But I couldn’t quite pinpoint what I’d figured out.

    On Thursday, it was that piece in The Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Of course these days Facebook is gathering up network trends and lets me know helpful things like “nine of your friends are discussing foot-binding” or whatever so I can know how to fit in. All people I’ve ever known shared this article (it’s already the most-read piece in the site’s history), so I read it, top to bottom, last night, even when it really stopped bearing any relation to my life or the life I envision, five or ten years down the line. The part that stuck was the generational divide. I think a lot of younger lady bloggers have noted it, too.

    The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

    Older ladies prescribing what I think is rightly characterized as “feminist credo”. It’s an issue worth examining, but maybe not here; this week has been about impressions, mediations on a theme, and looking back on it, I don’t really think I understand what it means to be a woman, in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s world—college-educated, ambitious, simultaneously desiring a family and a super-career—and in VIDA’s world, where people pitch articles and are published regardless of gender or sex. I don’t know if I was supposed to glean any answers from the articles or the conversations. But I’m going to keep trying.

    In between, on Tuesday, it was Sheila Heti. I haven’t read How Should a Person Be?, or anything else by Heti, but I went to her reading at powerHouse Arena and she was just lovely—gracious and brief and a little skeptical when some of the questions from the audience were not-so-hot. So maybe it’s best to leave it with a passage she read that evening, on ladies.

    One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time. I laugh when they won’t say what they mean so the academies will study them forever. I’m thinking of you, Mark Z., and you, Christian B. You just keep peddling your phony-baloney genius crap, while I’m up giving blow jobs in heaven.