Globe Theatre makes Joan of Arc non-binary in new play

[ChristinaXYZ]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/11/globe-theatre-makes-joan-arc-non-binary-new-play/

"Joan of Arc is represented as non-binary in the Globe show, and the pronouns of the French patron saint have been changed to “they/them” rather than “she/her”.

Women’s rights campaigners have raised concerns that the move is another example of female figures being “erased” from history.

Promotional material for the “powerful and joyous new play” sets the scene: “Rebelling against the world’s expectations, questioning the gender binary, Joan finds their power and their belief spreads like fire.”

The play is written by writer Charlie Josephine, whose web biography states: “My pronouns are they/he. I’m an actor and a writer."

The Telegraph writers, who like The Spectator staff, know their stuff on this and have included a Women's Place comment too:

"Campaigner group Women’s Place UK said in a statement on the issue: “Women are getting really tired of being erased from history and having our achievements diminished.

“Joan of Arc was an astonishing woman who rebelled against the authoritarian oppression she faced for being female.

“Theatre has a fine tradition of inverting reality to encourage us to look at life differently but the fact remains that Joan of Arc was a woman and was persecuted as such.”"

If this version of Joan of Arc had been left as just another fanfic on A03, then there would be no problem. And alternative history can be really interesting and illuminating: as others have said, reimagining the Duke of Wellington as a dragon-rider, or Pitt the Elder as a vampire, or the the Egyptian God Ra as a semi-immortal alien snake - no problem at all. I also really enjoy all the "historical" Doctor Who episodes which have Cleopatra on a spaceship or whatever.

I also, on the whole, don't care much about who plays characters onstage, as long as they are good. The Donmar and the RSC have done plenty of productions where the sex of the character and the sex of the actor are different, and it's been great. I really enjoyed Mark Rylance as Olivia in Twelfth Night at the Globe, and Tamsin Grieg as Malvolio at the NT.

But this production, at this particular point in history, where women and women's history are being erased left right and centre? And where so many girls and young women are encouraged to self-harm? Putting on a production which claims Joan isn't a woman, and advertising it with a young woman half-naked and putting a binder on? A fucking disgrace, and misogyny in action.

AmaryllisNightAndDay · Today 13:26
I do think playwrights are allowed to explore a historic character through a modern lens. So long as they aren't trying to make a historic claim that she definitely was anything - mentally ill, or inspired by God, or feminist, or trans.

Historically, people did used to believe in God and would have used that belief as a guide for their actions. (Even if we in modern times might consider them to have been deluded.)

I don’t think it would be against history to say Joan of Arc had been ‘inspired by God’. Or are you meaning that is just a legend?

I found this really illuminating (and funny) - thank you, @theclangersarecoming

Why can’t they see the misogyny?

The message is clear. A woman who doesn’t conform to sexist stereotypes of ‘feminine’ behavior must be non-binary.

What a terrible, sexist message.

They should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

I think it’s one reason why there’s such a huge anger against middle aged and older women. Because if you are a young “creative” and want to go about saying, “people in the past who were “gender non conforming” were AKSHUALLY TRANS!!!” — then, unfortunately, we’re all here saying “well we were AKSHUALLY here twenty and thirty years ago, and they weren’t then, so there’s zero reason to think that they were in 1940 or 1611 or 1350 either.”

Worryingly, there are some historians out there who I fear might actually let their dedication to The Cause slide into their work. I don’t have monograph money so I can’t check the state of one person in particular’s latest - would anyone dare criticise in current climes? 🤔

I quite liked the Globe’s ridiculous dedication to historical detail phase. It was better than whatever they were about when they first opened.

Increasingly think I either need a GC Twitter alt or to not follow Twitter links from FWR because I can’t reply & it’s very difficult not to 😡🤯

Ah, we're talking cross purposes.

I am saying that men wanting to live as women, and women wanting to live as men, has often been seen as unacceptable - and not in the least playful.

There is, as you say, a lot of cover for that, though - there are contexts in which cross-dressing is made 'ok'. That allows for the expression of desires and positions that are otherwise not licit.

This really isn't a Whiggish fantasy. In many periods in the past, there have been strict, and strictly enforced, laws about clothing. Those laws are designed to police class as much as gender, and they are often serious.

And of course there have also been contexts and times in which, sure, clothing wasn't particularly at issue.

I'm well aware that there are tropes that function in the way you describe. But there are also instances where people have been genuinely unsure whether an individual was male or female - and often, that results in violence. I don't think these instances are primarily about clothing, though.

It seems to me that the playful contexts you describe indicate a fairly consistent social need for a safety-value: a place in society where one can play with taboo ideas.

It's a bit ridiculous that people of a certain ideology just can't get their heads around JoA and trans them.

I think this is just a habit of thinking because it's another habit of thinking to challenge gender stereotypes.

Even if JoA did identify with aspects of masculinity, like all women do, that doesn't make her NB. There were not many female soldiers in the middle ages, but there are now.

I hope that things like this are eye opening to young people, namely young girls. I know it's theatre but The Globe is somewhere school groups regularly go to. It's a big venue, hardly fringe where this belongs.

@ScrollingLeaves I know historically people believed such things, I was thinking more of a religious playwright who insisted that Joan of Arc's visions were definitely from God. Though the Globe could have commissioned such a play and highlighted how multi faith and inclusive that made them.....

I am more irritated by the gender training that a pal of mine attended, which claimed Joan of Arc as a historic example of a trans person.

Great thread on Twitter here: twitter.com/alaricnaude/status/1558335768174612480?s=21&t=SRdrZEqtxLbyLXDKWsHcNQ

TL;DR - Joan of a arc never identified as non binary or a man

AmaryllisNightAndDay · Today 15:32
@ScrollingLeaves I know historically people believed such things, I was thinking more of a religious playwright who insisted that Joan of Arc's visions were definitely from God. Though the Globe could have commissioned such a play and highlighted how multi faith and inclusive that made them.....

I am more irritated by the gender training that a pal of mine attended, which claimed Joan of Arc as a historic example of a trans person.

I see what you mean. Thanks fir explaining.

Clymene · Today 15:37
Great thread on Twitter here: twitter.com/alaricnaude/status/1558335768174612480?s=21&t=SRdrZEqtxLbyLXDKWsHcNQ

TL;DR - Joan of a arc never identified as non binary or a man

Thank you, that is truly fascinating. She was certainly extraordinary.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/12/elizabeth-may-have-non-binary-claims-shakespeares-globe/

Not content with de-sexing Joan of Arc, the Globe is now doing it to Elizabeth I.
An essay on the Globe's website By Dr Kit Heyam presents her as possibly non-binary. It refers to her as they/them and was written by a "transgender awareness trainer" (says it all) in defence of the Globe's decision to stage a play featuring a non-binary Joan of Arc.

It uses the Queen's famous speech about having the body of "a weak and feeble woman" but "the heart and stomach of a king" to suggest Joan and Elizabeth "in some sense adopted a male identity."

So, another attempt to de-sex a strong and capable woman. They have to somewhat male because as every fool knows, women cannot possibly be strong and capable can they?

Is there no lengths to which these regressive trans supporting clots won't go to try and erase women? Obviously not.

I don’t think it’s like that at all — 1984 grandpa most probably isn’t punching anyone; he might complain about Boy George but he also perfectly well enjoys cross-dressing when it’s on the Two Ronnies or Bernard Manning, or at an end of the pier show.

It’s other young men who are punching the young man — and they aren’t doing it because they think he’s a “tranny”: they’re doing it because they think he’s gay.

The point is that most “gender non-conforming” in men, outside certain coterie contexts and communities, was until very recently read as homosexual or aesthetic rather than the current concept of “transgender”. And male “gender fluidity” was also heavily culturally coded: anyone in 1984 knows in a second that Ozzy Osborne and Alice Cooper are not styling themselves as homosexual, but Boy George is. What they don’t think is that any of them “identify as women”.

Sorry, I'm not accusing your grandad personally!

I meant, take a generic male character. He may well enjoy cross-dressing in those sanctioned contexts, like Two Ronnies, absolutely. And he may whinge about Boy George. But he also may punch an man he momentarily mistakes for a woman. I doubt this is only about sexuality - men and women who don't conform to what society has dictated is 'acceptable' gender presentation tend to be targets of violence whether they're gay or not (and, more importantly, whether they're read as gay or not by those around them).

Now, I would agree our hypothetical male puncher might be afraid he himself will be seen as gay. But I think what causes the fear really is that moment of 'ooh, gorgeous .... shit, wait, it's a man!'

I think we're straying from the thread a lot (but I really enjoyed it and found it interesting). My feeling is just that, on the whole, we tend to over-simplify the past by saying 'oh, well if men presented as women, it was just because they wanted same-sex intimacies' or 'oh, if women presented as men, doubtless it was so they could do the things they wanted to'. That may often have been true, but there seems to be quite a lot going on that doesn't quite fit this model.

I think with Joan of Arc, it does feel a bit as if she's already had so so many narratives imposed on her, right from the start, that I feel a bit hesitant about this play. But who knows? If it speaks to the author and some audiences, fine by me. What I don't think is fine is saying 'but in the past no one ever had a complicated sense of gender or sex, that's just a modern thing'.

Sorry, I'm not accusing your grandad personally!

I didn’t think you were.

Now, I would agree our hypothetical male puncher might be afraid he himself will be seen as gay. But I think what causes the fear really is that moment of 'ooh, gorgeous .... shit, wait, it's a man!'

I’m not sure that’s ever really been true. Men don’t ever really tend to pass as women, which is something that seems to be a fantasy of the current gender ideology.
I’ve never been convinced by the similar “homosexual panic” idea, that even Eve Sedgwick acknowledged was largely a fantasy of the American court system, invented as a means of getting violent men off assault charges.

I think male violence in that context has always been more like an exercise of dominance against other men who appear “effeminate” = gay. It doesn’t matter if they are gay or not; it’s the dominance that matters. But the complexity of sex, gender and sexuality in the past is actually flattened, not amplified, by suggesting that there were many men who wished to live as women before, say, 1900, in the same way that “gender identity” currently understands that idea.

Our current situation of relative sex equality and secularism, compared to the past, tends to foreground “identity” instead of biological sex; but before the nineteenth century, pre-Freud, pre-Charcot, pre-Ellis, pre-modern psychological disciplines, pre-Darwin, even the notion of “identity” per se would not have meant much if anything to the majority of people.

Some men might have been titillated by or enjoyed cross-dressing, gay or straight; but “living as a woman” is not very plausible, partly because few women were not under some kind of male control. And men who wanted to be in the same position largely wanted this for reasons of erotic or masculine/homosocial same-sex attachments and hierarchies, rather than “identity” ones. Male-male friendship or servile relationships were culturally very complex, and not always necessarily actively homosexual, but the trope of being another man’s “wife” was largely understood as just that, a trope — not a desire to “identify” as an actual woman. (In fact in much of the early modern period that would have been a pretty laughable idea in itself, since the subjectivity of women was understood as distinctly lacking.)

Re Queen Elizabeth 1
Altogether predictable.
When will they realise that in that case everyone is basically non binary.

Royalty and Mrs Thatcher refer to themselves in the 1st person as ‘we’. As heads of state identifying with and representing all people.

When people who say they are non binary give their pronouns as they/them, do they also remember to logically say ‘we’ when speaking about themselves?

In contrast, I think it’s actually pretty plausible that many women wished they could have been men. There is a consistent theme in literature and historical exits about women who dressed as or concealed themselves as men — again, it’s difficult to disentangle how much was out of the paucity of women’s lives, and how much was “identification”. I do think it’s a lot more plausible that an oppressed group wished to be the oppressor rather than the other way around. Current gender ideology treats gender/sex as a swappable “binary” with pretty much equal terms, rather than a system of oppression, which obscures the fact that in the past many women wished for the freedoms and legal positions of men, but few men the reverse. But what women wanted was men’s rights, not necessarily men’s psyches (though I think it’s very plausible than some wine wanted both, especially if they were same-sex attracted).

BUT even when people like Havelock Ellis and others came up with “inversion” theories of homosexuality in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was widespread dissatisfaction with these amongst actual gay people — even Radclyffe Hall disliked these theories and was extremely ambivalent about them. Same sex attracted people were never that keen on the proto-trans “sex inversion” ideas about “trapped in the wrong body” identities — hence why they fell out of favour extremely quickly by the thirties, forties and fifties. Gay and “gender non-conforming” women in the early twentieth century in particular, really really disliked the idea that they were “men trapped in a woman’s body”!

Exits? Texts! Bloody auto

Sorry, that was silly. I am tired, lying here in a boiler suit on a hot day having been very non-biniarly doing all sorts of heavy duty handy man work. Now I have more. I want to get it done so tomorrow morning I’ll be free to do my hair and put on a pretty dress.

What an interesting discussion you are having SarahandQuack and Clangers.

It just seems like the most stereotyped thing to label Joan of Arc ‘non binary’ because she was such a strong female historical character with short hair. Lazy really.

Precisely. And their energy goes into the narcissistic 'battle' to be NB and all that is required to sustain that particular form of elected victimhood.

Thank you
*curtsies

Have really had enough of spectacularly ill-informed takes on Twitter.

People doing the whole “it’s just a play, nobody’s saying the REAL Joan was non-binary” - right alongside a load of people saying “OMG AFAB ENBY REPRESENTATION AT LAST!!!” & “so amazing for all the AFAB enbies like me who’ve always wondered if Joan was like us”. Particularly ridiculous to try to argue a play at the Globe won’t have any influence on how people think about a real person: I think Richard III would disagree 🤨

This stuff gets absorbed. And even if people don’t believe Joan was non-binary, there will be a load who’ll absolutely believe that “non-binary” as it’s understood now existed in medieval Europe. 🤦‍♀️

If you HAD to have a non-binary Joan, make them a time traveller who realises they’ll have to be Joan for Joan to exist or something.

@SarahAndQuack if you saw a grandpa from 1984 grumbling at Boy George on Top of the Pops: “Is or a man or a woman?” — you know that he doesn’t actually believe that Boy George is either actually androgynous or that one can’t tell if he is a man or a woman. It’s a trope used to articulate a sense of social disapproval of what was perceived as homosexual.

This is why I consider so-called transphobia to be old-fashioned homophobia. To most people disturbed by homosexuality and who link it with gender-bending, it's all the same thing.