Cross-dressing, gender identity, and sexuality of Joan of Arc

Joan accompanied an army during the Hundred Years War, adopting the clothing of a soldier, which ultimately provided a pretense for her conviction and execution.

She has been portrayed as saint, heretic, religious zealot, seer, demented teenager, proto-feminist, aristocratic wanna-be, savior of France, person who turned the tide of the Hundred Years War and even Marxist liberator.

"[1] After her capture during the siege of Compiègne while retreating from a failed attack at Margny, Joan was handed over to the English by the Burgundians, imprisoned, and subsequently put on trial for heresy.

On the other hand, there were the guidelines of St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that "it is in itself sinful for a woman to wear man's clothes, or vice versa; especially since this may be a cause of sensuous pleasure ...

Nevertheless this may be done sometimes without sin on account of some necessity, either in order to hide oneself from enemies, or through lack of other clothes, or for some similar motive",[5] thus giving some leeway to whether crossdressing is justifiable under church law in certain circumstances.

[7] Vern and Bonnie Bullough comment that despite the specific canons against it, one might search the church fathers in vain for overt and unconditional approbations on wearing of the opposite gender's attire.

[8] On the contrary, Susan Schibanoff notes that "one version of transvestism appears to have been both admired and encouraged, albeit indirectly, in the legends of female saints who disguised themselves as men to live as monks".

Saint Marina followed the classic story: fearing for her virginity on her wedding night, she cut off her hair, donned male attire, and joined a monastery, passing herself off as "Father Marinos".

While same-sex relationships among men were highly documented and condemned, "Moral theologians did not pay much attention to the question of what we would today call lesbian sex, perhaps because anything that did not involve a phallus did not fall within the bounds of their understanding of the sexual ...

The Bourgeois of Paris claimed that this was because, "all who disobeyed her should be killed without mercy", but the author of the Journal du siege d'Orleans noted that "All regarded her with much affection, men and women, as well as small children."

Even disobedience to her higher command seems to have invited loyalty; she brought action and victory, while the older, noble generals achieved nothing but inaction and defeat.

As Pinzino notes, "The pro-English [Burgundian] party into whose hands Joan fell in 1430, over a year after her role in the vital French victory at Orleans, worked to defame her self-asserted divine calling and executed her at age nineteen in the marketplace of Rouen in 1431.

The primary cross-dressing charge, that Joan dressed entirely as a man "save Nature's own distinctive marks", was designed to evade Aquinas's exceptions on cross dressing—as Raoul Le Sauvage phrased it, to "escape violence and keep one's virginity", was predicated on total disguise and passing.

As Pernoud and Clin note, "That trial was now a symbol of complex cultural fissures in search of closure: of the internal fractures of a riven France, of national splits enervated by English invasion, and of religious and civil power struggles sustained by the University of Paris.

[27] Guillaume Manchon testified, "And she was then dressed in male clothing, and was complaining that she could not give it up, fearing lest in the night her guards would inflict some act of [sexual] outrage upon her", a claim backed up by a number of other witnesses.

"[31] Warner argues that in pre-industrial Europe, a link existed between transvestism and priestly functions, hence justifying the historical interpretation of her as both a witch and a saint.

... At the same time, by never pretending to be other than a woman and a maid, she was usurping a man's function but shaking off the trammels of his sex altogether to occupy a different, third order, neither male nor female".

Quicherat criticized the text as "uninstructive hodgepodge", and, according to him, "made it considerably shorter, taking out parts of the passages where points of religious dogma are discussed".

As Bouzy, a member of the Centre working on the project notes, "This text has hardly ever been consulted by historians, although it provides interesting evidence for the way the fifteenth-century church perceived Joan.

And what secrets in this quasi-pornographic account are the spectators hoping to discover ... Anne Llewellyn Barstow offers the most literal explanation, linking the Bourgeois's morbid description to the crowd's fascination with and confusion over Joan's sexual identity.

Crane argues that "an intensified relation to the law produces not her acquiescence in self-correction but instead her persistent effort to distinguish herself from the category of womanhood as she understands it."

She notes Joan's repeated justification of her attire that it "pleases God that I wear it" (il plaist a Deu que je le porte, etc.

[37] Leslie Feinberg argues in Transgender Liberation that "Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the Inquisition of the Catholic church because she refused to stop dressing as a man."

In the verbatim proceedings of her interrogation, however, the court records show that Joan's judges found her transvestism repugnant and demanded that she wear women's clothing.