Guest Post by Blake Gutt - Medieval Trans Lives in Anamorphosis: A Pregnant Male Saint and Backward Birth

In a Medieval, She Wrote first, it's my great pleasure to introduce a guest post by Blake Gutt, a final-year PhD student at King’s College, Cambridge. His doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Rhizomes, Parasites, Folds and Trees, is an investigation of conceptual networks and the ways in which they underlie both text and its mise en page across a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century literary works in French and Catalan. The project explores the resonances of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorisation of systems with medieval texts which include saints’ lives, encyclopedic works, and texts featuring characters who can be read as transgender. Blake's work, an article entitled ‘Transgender Genealogy in Tristan de Nanteuil’, will be published in Exemplaria in summer 2018. Without further ado, it's over to Blake!

On July 6th 2017 I will be presenting a paper at the International Medieval Congress, in Leeds (UK). The paper is entitled 'Medieval Trans Lives in Anamorphosis: A Pregnant Male Saint and Backward Birth', and it will be part of a panel called 'Hagiography Beyond Gender Essentialism I: Trans and Genderqueer Sanctity - Rethinking the Status Quo', organised and chaired by Alicia Spencer-Hall, with sponsorship by the Hagiography Society. Alicia has kindly allowed me to publish the slides I will be using for this paper here, for consultation by attendees during the paper, or for anyone who can't make it to the session.

In this paper, I argue for the validity and the importance of transgender readings of medieval texts in general, and medieval hagiography in particular. I employ two theoretical perspectives which demonstrate the power of retrospection, and how looking back allows us to see differently; these are anamorphosis, as presented by Jacques Lacan, and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept of the queer child’s ‘backward birth’. I explore these perspectives with reference to an early-thirteenth-century French hagiographic romance, Le Roman de Saint Fanuel, whose eponymous protagonist is a male saint who becomes pregnant and gives birth. Furthermore, Fanuel’s daughter is Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary; the text thus grafts a transgender branch onto the holy family tree. Through my analysis of the narrative, I demonstrate both the personal and the political uses of medieval hagiography for modern trans people. If you would like to read more - and in more detail - about these topics, keep an eye out for my forthcoming article in Medieval Feminist Forum, entitled 'Medieval Trans Lives in Anamorphosis: Looking Back and Seeing Differently (Pregnant Men and Backward Birth)'.