What If Joan of Arc Wasn’t a Woman?
Does it matter if Joan of Arc was not a woman? “Our new play I, Joan shows Joan as a legendary leader who uses the pronouns ‘they/them,’” announced Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London on August 11. “We are not the first to present Joan in this way, and we will not be the last.”
That strange tone—half punk, half defensive—is more explicable in light of the backlash that followed. Many British feminists immediately objected that, yet again, well-meaning revisionists had deemed a historical figure too compelling to be a woman. “One of the consequences of the recent insistence that gender identity is more significant than biological sex has been the recasting of those who fail to meet the stereotypical standards of cis womanhood as trans or non-binary,” wrote Victoria Smith in The Critic, pointing to the author George Eliot, the Civil War soldier Jennie Hodgers, and the ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, as well as Little Women’s Jo and The Famous Five’s George. “Whenever you find an interesting woman—or even just a woman called George—you should always consider the possibility she’s a man.”
Indeed, in I, Joan’s climactic scene, where Joan refuses to give up wearing men’s clothes, they give a rousing speech that concludes: “I am not a woman. I am a fucking warrior.” Excuse me? I spent my 20s arguing with stuffy conservative men who thought that women were unsuited to serving in the military. Does the bleeding edge of progressivism now agree with those dinosaurs?
The feminist argument against ’s gender politics is that nonbinary identities are an act of individual liberation that pushes the rest of us back into rigid pink and blue boxes. A few special rebels escape the stereotypes that everyone else is assumed to embrace. The response to this, from the nonbinary people I’ve spoken/ pronouns simply feel like a better fit. The words fall on them, as Philip Larkin about jazz, “as they say love should, like an enormous yes.”
