Dressed Like a Man?: Of Language, Bodies, and Monsters in the Trial of Enrique/Enriqueta Favez and Its Contemporary Accounts

The Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. . . . I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.

—Susan Stryker¹

In 1823 one of the most scandalous trials of the nineteenth century took place in Santiago de Cuba. A year earlier a housekeeper named Rosa Suárez walked into the bedroom of her master—a well-known and respected Swiss doctor—in order to help him undress and get into bed because she feared he was too inebriated to do it himself. But what she saw when she opened the door stunned her, drastically changed the life of her master and his wife, and shocked the Catholic Spanish colony. Favez was in bed, passed-out drunk, with his shirt open.² As she approached, Suárez saw with horror that instead of the flat—and perhaps hairy—chest she expected, there lay before her the body of "a perfect and whole woman."³ Word spread rapidly. On 24 July 1822 Favez's wife, Juana de León, requested the annulment of her marriage, and in January 1823 she filed a lawsuit demanding that Favez be imprisoned, publicly recognized as a woman, and punished for his conduct. The police acted swiftly. On 7 February Favez was arrested, and the story he told while in prison stunned the general public and the authorities of the conservative island.

Born in Switzerland in 1791, Favez was identified as a woman and named Henriette.⁴ An orphan at a young age, he was taken in by an uncle who served in Napoleon's army. However, to correct what he perceived as unacceptable and troublesome masculine demeanor, the colonel married Favez to one of his fellow soldiers when Favez was fifteen years old. By the time he turned eighteen Favez was already a widow and had lost his only child. Tragedy turned into opportunity, and, taking advantage of the unusual freedom that this lack of familial attachments awarded him, Favez moved to Paris, where he assumed a masculine identity. He studied medicine and became a skilled surgeon. He then served in Napoleon's army as a doctor and a soldier and was taken prisoner of war in Spain, finally seeking refuge in the Caribbean. He arrived in Cuba around 1818 and started practicing medicine. In 1819 he met Juana de León, a poor mulatto woman, whom he soon married. Three years later he found himself in prison accused of the "horrendous and impious conduct" of dressing as a man, of practicing a profession forbidden to women, and of "the detestable, scandalous, and unheard-of crime of marrying a person of the same sex."⁵ He was then sentenced to prison and later banned from all Spanish territories for the rest of his life.

Based on the thorough archival work done by James Pancrazio and Julio César González-Pagés about Favez's life, I offer a textual analysis of the role language played in the de/reconstruction of Enrique/Enriqueta's bodily, social, and legal identity during the trial against him. Both Pancrazio's Enriqueta Faber: Travestismo, documentos e historia (Enriqueta Faber: Transvestism, documents, and history, 2008) and González-Pagés's Por andar vestida de hombre (To walk around dressed like a man, 2012) provide exhaustive—and much-needed—accounts of Favez's life before, during, and after the trial. The documents they provide are vital to the project of piecing together Favez's story and gaining a more detailed and nuanced understanding of his ordeal. However, these authors' analyses of Enrique's case have limitations. On the one hand, Por andar vestida de hombre is...