Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France by Rachel Mesch (review)

Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916)—one of the three people whose lives constitute the triptych of the very readable Before Trans—took an archaeological approach to "her own layered self" (60). Part of her story of gender becoming, "an early narrative of gender transition" (45), is predicated on a parallel between this archaeologist's exploring and excavating physical sites in Persia and doing the same with masculinity. To document this transition to masculinity, Mesch employs a variety of archival materials, especially photographs, journals, novels, and theatrical performance notes. Dieulafoy's 1894 novel Frère Pélage, for instance, chronicles the difficulties and challenges of being taken as a woman and married to a man, but ends in a new identity that "combines both genders but is defined by neither, even if [Dieulafoy] ultimately calls that identity female" (98). Mesch narrates in detail three stories that have resonance—each distinct and rooted in the archives—for a general educated readership (not unlike the readership of Dieulafoy's writings). The life of Marc de Montifaud (christened as Marie-Amélie Chartroule de Montifaud) constitutes the third section of the book. The life story of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, known under the nom de plume of Rachilde, which makes up the second part, may be the best-known of the three, largely because of her fame (then and now) from the scandalous novel Monsieur Venus (1884). Pronoun use is a topic in these stories, but Mesch uses she/her pronouns throughout the book.

These gender biographies gesture forward toward—but definitely do not equal—the category "transsexualité" invented in the 1950s in France and "transgenre," which became common currency about four decades after that. The three stories reclaim a "complex history of gender identity" (9): there is no easily identifiable or culturally legible language or discourse for these three people to describe their gender subjectivity. On one level, this absence means that their visual and textual delineations of self were not predetermined by medical, psychoanalytic, or juridical discourses. There is indeed something very queer about gender/sexuality here, for the more Mesch's book examines self-representation over the course of the chapters, the more complicated or perhaps the more queer it becomes. In reading, I was reminded of Jeffrey Masten's Queer Philologies (2016), which argues that the more closely or the more philologically scholars examine early modern constructs of sexuality and gender, the more queer they become. As I read and took in all the historical documents, I kept thinking that Mesch's book was queering as well as trans*ing nineteenth-century notions of gender and sexuality, leaving them increasingly complicated and rich, unable to be understood except in their specificity. Mid twentieth-century French trans folk will write autobiographies, many of them more coherent and linear than the gender expressions of these three people, but in this earlier period the archivist has to collect a wide variety of gender data points to tell the stories. The three subjects do often tell their own stories, albeit obliquely in many cases and through sources that have to be read as autobiographical. This methodology is grounded in what José Muñoz called "ephemera as evidence," texts that necessitate digging below the surface and finding gender in places where it might not be assumed to lie.

Central to the book's use of ephemera is a literary methodology that reverses assumptions that an author's life should inform the understanding of a literary text. Here, the close reading of literature allows the reader to hypothesize (but never fully know) how a writer inscribes their gendered subjectivity in fictional form, writing in fiction what cannot be said otherwise. This is a well-known approach in queer studies: an author who cannot, for instance, speak their homosexuality might write it in coded terms that have to be read by those in the know. A woman writer who cannot speak against...