Introduction

ARTICULATING A VARIETY OF GENDER presentations that have become visible in recent years, the term “transgenre” is now widely used in France. In Changer de sexe, Augst-Merelle and Nicot define the term: “Personne dont le genre ne concorde pas avec son sexe, au regard des stéréotypes imposés par une culture donnée.”¹ Although this definition positions the term as culturally specific, the question of its relation to the Anglo-American context cannot remain unasked. Citing Wiktionnaire, the recent reference work La Trans-yclopédie explains that the French term is an “[a]daptation de l’anglais Transgender de trans- et gender.”² A recent coinage, the English umbrella term “transgender” incorporates a range of practices and constructs that resist sexual or gender stability or normativity, and, as a result, overlaps with terms such as “queer,” “gender fluidity,” “transvestism,” “trans-sexuality,” “butch,” “effeminacy,” and “androgyny.”³

If the French term is adapted from English, what of the largely Anglo-phone field of transgender studies? How has it been adapted to the French context? By comparison with ground-breaking work in Anglophone literary/cultural studies, French studies has been relatively slow to intervene into the bourgeoning discussion, even though a strain of transgender studies relies on theoretical models rooted in French thought. Foucault serves as a key theoretical substratum in Stryker’s delineation of the field in her introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader, Merleau-Ponty grounds considerations of corporality in Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (reviewed in this issue), and Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of bodies without organs and of productive becoming have lent themselves to thinking about transgender as movement.⁴ Having been placed into dialogue with transgender phenomena, such theoretical models are ripe for juxtaposition with French texts and contexts.

It may be surprising that French trans studies has not become a more widespread field since French culture has traditionally had close connections to transgender. Georges Burou (1910–87), a doctor who worked in Morocco, was a major figure in sexual reassignment surgery and in transsexual history. The 80s saw the publication of a number of French transsexual texts. Coccinelle (1931–2006), a transsexual performer well known across and beyond Europe, composed an autobiography titled Coccinelle (1987). Doucé’s La Question transexuelle (1986) in many ways foreshadows the current field of transgender studies, with contents including témoignages, studies on la personne transsexuelle, cultural constructs, cross-cultural differences, and “normes pour les soins du changement chirurgical de sexe et l’hormonothérapie hétérogène.”⁵ Maxime Foerster documents the rich history of modern transsexuality in Elle ou lui?: une histoire des transsexuels en France (reviewed in this issue). A number of earlier trans figures or characters can be located, such as the abbé de Choisy in the seventeenth century, the Chevalier d’Éon in the eighteenth century, and dandy figures in modernism. Colette has much to say about transgender as well, even if she avoids sexual taxonomies per se. Montaigne discusses the sex change of Marie-Germain, and the Middle Ages provide stories of figures who might be tagged transgender.⁶ And, of course, Joan of Arc has been taken as a key figure in transgender history.⁷

As Karine Espineira points out, however, it is really in the twenty-first century that there is an explosion of trans groups, even as transgender becomes substantially more visible in the 90s.⁸ Alain Berliner’s film Ma Vie en rose (1997), about a boy who wants to be a girl, took the queer transnational world by storm. French films such as Change-moi ma vie (2001), Thelma (2002), Chouchou (2003), Tiresia (2003), Wild Side (2004), and Tomboy (2011) depict a variety of trans characters. Most recently, Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (2012) focuses on the love relation between a French transwoman and a Québécoise. The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of widely available published narratives, including Axel Léotard’s Mauvais Genre (2009), Amanda Lear’s Je ne suis pas du tout celle que vous croyez (2009), Alexandra Cerdan’s prococative Transsexuelle et convertie à l...