Sami Biasoni is a doctor of philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, lecturer at ESSEC and co-author of the
French essay despite them,
L'artilleur, February 2020.
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“Could you change gender in the Middle Ages?
Live as a man and become a saint?
To be born a girl and end up a knight?”: these were the questions discussed at a conference recently organized by the National Museum of Cluny.
This conference, decried, even mocked by some, highlights – on the initiative of the said public institution – the work of the “performer artist” and doctor in historical anthropology Clovis Maillet, who published in 2020 an essay devoted to these themes entitled
Les genres fluids.
From Joan of Arc to trans saints
.
The question that is posed is that of the possibility of a critical re-reading of sacred history through the prism of
gender .
, in this case of a “fluid” gender, that is to say of the transition from feminine to masculine and its detransition.
The “theories” of deconstruction aspire to revisit everything;
it is even by this that we recognize them.
Making any past or present event an element of potential narrative, a material conducive to textual analysis and critical revisionism, and having alone decreed that the real was only a variation of the true, these "theories" act by fixing first their conclusions then proceed by exegesis to try to accredit them by metaphor, provocation, emphasis when necessary.
The real serves them first of all to show what they generally cannot demonstrate.
So goes the search when it leaves out the
If it is true that there are a few examples of women who took on the appearance of men in sacred history, in particular to become monks – at a time when there was hardly any alternative –, see
queer
muses
before their time may seem highly abusive.
It is, however, the bold step that certain activists like the American Leslie Feinberg have tried to take, in the name of the militant rehabilitation of a “trans history”, and in defiance of historical fact.
The question of the sexual identity of real or mythical historical figures is important, but in the same way as many other anthropological markers.
To make it the alpha and omega of the human sciences, to the point of granting it preeminent explanatory power, as gender theories do, is problematic because history is not divisible: it is by nature holistic, multifactorial and complex.
“Science doesn't matter as long as we serve the cause” would go so far as to say certain committed researchers.
A change of hairstyle, name or clothing can become, in this context, an ex post claim of the existence of a medieval “transidentity”.
Sami Biasoni
Particular examples of female knights, warriors, saints, who had to partly deny their
status
as women to serve their causes, and of whom Joan of Arc is the archetype, have marginally punctuated medieval history.
These are very rare cases, for many only attested by fictional literary texts, apocryphal documents or incomplete iconography.
Yet it is on this basis that the critical history of “gender” unfolds.
"What does science matter as long as we serve the cause" would go so far as to say certain committed researchers.
A change of hairstyle, name or dress can become, in this context, an
ex post claim.
the existence of a medieval “transidentity”;
and the public institution of funding anachronism and relativism at the cost of good conscience, with the consent of much of the progressive media, including those in the public service.
It is interesting to observe that these same media did not fail to relay at will the work at the origin of the
controversy
of the "Puy du Faux", a formula referring to the eponymous work published this year by a group of four historians.
Their will displayed at the place of the Vendée park founded by Philippe de Villiers: to reveal "
a universe filled with errors and simplifications, all in the service of a diffuse propaganda which it is a question of identifying if we want to fight it
".
Although it is a place of entertainment, historians have not failed to point out the oriented and "Manichean" aspect of some of its shows.
Strangely, the same supporters who affirm that the human sciences must be militant and committed to the service of "their" social causes, cry out loudly when a leisure space - which certainly has an educational role but does not fall within the sphere of academic – promotes a certain vision of the national novel.
What is called into question, even attacked by some, is the very sphere of influence of the Judeo-Christian West.
Sami Biasoni
We are at the heart of the pitfalls of wokism: no longer accepting the possibility of an argumentative nuance in the face of the dogmatic evidence of the causes of "social justice", many of its followers condemn but no longer debate.
No offense to Roland Barthes, it is not so much language that is "totalitarian" – at most it is constraining – it is subjectivity set up as a condition of truth that is supremely so.
We cannot precisely account for what is happening without specifying that what is called into question, even attacked by some, is the very sphere of influence of the Judeo-Christian West.
Yet entryism always occurs on the side of the least well guarded gates.
That racism is much more developed in many other regions of the world, neo-progressivism does not care;
that the condition of women is almost nowhere else more enviable, neo-progressism does not even conceive of it;
that ecology is not even a political parameter far from our decried democracies or that democracy itself is, in many places of the globe, not even conceivable, there is hardly any question of worrying about it for the neoprogressivism.
Encouraging self-hatred will only strengthen another's hatred.
Sami Biasoni
This blindness is embarrassing, because it diverts us from the humanist struggles that we must carry out, united, in the name of the most elementary solidarity, the very one that has guided the conquest of the most noble universal rights throughout our history.
Encouraging self-hatred will only strengthen hatred of the other: the examples of American society or the failed Scandinavian multicultural models should encourage us to assert more forcefully the values that adorn the pediments of our public buildings.
Not having managed to make them happen fully should not constitute a call to deconstruct them.
The advent of the universal requires patient work, over a long period which is not that of men but that of civilizations.
Our past is not free of errors, suffering and injustice, no one will deny it.
Remembering this constantly, and making it the central condition of the social balances of our time, means helping to perpetuate this failure rather than seeking together to build a truly just project.
Deconstruction is an aporia, leaving it free means taking the risk of having to face other obscurantisms which will inevitably settle on its rubble and which, for their part, will not bother with our "tolerance to intolerance" to impose their law.