For my MA dissertation I did a translation of a text called Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme [Memoirs of the Abbot de Choisy dressed as a woman]. Choisy, a seventeenth-century French priest wrote these memoirs at the insistence of a friend who liked racy gossip though it’s unclear if he ever wanted them published as they were eventually published after his death. The memoirs include two separate episodes of Choisy’s life. In one he moves to a suburb of Paris where after a few months he starts dressing as a woman, his neighbours call him Madame de Sancy but know that he is ‘biologically’ male. In the other episode Choisy moves to the small town of Bourges where he arrives already dressed as a woman and claiming to be la Comtesse des Barres. In Bourges nobody knows that Choisy is a man. Choisy is most often referred to as a cross-dresser but in my dissertation I argued that he was trans. In his writing, especially during the ‘Comtesse des Barres’ section, ‘he’ often identifies as a woman. Furthermore, in the memoir Choisy uses the feminine grammatical voice.
My dissertation discussed experimental ways to show that Choisy uses both masculine and feminine grammatical gender. One of those ways was to create a font which used the symbols of Mars and Venus to indicate if a word was masculine or feminine. It could be argued that these strategies serve to highlight the gender binary, but they also show that it’s possible for someone to have a gender identity that a) doesn’t match their ‘biological’ sex and that b) can be ambiguous. It’s hard to say whether Choisy would have identified as a man, a woman or a transwoman (technically he can’t have identified as a transwoman as the concept didn’t exist, but just because the linguistic label didn’t exist doesn’t mean people didn’t feel that way) but this strategy shows exactly what Choisy did with his grammar in translation. Something I think is important.
When I did this strategy for my dissertation I added some lines and arrows on to letters. I had a feminine ‘p’ and a masculine ‘a’ and ‘o’. Aside from the fact that this looked terrible, it really restricted what I could do translation-wise. For example, I couldn’t translate a feminine word meaning ‘dressed’ when there’s no ‘p’ in the word! I had to go for ‘dressed up’ which is slightly different. It also caused a nightmare when I came to print my dissertation – all these makeshift letters were in the document as images, I had the margins wrong and as soon as I changed them all those letters moved out of place. It was a bad day.
I didn’t think much more of this after I did my MA until I did the UEA in the City event for my PhD where I presented a poster to members of the public. Whilst talking to one of the judges I explained this strategy I used and he said that it would be quite easy to get a professional to create a proper font with these symbols. I contacted Jamie Clarke and he created something great for me. (Just to be clear, I’m calling this a font but the words typography and typeface have also been used – I don’t actually know the difference between these!).
So, here is my font/typography/typeface (delete as appropriate if you know the difference) in practice, this is an extract from the Madame de Sancy section of Choisy’s memoir:
