The Chevalier d'Eon and his Worlds: Gender, Espionage and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

Description

Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. Not surprisingly, such sensational material has attracted the attention of enthusiasts, scholars and literateurs to 'the strange case of the chevalier d'Eon'. He has also attracted the attention of psychologists and sexologists, and for most of the last century his gender transformation has been viewed through a Freudian lens. His cross-dressing, it was usually assumed, must have a psychosexual explanation. Until the second half of the twentieth century the terms 'Eonist' and 'Eonism' were the standard English words for transvestites and transvestism respectively, but 'Eonism' was also, thanks to Havelock Ellis, widely regarded as a psychological condition or compulsion. However, in the mid-twentieth century, new ideas about gender-identity disorders led to d'Eon being redefined not as a transvestite, but a transsexual - a person who considers their sex to have been 'misassigned'. The essays in this collection contribute to d'Eon's rehabilitation as a figure worthy of scholarly attention and display a variety of disciplinary approaches. Drawing on new research into d'Eon's life, this volume offers original and nuanced readings of how a gender identity could come to be negotiated over time.

Simon Burrows is a leading scholar of European print culture and French political life in the period 1760-1815. In the course of a rich career, he has worked at the Universities of Waikato (New Zealand), Leeds (UK) and is currently Professor of History at Western Sydney University, Australia. He has published six books as author or co-editor and over 20 articles and chapters in well-received themed collections. He is the principal investigator of the highly acclaimed French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database project, which was founded at the University of Leeds, funded by a research grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2007 and 2011, and is now housed at UWS. Jonathan Conlin is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author of Civilisation and Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Making of the Modern City. Russell Goulbourne is Professor of French Literature at King's College London, UK. He is the author of Voltaire Comic Dramatist (2006) and a scholarly translation of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker (2011). Valerie Mainz is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Fine Art, University of Leeds. She specialises in C18th French art and the French Revolution.

The editors of this book have brought together 15 essays...shedding light on various aspects of the chevalier's life and on the social, political and cultural contexts he/she moved in... The book offers a captivating and highly readable perspective on eighteenth-century French society, looking at issues which are often neglected or under-researched... What is remarkable is the way in which many of the authors use cultural theories in a way that not only helps to shed light on the history of eighteenth-century France but also contributes to the problematization of some issues of cultural theory. From this angle, the volume represents an important meeting point of different disciplines... d'Eon is intelligently placed in his own cultural and social context so that the book represents an important contribution to the history of the period more generally. Its relevance clearly goes beyond the study of d'Eon. -- Matthew D'Auria, University of Salerno, Italy * European History Quarterly *