Harvard: Trans Orientalisms - Home Theater & Cultural Cosplay at the fin de Siècle

A talk by Rachel Mesch. This talk explores how nineteenth-century French writers and artists brought orientalism home quite literally: by constructing their living spaces as simulacra of the far-away lands where they had enjoyed altered versions of themselves or fantasized of doing so. Writer-explorers Jane and Marcel Dieulafoy decorated their stately house in the Passy neighborhood of Paris with dozens of artifacts and visual reminders of their time in the Middle East; it also served as a theater, in which they hosted plays performed by actors in androgynous garb that recalled that of the young men they met in Persia. Novelist Pierre Loti recreated a Turkish mosque alongside myriad visual references to the Middle and Far East in his home in Rochefort, where he hosted elaborate costume parties in which he dressed in the traditional clothing of those locations. The theatrical nature of both Dieulafoy and Loti’s homes becomes that much clearer when compared to the dazzling orientalized living spaces of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, where she and her guests engaged in gender-crossing cosplay. In this talk, I explore how Dieulafoy, Loti, Bernhardt and others exploited imperialist power structures in service of liberating gender expression. These wealthy figures drew on a French imaginary that exploited their power as French citizens in order to challenge those power structures in other ways: orientalized cosplay was a means to joyously and unproblematically embody alternative queer and trans identities that might otherwise threaten their privileged social status. During a time when the medical field was rapidly developing stigmatizing diagnoses around queer sexualities and non-heteronormative behaviors, these forms of liberated gender play point to an overlooked archive of queer and trans expression and even joy. And yet, these pleasures were built upon a troubling and often violent history of cultural exploitation actively effaced by these playful pastimes. How do we reconcile the intertwining of the liberatory and the exploitative in these under-explored practices crucial to both French gender history and the history of orientalism in France?