Queering Joan: Maid in the Mirror: Luvvy Jihad
Shakespeare's Globe queers Joan of Arc in I, Joan. A play marketed as an exercise in ideological conquest across history, modelling the saint on the show's stars. (Long read)
As expected, plenty has been written about the latest example of “transing the dead” within the Globe’s most recent interpretation of the life of Joan of Arc in the play “I, Joan”. The saint has been “transed” before, I wasn’t surprised that now Joan was “non-binary”. I, however, have some thoughts that are a bit more complex than my exclamation of “what insufferable narcissists!”, which I groaned in disgust whilst listening to an interview with the production’s team. That does cover a lot of my criticism, amongst an array of ahistorical and offensive elements of retconning the most famous Patron Saint of France.
I, Joan[1] is a dance theatre piece written by Charlie Josephine, and it is a play about I, Charlie Josephine.
Well, it would seem so from her interview with the show’s director Ilinca Radulian, hosted on Shakespeare Globe’s Youtube channel[2]. Josephine feels she walks the same path as Joan, The Maid of Orléans, striving in adversity and fighting the English. Not literally but literarily; her war is with words. With the Globe’s crew, she is going to dance you to death, or at least until you submit to calling her “they/them” and confess to your cis sins.
With militaristic drum lines playing in the background, Josephine states her play is “going to be this big, sweaty, queer revolution, rebellion...” the production is her sword against the famously heteronormative theatre establishment who have been preventing her from writing (more) plays.
She continues,
“Joan of Arc was this incredible historical figure. Joan was this working-class young person who was transgressing gender at a time when it was really dangerous, and that just felt instantly relatable to me. I was assigned female at birth. I'm non-binary, I'm from a working-class background and I've often felt like I've had something to say and haven't been given permission to say it. So, to get an opportunity to write this play about a character that's also trying to do that”.
It's hard not to cringe at the hyperbole. Having a short haircut and a Globe-sized ego in post-covid England is nothing like the struggles of a girl in post-plague France. Besides obviously having a whole host of rights that even men did not have in the Middle Ages, the writer seems to think Joan was purely on a crusade against gender stereotypes as opposed to being a religious warrior against an invading army.
Josephine has a few plays under her belt, and she is far from silenced, both performing and writing regularly. Writing for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 2018 in the Whispers From The Wings blog #68[3] titled Fighting the Female Fear, she discusses her long-term obsession with gender “…So, gender seems like an unavoidable topic to write about. I’ve always wanted to play Mercutio. I’ve never really felt like I’m a ‘Juliet’ (whatever that means?) and always wondered why the lads get the best parts, so when this audition came through I nearly fell over”. She got the role but explains that she is still held up by issues of self-worth, “…every day since, I’ve had to actively remind myself that I deserve to be here. And look, perhaps that’s just a public admission of my low self-esteem, but I can’t help but feel like it’s gendered”.
Soon after, in the same year, Josephine swiftly decided to be part of the fashionable subculture wherein people describe themselves as “non-binary”. In 2020 as part of The Pleasure Podcast episode The Joy of Queer Sex the text blurb states, “Charlie started to identify as non-binary two years ago after having felt they’d failed at womanhood the whole of their lives.”[4]
A stark contrast to the 2018 Whisper blog where Josephine wrote, “I’ve been cast as my favourite ever Shakespeare part. Just as I’m coming into my own skin as a woman. Just as misogyny truly bubbles and boils over into a seething #MeToo animal cry. Just as my sister is about to give birth to a baby girl (please god, let it all stop before she enters the world).”
A common symptom of insecurity in modern women is latching on to the transgender trend which lets them escape the turmoil of being boring or weak characters in their own life. It isn’t true that they are necessarily boring or weak, but they are so affected by sexism and stereotypes that they seem to think it is inherent to being female to somehow be lesser than men, or in 2022, a multitude of “genders” under which actual women are to be despised.
“Please god, let it all stop…” the lines between theatrical fiction, factual reality and pseudo-ironic religiosity, seem chronically blurred. It is sad that she came into her skin just to want to jump back out of it, creating a new social avatar via a quasi-religious cult. She seems to think she “failed” at being a woman, entrenching such extreme sexist ideas of what a woman might be, and projecting this confused personal distress onto historical figures. She defines them as failed women too, no matter how extremely successful and famous they are for their conquests as females. Did Joan fail God in her role as a woman - or did Josephine?
The Globe theatre, where the play was produced and is to be performed, maintains an ideology that forces a viewer to see these women as somehow not female. On the event listing the theatre’s webpage links to the organisation Gendered Intelligence[5] inviting viewers to click “If you’d like to find out more about the themes of this play or learn about allyship”. Allyship in this instance is akin to being a good Christian, learning the lexicon and ethics of this transgender and queer ideology surrounding the concepts of Big Gender, and talking to learned leaders and the most pious prophets.
The Gender Intelligence landing page states, “We are a trans-led and trans-involving grassroots organisation with a wealth of lived experience, community connections of many kinds, and a depth and breadth of trans community knowledge that is second to none. We believe everyone can be intelligent about gender!” There is little to distinguish this from any other religious charity website I have visited.
The Shakespeare’s Globe website displays its adherence to the ideology and evangelical nature by listing on the “I, Joan” webpage a hyperlink to “READ OUR STATEMENT ON I, JOAN AND IDENTITY”[6].
The frankly disturbing text echoes the interview between the creators, the Globe describing the audience as a religious army under the command of a non-binary fanatic; “Joan’s army will be made of hundreds of ‘Groundlings’ standing in the Yard, all coming to watch a play for £5”.
The play isn’t so much about art for art’s sake, but a rallying cry for institutional change; the play is about the ethics and direction of the company.
“We are committed to becoming an inclusive and diverse organisation, and making necessary change is at the heart of our strategic aims for the organisation. This includes becoming pro-trans, anti-racist, and taking positive, conscious, and intentional action against any form of prejudice present in our culture. We aim to create a culture and environment in which everyone’s experience at Shakespeare’s Globe is equal, inclusive, and equitable.”
The Globe converts from being anti-trans, pro-racist, and generally negative. The management sternly renounced the past and confessed to the collective sins (who knew the place was such a hotbed of hate). The ominous and striving mission statements don’t seem much like Shakespeare’s fantasies contained upon a Tudor stage.
“The Globe is a place of imagination. A place where, for a brief amount of time, we can at least consider the possibility of world’s elsewhere.”
When the Globe itself rallies audiences to rebel in the name of “inclusivity”, a bastardised term which means the forced exclusion of those who hold gender-atheist views, many will shudder and think of the possibility of the new world that is being created.
Just as I type, I read of J.K. Rowling once again receiving another death threat.[7] She had sent well wishes to Salman Rushdie who just suffered an apparent assassination attempt, likely linked to the long-standing fatwa placed on his head by Ayatollah Rhuhollah Khomeini who called for the world’s Muslims to kill Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses” in 1989. The alleged attempted assassin carried fake identification cards with the names of Hizbollah leaders and had a Facebook profile covered in images of Shia militants and images of the Iranian leaders.[8] In response to J.K Rowling’s tweet, a Twitter user called Meer Asif Aziz replied to Rowling saying, “Don’t worry you are next”.
Rowling and her books have many unofficial and official fatwahs against them from many different religious orders, from those within the various Abrahamic religious groups; the Christian sects, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Muslims and so on, for her books about witchcraft. Then later, the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ via Dumbledore, led to book bans, burnings, and film censorship. [9] In the last few years, a new cult raised its head to wish death upon her, this time it’s the ummah under the Trans Umbrella. If you have read a newspaper in the last few years, you’ll be well aware of the vitriol poured on J.K. Rowling for her -at first mild- but increasingly outspoken opinions about the rights of women conflicting with the political demands of Gender Ideologists.
No matter how Christ-like Potter was and no matter how empathetic Rowling is on Twitter, there is no hiding from the threat of the gender jihadi or Christian soldiers. No matter what faith or order guides the tweeter who tells her she is the next to be assassinated, it all results in the same thing, a woman being threatened for speaking and for being a heretic.
I once interviewed the comedian Mr Menno[10] about the overlaps between religious fundamentalism and trans activist threats against comedians and critics. I even wrote to the government many years ago telling them this is not a harmless fad. From Charlie Hebdo to Rowling, there are real and present dangers. Parody and critical discussion are off limits if not toeing an ideological line, the arts are becoming a cultural battlefield and there is a stifling fear in the (ever less) expressive media.
The similitude of themes in I, Joan and the Globe’s statement of holy war against transphobia and heteronormativity should make the reader nervous. With increased violent threats being sent to any man or woman who wants to maintain their right to freedom of speech, and with police being sent to arrest people who even dare to mock this totalitarian new state religion, we should be critical of any propaganda that may encourage violence.[11] In part, propaganda that tries to tell you that laws and a new form of state religion are just a figment of your imagination and that it’s all just play.
“Calm down dear, it’s a commercial, I’m only acting”, the Esure advert[12] is an earworm that has played through my mind whilst imagining the response to my claims that The Globe is part of a religious takeover of the UK. Look around you, the Police wear the same flag[13] hung in the Metropolitan Community Churches[14] (transgender evangelicals), worn by the clerk at the bank, the cashier, the waiting staff, the nurse, strung high at the Pride parade, the daycare, the school, the stage…I hear God’s pronouns[15] are “they/them”…
Artistic expression should not be inhibited, plays can tackle any subject, I support this, indeed some of the best plays are the ones that give you something to moan about. I absolutely do not want this play cancelled. But this attitude needs to be applied across the board when talking about sex and gender and the ever-stifling “Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion” directives of companies and theatres.
Juxtapose what was done to dancer and director Rosie Kay when she had the audacity to tell her own troupe in her own home that she didn’t think humans could change sex. The double standards on freedom of expression are stark. Kay founded and operated her company The Rosie Kay Dance Company, she invited the young dancers to dinner and drinks in Kay’s own home to relax and bond after a long covid-enforced break from in-person meetings. She revealed to the dancers that her next piece was an interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She discussed the fact that women cannot change sex and that Orlando was an artistic way of exploring the debate around transgenderism and the immovable fact that the sequential hermaphrodism on stage was only fantasy. For her trespass against the ideology, some “non-binary” identifying cast members started a complaints procedure against Kay, which culminated in a contrived knock back to Kay’s career, with her losing her very own company, which she was bullied out of. There are parallels and an inversion of the I, Joan production teams’ insistence that the fantasy on stage reaches out to mould our lives and interpretation of reality.
Kay, unlike Josephine and Radulian, considers art as a way to discuss issues, not as a mode of brainwashing into conformity. Kay has since started up another company K2CO[16]. Luckily, Rosie was able to speak out and had the strength to return to dance after the Shakespearean assassination of Rosie Kay, the dance troupe's Ceasar (their hands potentially guided by external forces). I hope to see Kay’s protandrous protagonist on stage in the future.
While Kay may do one-woman shows about her own life, others use historical figures as body-snatched avatars to wear while they tell you about themselves. It isn’t unusual for auteurism and autobiographical elements to be expressed via historical themes, but so blatant is the co-option of Joan, that from the discussion in the Globe’s interview, it is hard to tell how much will actually be about the young French woman versus being about the play’s writer and lead actress, who both are non-binary and use the pronouns “they/he”. Unlike some commentators, I don’t subscribe to gender ideology at all, so I see Joan as no less female if a woman plays her and calls her “non-binary”, because she is still a woman, and so is the actress. I will not subscribe to the idea that anything materially changes about the performers or the subject, it is just words, but the criticism is of the philosophical attitude towards the historical woman’s identity.
Femaleness was absolutely integral to Joan of Arc’s own self-understanding, to subvert this is not to subvert society now, it is to dance on the intangible grave of the woman who was burnt three times and scattered in the Seine so that nobody could visit where she was laid to rest and no relics remained.
The writer Josephine states that I, Joan is “going to be this big, sweaty, queer revolution…”. Was Joan Queer? The Globe states in its further information what“Queer” means in the context of the play:
“WHY WE USE THE WORD QUEER
The word ‘queer’ is widely used to refer to non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities. We use the word ‘queer’ interchangeably with LGBTQIA+. Regarding the copy for I, Joan, our creative team has been integral to choosing the language used in our copy. We recognise the complex history of the word queer, and its reclamation into a positive or neutral descriptor. We use queer to mean those outside of heterosexual and cisgender identities.”
I don’t claim to know Joan’s sexual orientation, and I will not presume to guess, but I know one thing about Joan: She was known as“la Pucelle d'Orléans”, The Maid, The Virgin, because of her chastity and virginity. Her virginity gave her power in the context of a deeply religious society in the 1400s. She was the antithesis of queer. Her brand was extreme piety, so much so that the English-run court struggled to find fault with her faith and hinged much of the accusations of impropriety on her wearing of men’s clothes. The English had nuns subject her to virginity tests and she was found to be “intact”, and Joan said she preserved her modesty and virgin body to deliver to God and the saints. Her adherence to the word of God was one of her weapons, to encourage men into battle with her, to gain public support and to defend herself in court.
She claimed to have been given visions of the saints and angels including Gabriel when she was just 13. This has been hypothesised to be caused by neurological issues such as "idiopathic partial epilepsy with auditory features (IPEAF),"[17]or even schizophrenia but we may never know what the hallucinations were when she heard church bells, and which woke her from sleep. Whatever caused them, she truly believed them to be real and it set her on her mission as the virgin peasant to carry out the prophesies shown to her.
To describe Joan as some sort of lascivious, party-monster queer isn’t just ignorant, it is downright rude. “Elle n'est plus pucelle” - she is no longer a virgin. “Pucelle” also was sometimes used to mean “slut” and I feel this is the inversion of the meaning of Joan’s actions. Her chasteness being queered is similar to the phenomenon I wrote about in my essay “Asexuality: Queering the Mundane”1. Queering Joan in the image of the narcissistic writer who blogs about queer sex just shows how much she thinks Joan is cool a pop culture myth to further promote the idea that everyone fits in a framework of “queerness”, as opposed to caring who Joan actually was. The auteurism of I, Joan is immediately apparent in the title, I [am] Joan.
The writer, director, and lead want to mirror themselves in Joan’s story, maybe inadvertently highlighting the fact their vacillating identities and self-image is also a sign of mental disturbance. (Can this be said without risking arrest these days?)
The “non-binary” lead of the play Isobel Thom[18] is photographed for the poster with her breasts bound. Imagery similar to that of African girls with their breasts ironed flat with hot rocks to hide their puberty from the male gaze and to avoid marriage and rape[19]. Maybe Joan did wear binders as they have appeared throughout history to compress and stabilise breasts, for fashion and boyish figures in the 1920’s for instance. Under armour, this might have been practical, but that isn’t the visual signalling here. The lead’s styling echoes the multitude of images online of depressed girls crushing their breasts as part of the transgender fad[20], stirred into self-hatred by the flashing images on their phones[21] and laptops that remind them how violent the world is to women and how supposedly safe a haven boyhood is. An escape they can find via amputation and injections (if only it were so simple).
Joan wore “men’s” clothes in the context of battle, this was practical, a disguise to blend in and suitable garb for horse riding and battle. She wore “men’s” clothes in captivity, again for practical reasons - to avoid rape and molestation.[22]
What did Joan say? She was captured by the French and delivered to the English. In 1431 in Rouen, France, within a church court controlled by the English, the court record states (which is available online here[23] where I have sourced these extensive quotations, below are a selection, not all):
[24]
“SECOND PUBLIC EXAMINATIONThe Trial of Condemnation
Thursday, February 22nd, in the Ornament Room at the end of the Great Hall of the Castle of Rouen. The Bishop and 48 Assessors Present….
““Who counseled you to take a man’s dress?”To this question she several times refused to answer. “In the end, she said: “With that I charge no one.”
Many times she varied in her answers to this question. Then she said:
“Robert de Baudricourt made those who went with me swear to conduct me well and safely. ‘Go,’ said Robert de Baudricourt to me, ‘Go! and let come what may!’ I know well that God loves the Duke d’Orleans; I have had more revelations about the Duke d’Orleans than about any man alive, except my King. It was necessary for me to change my woman’s garments for a man’s dress. My counsel thereon said well.”
The trial continued on Saturday, 24th February[25]
“Would you like to have a woman’s dress?”
“Give me one, and I will take it and begone; otherwise, no. I am content with what I have, since it pleases God that I wear it.””
Later on Tuesday, February 27th:
“Was it God who prescribed to you the dress of a man?”
“What concerns this dress is a small thing – less than nothing. I did not take it by the advice of any man in the world. I did not take this dress or do anything but by the command of Our Lord and of the Angels.”
“Did it appear to you that this command to take man’s dress was lawful?”
“All I have done is by Our Lord’s command. If I had been told to take some other, I should have done it; because it would have been His command.”
“Did you not take this garment by order of Robert de Baudricourt?”
“No.”
“Do you think it was well to take a man’s dress?”
“All that I have done by the order of Our Lord I think has been well done; I look for good surety and good help in it.”
“In this particular case, this taking of man’s dress, do you think you did well?”
“I have done nothing in the world but by the order of God.”[26]
And so on. Joan was restricted from attending mass, demanding to keep her outfit the same. Later she conceded that if she was to wear a dress of a woman it would be long.
Thursday, March 15th[27]
“When you asked to hear Mass, did it not seem to you that it would be more proper to be in female dress? Which would you prefer, to have a woman’s dress to hear Mass, or to remain in a man’s dress and not hear it?”“Give me assurance beforehand that I shall hear Mass if I am in female attire, and I will answer you this.”
“Very well, I give you assurance of it: you shall hear Mass if you put on female attire.”
“And what say you, if I have sworn and promised to our King my Master, not to put off this dress? Well, I will answer you this: Have made for me a long dress down to the ground, without a train; give it to me to go to Mass, and then on my return I will put on again the dress I have.”
“I say it to you once again, do you consent to wear female attire to go and hear Mass?”
“I will take counsel on this, and then I will answer you: but I beseech you, for the honor of God and Our Lady, permit me to hear Mass in this good town.”
“You consent simply and absolutely to take female attire?”
“Send me a dress like a daughter of your citizens that is to say, a long ‘houppeland.’ I will wear it to go and hear Mass. I beseech you as earnestly as I can, permit me to hear it in the dress I wear at this moment and without changing anything!”
The questioning and answering follow this pattern. The refusal to remove the clothes is clearly a symbol of her stubbornness to do as these men demand, and to remain in the costume she put on to fight for her God. Divesting seemed to represent submission and defeat. Having read the court record she refers to women as “other women” who she says can do women’s work instead of her when she was commanded to. She doesn’t declare herself anything other than a modest woman who finds other women safe to share sleeping quarters with, as opposed to men. Joan said,
“At Arras and Beaurevoir I was invited to take a woman’s dress; then I refused, and I refuse still. As to the women’s work of which you speak, there are plenty of other women to do it.”2
Commentators on Joan’s trial and demise consider her male attire solely to be what she is burned for, as opposed to an element of the show trial parading her many sins described in the Twelve Articles of Accusation. She ran verbal rings around the inquisitors, embarrassing them and infuriating them. She was found to be a heretic, idolater and liar, Roman Catholics were not fond of people claiming to have personal correspondence with God and angels and were certainly not pleased when that same person led armies that defeated the side of the trial’s Inquisitors. She was threatened with burning and was terrified into declaring she was guilty and agreed she would wear women’s clothes in return for a mitigated sentence of life imprisonment. When she was discovered days later to have ‘relapsed’ and was again wearing men’s clothes, the inquisitors were gleefully able to sentence her instead to death.
She was forced to sign an abjuration[28],
“…I, Jeanne, commonly called the Maid, a miserable sinner, after that I had recognized the snares of error in the which I was held… I confess that I have most grievously sinned, in pretending untruthfully to have had revelations and apparitions from God, from the Angels, and Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret; in seducing others; in believing foolishly and lightly; in making superstitious divinations; in blaspheming God and His Saints; in breaking the Divine Law, Holy Scripture, and the lawful Canons; in wearing a dissolute habit, misshapen and immodest and against the propriety of nature, and hair clipped ‘en ronde’ in the style of a man, against all the modesty of the feminine sex; also, in bearing arms in great presumption; in cruelly desiring the effusion of human blood;…
And in sign of this, I have signed this schedule with my signature. (Signed thus): Jehanne”
Afterwards, she was taken to prison, given women’s clothes and her head was shaved3:
“Exhortation made to Jeanne by the Deputy Inquisitor, in Prison.And the same day, Thursday, May 24th, in the afternoon, We, Brother Jean Lemaitre, the aforesaid Deputy, assisted by the Lords and Masters N. Midi, N. Loyseleur, Thomas de Courcelles, Brother Ysambard de la Pierre, and several others.
We did repair to the place in the prison where Jeanne was to be found…
“We told her to leave off her man’s dress and to take a woman’s garments, as the Church had ordered her.
In all our observations Jeanne did reply that she would willingly take woman’s garments, and that in all things she would obey the Church.
Woman’s garments having been offered to her, she at once dressed herself in them, after having taken off the man’s dress she was wearing; and her hair, which up to this time had been cut “en ronde” above her ears, she desired and permitted them to shave and take away.”
On May 28th, four days later she was discovered to be wearing men’s garb again:
“And because Jeanne was dressed in the dress of a man – that is to say, a short mantle, a hood, a doublet and other effects used by men-although, by our orders, she had, several days before, consented to give up these garments, we asked her when and for what reason she had resumed this dress.1She answered us:
“I have but now resumed the dress of a man and put off the woman’s dress.”
“Why did you take it, and who made you take it?”
“I took it of my own free will, and with no constraint: I prefer a man’s dress to a woman’s dress.”
“You promised and swore not to resume a man’s dress.”
“I never meant to swear that I would not resume it.”
“Why have you resumed it?”
“Because it is more lawful and suitable for me to resume it and to wear man’s dress, being with men, than to have a woman’s dress. I have resumed it because the promise made to me has not been kept; that is to say, that I should go to Mass and should receive my Savior and that I should be taken out of irons.”
“Did you not abjure and promise not to resume this dress?”
“I would rather die than be in irons! but if I am allowed to go to Mass, and am taken out of irons and put into a gracious prison, and [may have a woman for companion]I will be good, and do as the Church wills.””
Footnotes from the source which I quote, discusses the variations or what was said and they reveal that the English snatched her dress and left her with only men’s clothes, forcing her to break the deal against her will and against her protestation. It is also noted that she was wearing those clothes to protect herself from assault, the footnote states “… The Dominican Brothers declared that she had been assaulted by an English milord, as she told them, and that she therefore considered it necessary to return to the protection of her old dress; but considering the type of soldier in whose care she was placed, there seems no need to seek for any further explanation than her own, as given in the text, and as later corroborated by Manchon and De Courcelles.”4
It is distressing that in 2022 women would promote such a rigid social framework where the way you dress would have such significance, or suggest there is a way correct for women to dress. It’s as if they actually want this extreme attitude to costume to persevere into the modern age. The production team suggest they are not actually woman, look at their outfits!
The I, Joan team, by saying she was not a woman, suggest that Joan’s captors erred in persecuting her for clothes, they insinuate she was wearing the correct dress and she wasn’t defying any of the Catholic rules. What a grotesque suggestion, to apply such modern thinking to a torturous situation a woman experienced. If only they had a time machine to pop back and explain that she could have neopronouns and could avoid the flames.
Later, on May 30th, Joan was taken to be executed. She was placed on a platform, sentenced to death and ex-communication[29]:
“…But after this abjuration of your errors, the Author of Schism and Heresy had arisen in your heart, which he had once more seduced, and it had become manifest by thy spontaneous confessions and assertions – O, shame! -that, as the dog returns again to his vomit, so have you returned to your errors and crimes; and it had been proved to us in a most certain manner that you have renounced thy guilty inventions and thy errors only in a lying manner, not in a sincere and faithful spirit. For these causes, declaring thee fallen again into your old errors, and under the sentence of excommunication which you have formerly incurred, WE DECREE THAT YOU ART A RELAPSED HERETIC…”
A terrifying and inescapable group of men condemned her to death and her soul to hell. I’m no scholar of the saints, my knowledge of Joan from films and articles, but watching the I, Joan Interview disgusted me. I sat and wrote this essay in my head but knew I had to go to the source, and as I expected, reading more about the Maid of Orlean’s trial the last thing it made me think of was a “big, sweaty, queer revolution, rebellion, festival of like, joy.”
There is nothing joyful there.
Joan did do something extremely unusual in adversity that is incomprehensible for women in the modern UK. We aren’t feudal peasants like Joan, we luckily don’t yet live under religious law as our ancestors did, where burnings were once used as a punishment to keep men and women in line.
Burnings were used as punishment for witchcraft and heresy (particularly in the Spanish Inquisition) and in the British Isles also for the crimes of “petty treason” (murdering your husband) and “coining” (clipping coins and colouring base metals). It became a sex-specific form of capital punishment which in turn was an element of its abolition.
Hundreds of years after the English burned Joan, a growing distaste towards the practice developed as people were turned off from the spectacle and smells from the gruesome torture, and then the disparity in punishment between men and women became untenable. For coining men were hanged, a relatively painless death versus the burnings reserved for women, although there developed the practice of pre-strangulation for women. An interesting website “Capital Punishment UK” claims:
“…the whole ghastly business passed into history under the provisions of the Treason Act of 1790. The Sheriffs were also becoming increasingly unhappy about attending burnings, and it was they who brought forward the Bill to end this practice. Even though by this time the condemned woman was dead before the faggots were lit, it must have still been a gruesome and revolting spectacle and one which conveyed a feeling of injustice. Men convicted of coining offences were hanged in the same way as other condemned males. The Times newspaper took up this theme after Phoebe’s burning and printed the following article: “The execution of a woman for coining on Wednesday morning, reflects a scandal upon the law and was not only inhuman, but shamefully indelicate and shocking. Why should the law in this species of offence inflict a severer punishment upon a woman, than a man. It is not an offence which she can perpetrate alone - in every such case the insistence of a man has been found the operating motive upon the woman; yet the man is but hanged, and the woman burned.” Other London newspapers carried similar articles.”[30]
Why would women so emancipated in 2022 be harking back to such horrible times in history and have the audacity to suggest their personal time on earth is anywhere near as oppressive? To suggest being correctly sexed and have people ignore your requests to use your chosen pronouns as somehow like the persecution experienced under religious inquisition? Do they not see the irony of promoting a play and releasing statements declaring a new movement to have everyone submit to a new ideological set of rules? Are they not aware of the inquisitorial trials that girls are subjected to in schools; The Crucible is no longer a set-text or school trip to the theatre, but a real-life nightmare for children who stand up to ideological peers who brand the heretics “transphobic” and TERFs?[31]
Maybe they aren’t blind to this, they may well think it is justice in action.
I think part of the motive of the show makers can be boiled down to something less philosophically profound, and far lower brow: Joan is cool.
She was a fighter, a total badass. She bucked trends and had something many will envy: a purpose.
Few will want the visions or seizures, but her depiction in popular culture has created a heroine for many a young girl. There have been over 42 films[32] about Jeanne d’Arc since 1898, and many television shows and innumerable plays. It’s a role associated with famously beautiful and strong actresses such as Milla Jovovich and Ingrid Bergman. I was freaked out by the brutality of the story of Joan in “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc” (1999), the burning absolutely terrified me, and Jovovich’s manic portrayal was hypnotic.
Like thousands of others, I once went as Joan for Halloween. I made a tabard out of part burned canvas, made a sword, crucifix, and scabbard out of wood (the joys of an art school workshop), and I cut my hair off in a Medieval French style. I wasn’t fighting the English, just the demons on the dance floor after cycling my party-bike steed to Dundee’s best Halloween party at The Reading Rooms.
I, like many a woman would love to have the fortitude and famous style of Joan, just like the playwright did. But one must freely admit there is romanticism in how you wish to be a warrior - in relative safety and not risking spiritual cleansing by fire. We see the plight of women in Iran and India, risking death for speaking, dressing differently, and wanting an education. Some of us fight for all women, not for a God, but for freedom. Instead of suggesting that these girls are failing as women, thereby agreeing with modern-day Morality Officers[33] and the Inquisitors at Rouen, express the joy and anger at what women can do, and have done, and dance to that.
END
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P.S Unfortunately, I won’t be dancing and will not see the show. I’m stuck in bed for months, again, after yet more orthopaedic surgery for disabling chronic injuries. Disability is one of the under-discussed rights movements. I would like to see the show, but I cannot walk. I think the dancers need to continue to look in the mirror but practice a little more critical self-reflection about who is really struggling in our society
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[1] https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/joan-2022/
https://archive.ph/pUfZF
youtube Shakesperes globe
[3] https://www.rsc.org.uk/blogs/whispers-from-the-wings/fighting-the-female-fear
[4] https://play.acast.com/s/thepleasurepodcast/s3-ep8charlottejosephine-thejoyofqueersex
https://genderedintelligence.co.uk/
(https://archive.ph/wip/3zgQp)
[6] https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/identity-in-i-joan (https://archive.ph/wip/uOWV4)
[7] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/jk-rowling-twitter-threat-salman-rushdie-stabbing-new-york-b1018409.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fs=e&s=cl&fbclid=IwAR2VTBXBQF4LEYsipMIZ4QbfPfTOCJWWb0b-Dx1FJMAKWA_kPKd9YHCjErE#Echobox=1660402435
(https://archive.ph/wip/1W17o)
[8] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/13/salman-rushdie-stabbing-suspect-hadi-matar-had-fake-driving/?utm_content=telegraph&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3tLVpoNC5x0fsdUlMLCpadOpZM49aNV3EcijI4_nYb2LM33g2bVAyaFXg#Echobox=1660414759-1
[9] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/09/03/catholic-school-bans-harry-potterbut-according-to-free-speech-advocates-its-nothing-new/
(https://archive.ph/wip/FtCD9)
[13] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-power-of-flags/
[14] https://metropolitanchurch.org.uk/community/trans-people https://archive.ph/wip/GgdZ2
(https://archive.ph/wip/dAKGv) https://www.reddit.com/r/pasadena/comments/o7w444/i_was_walking_around_town_yesterday_and_came/ (https://archive.ph/wip/cfmBs)
[16] https://k-2co.com/new-page-3 https://k-2co.com/new-page-3
[17] https://www.livescience.com/55597-joan-of-arc-voices-epilepsy.html
[18] https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2022/08/14/i-joan-of-arc-non-binary-isobel-thom-globe-theatre/
[19] https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/611779/Breast-ironing-gender-violence-Cameroon-violence-against-women-UN
[20] https://ftm-guide.com/complete-guide-to-chest-binding-for-trans-men/ https://fashionmagazine.com/flare/how-to-bind-your-chest/ (pic)
[21] https://www.out.com/celebs/2021/7/06/crown-star-emma-corrin-updates-pronouns-shows-binder
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/chest-binding-dangerous/
[22] https://allthatsinteresting.com/joan-of-arc-death (links to National Geographichttps://archive.ph/wqII7)
[23] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/
[24] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-second-public-examination/
[25] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-third-public-examination/
[26] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-fourth-public-examination/
[27] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-seventh-private-examination/
[28] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-deliberations-final-session-sentence-and-recantation/
[29] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-second-process-the-relapse-adjudication-and-death-sentence/
[30] https://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/burning.html
[31] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10894523/Sixth-former-bullied-private-girls-school-questioning-trans-ideology-shares-story.html
[32] https://www.jeanne-darc.info/cinematography/
[33] https://www.voanews.com/a/calls-grow-for-iran-morality-police-to-change-course-/6668847.html
(https://www.jeanne-darc.info/trial-of-condemnation-index/trial-condemnation-continuation-of-the-march-27th-reading-of-the-seventy-articles/)