“Disruptive Disguises: The Problem of Transvestite Saints for Medieval Art, Identity & Identification,” Medieval Feminist Forum, vol. 46, Winter 2010.
The lives of transvestite saints have benefited from a huge influx of new research since the entrance of Gender Studies into the medieval field. Almost all of this research, however, has focused on their hagiographies and cults from either a textual or socio-historical perspective, without special attention to their presence, or notable absence, within the visual sphere of representation.1 While literary scholars have delved into the nuances of each pronoun used to narrate these tales, art historians have hardly acknowledged transvestite saints, as individual figures or as a categorical topic. This imbalance in attention among the various scholarly fields derives logically from the material available—transvestite saints figure prominently in numerous textual sources while they are markedly scarce in medieval art—but it has unintentionally affected contemporary understanding of how medievals received these figures and interpreted their meaning. By focusing on evidence of the widespread dissemination of this trope in literature without considering the dearth of images produced to illustrate these tales, a primarily textual approach overestimates medieval acceptance of saintly cross-dressing.2 Taking an art historical perspective, this essay demonstrates that the popularity of transvestite saints in hagiographic or ecclesiastic writings belies the disruptive threat they posed to medieval visual representation and the stability of the symbolic order. Only by understanding why these stories were acceptable within textual narrative but problematic as artistic subjects can we fully appreciate how they operated within the medieval context, what social needs they served, and what reactionary restrictions they provoked....