“Le plaisir inexprimable d’être aimé”

Abstract

This paper sets out to interpret the Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme, a most interesting “insider” document of the queer temptation in seventeenth-century France. Contextualizing Choisy’s transgression within the power system of Louis XIV’s court will allow us to understand the dialectical nature of the transvestite option with regard to society and the court. In the centipetal culture of monarchic absolutism, the ubiquitous display of monarchic egolatry represents a problematic challenge to every marginal ego because of the contrast between the “natural” desire to assimilate oneself to the central subject and the impossibility to establish multiple centres within the same closed system. Choisy’s transvestitism can thus be seen from a perspective which does not dismiss it as a playful and “recreational” experience, but takes it seriously as a founding impulse of performative identity definition. Transgressive identity performances make therefore a deviant behaviour into the foundation of a new value system: Choisy’s queerness functions as an antidote to marginalization in the “straight” power structure, and can be seen as the expression of an exquisitely political will to bring into harmony, through a performative enactement of the paradoxes of female identity, self-perception and social perspectives on the self.

Keywords

• François-Timoléon de Choisy; Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme; cross-dressing; gender identity, performance of; mimetic desire>