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

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.  

Table of Contents:
The Chevalier d'Eon: Media Star, News Manipulation, Cultural Politics and the Making of an Eighteenth-Century Celebrity 'Faire le Wilkes': The Chevalier d'Eon and the Wikites, 1762-1775  Beaumarchais and d'Eon: An Affair to Remember  Je suis né a Tonnerre A 'monster of metamorphosis': Reassessing the Chevalier/Chevalière d'Eon's Change of Gender 'La Vie militaire, politique et privée de Melle d'Eon' (1779), ou comment faire d'un récit  de vie une enterprise de manipulation The Maiden of Tonnerre: Vicissitudes of the Chevalier and Chevalière d'Eon Dressing d'Eon The Chevalier d'Eon and his Several Identities: Representations of d'Eon in English caricatures of the 1770s and 1780s An Eighteenth-Century French Commonwealthman? Exploring the Context of the Chevalier d'Eon's Translation of Marchamont Nedham's 'The Excellence of a Free State' Traditions and Discontinuities: d'Eon and Choisy The Chevalier d'Eon, Rousseau, and New Ideas for Gender, Sex and the Self in the late Eighteenth Century Louvet's 'Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas': Sexual, Political and Textual Imbroglios Le Mythe des Amazones au XVIIIe siècle at la légende du chevalier d'Eon

About the Author :
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.