Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog, page 8
June 17, 2025
Pride Month 2025: Story of the Day
Elen de Céspedes (c. 1545–after 1588) was born in Spain, assigned female at birth, and lived much of their adult life as a man. A former enslaved person and farmworker, they eventually became a licensed surgeon, an astonishing achievement for someone of their social origin, let alone someone living across gender lines.
Céspedes married a woman dressed in male clothing, and presented socially as male, though at times they described themselves as having a body “made both of man and woman.” Interrogated by the Inquisition and royal courts, they defended their identity with remarkable clarity and defiance, asserting not deceit, but truth in complexity.
No confirmed portrait of Céspedes survives, but Spanish Renaissance portraiture of pages, soldiers, and physicians offers visual records of gendered roles that Céspedes may have inhabited. Paintings of young court attendants often portray ambiguous features — slender hands, powdered skin, delicate fabrics — inviting reinterpretation through a queer lens.
These images raise questions: how do we read gender in portraiture? What did it mean to pass or present across gender lines in the 16th century? Céspedes’s life and the portraits of courtly youths surrounding their era become a palimpsest of queer possibility, where gender was performance, protection, and defiance all at once.
June 16, 2025
Pride Month 2025: Art of the Day
In the hagiographic tradition of Eastern Christianity, Saint Marina the Monk (more properly known as Marinos) occupies a space that defies categories. Assigned female at birth, Marina disguised herself as a man to live in a monastery with her father. There, she took the name Marinos, donned monastic robes, and lived for decades as a male monk, her gender undisclosed to the brotherhood.
When falsely accused of fathering a child, Marina accepted punishment without revealing her assigned sex. She lived in disgrace, raising the child in humility and silence, until her death when the truth was discovered, not as a scandal, but a revelation of holiness and divine mystery.
In icons, Marina is often portrayed like any other monk: tonsured, robed, solemn — but with visual markers that invite deeper reading. In some traditions, Marina is shown bearded, symbolising full assimilation into the male monastic world. In others, she is portrayed cradling the orphan she raised — an image of maternal masculinity. Sometimes a lion is present, referencing stories of her retreat into the wilderness, where her sanctity brought even wild creatures to peace.
This iconography resists simplification. Marina is not “disguised” as a man. She is venerated as a monk — the identity she lived and died as. Her sanctity is not framed as despite her gender fluidity, but through it. In Orthodox Christianity, some saints are not worshipped for fitting social norms — they are honoured for transcending them.
Marina (in red) is being brought to a monastery by her father Eugenius. 14th-century French manuscript.
Shomèr ma mi-llailah?
Last night I dreamt I was back in Jerusalem. I was wandering the streets at night, it was late, and yet the air was thick with heat and sweat. The alleys were as deserted as they get, the only movement was the shimmering of the paving stones, shiny with the scraping of a thousand shoes and so dark, so bright, like the illusion of water in the midst of the desert. It was all a familiar sight. And yet, in the dream, I was reassuring myself a little too much, a little too anxiously, how natural it was that no one was around, being shabbat at all. It wasn’t shabbat, and I knew that. And I kept wandering those places, simultaneously familiar and alien as dreams can build, and no one of my friends was around. Not the shopkeeper who entertained me with mint tea and told me stories of his land. Not the military officer who was talking with dreamy eyes of the dream of having a safe space to call home, where his family wouldn’t be persecuted. Not the merchant, who explained me the worth of a land as the only true wealth you can leave your children, ‘cause earth doesn’t know currency and can’t be burnt by a foreign invader. Not the children playing in the streets, nor the angry, violent man who broke my colleague’s camera. No one was around, and in the dream I knew I had to know the real reason, and I just couldn’t grasp it.
I woke up shivering, in a pool of sweat, but the dream is still here. And my fingers are grazing the quiet stones, warm of a sun that’s memory or myth; dark has swallen the palm trees whole, and it feels like daylight never existed.
June 15, 2025
Pride Month 2025: Story of the Day
In the glittering intellectual courts of Abbasid Baghdad, one poet spoke of queer desire with wit, joy, and unapologetic sensuality. Abu Nuwas (c. 756–814 CE) — satirist, court jester, and literary rebel — composed verses that openly celebrated his love for wine, boys, and the pleasures of defiance. He was no marginal figure either: he was canonised in classical Arabic literature, even featured in some versions of The Thousand and One Nights as a comic hero and decadent sage.
While some of his contemporaries wrapped homoeroticism in layers of metaphor, Abu Nuwas wrote plainly. His poems describe trysts in gardens, longing gazes across courtyards, and the intoxicating beauty of young men whose grace eclipses that of women. He did not veil his desire behind Neoplatonic sublimation or courtly euphemism: he made it a public art form.
One of his poems begins:
“Beardless boys are lovelier than girls.
Say what you will, but that is my truth.”
Another concludes:
“Let me taste what is forbidden.
I shall answer only to my heart.”
Abu Nuwas was also attuned to gender’s theatricality. Some of his verse praises women who cross-dress, or boys whose beauty is heightened by femininity. He understood that gender was not fixed, but a space of performance and pleasure, especially in the urban world of Baghdad where clothing, voice, and posture were tools of seduction and resistance alike. Though periodically censored by some rulers, his verses endured, copied in manuscripts and taught in literary circles for centuries. His voice is irreverent, witty, lyrical. And utterly queer.
June 14, 2025
Pride Month 2025: Words of the Day
“Love has no why,
and the soul who loves has no need to ask.
She is unbound. She neither wills nor does not will,
for she is held, wholly,
in the embrace of Love’s will.”
— Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (Le Mirouer des simples âmes anéanties), c. 1290–1306
Marguerite Porete was a French beguine and mystic whose treatise The Mirror of Simple Souls was deemed so radical by the ecclesiastical authorities that she was executed for heresy in 1310. Her crime? Writing of a soul — cast as feminine — that is so wholly annihilated in divine love that she transcends all ecclesiastical structures, all moral effort, all binaries of obedience and disobedience.
In The Mirror, the Soul speaks of surrendering to Love in terms that are profoundly erotic, emotional, and ecstatic. She ceases to act, chooses no longer to will anything: she becomes, instead, a vessel of divine flow, suspended in the arms of a lover who is not God-the-Father, but Love itself.
This language of annihilation and passivity has often been interpreted theologically, but for many queer readers of the Ace community, it also evokes the erasure of normative identity and the longing for unbounded intimacy without phisicality, beyond rules, beyond roles. The soul here is gendered and desiring, but also liberated from social constraints: free of “why,” living in a logic outside law and structure. The beguine movement itself was often a refuge for women who lived independently, formed spiritual partnerships, and resisted patriarchal control.
Porete’s words survived after her condemnation, smuggled, copied anonymously, and eventually rediscovered centuries later. Today, her text is recognized not only as a masterpiece of mystical literature, but also as a queer devotional document, where love is surrender, loss is freedom, and identity is porous, radiant, and unnameable.
June 13, 2025
Pride Month 2025: Story of the Day
In the Roman de Silence, written in Old French by Heldris of Cornwall, we meet Silence—a child born female but raised as a boy to circumvent a royal decree forbidding women from inheriting. As the story unfolds, Silence becomes a celebrated knight, surpassing his male peers in bravery and virtue. Yet the heart of the romance isn’t just chivalry—it’s a profound meditation on gender as performance, and a direct confrontation between Nature and Nurture, who are personified as allegorical characters fighting over Silence’s identity.
Nature insists that Silence must return to her “true” womanhood; Nurture argues that the male role has shaped who he has become. But Silence defies both forces. He chooses his life, his body, and his name—challenging the binaries imposed upon him by society, biology, and even the narrative structure itself.
Despite ultimately being “outed” and married to the king, Silence’s journey offers a powerful and rare medieval exploration of gender fluidity and the tension between identity and expectation, and it’s not an unicum in its genre.
Le Roman de Silence gives us more than a literary curiosity—it offers one of the earliest known Western narratives of a transmasculine identity. Written centuries before the words existed, it reveals how queerness has always pressed at the limits of category, even when veiled in allegory and parchment.
June 12, 2025
A Kind of Language in Milan
From January 30 to September 8, 2025, the Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan hosts “A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema,” an exhibition curated by Melissa Harris. This showcase delves into the intricate pre-production processes of filmmaking, highlighting the pivotal role of visual planning tools such as storyboards, mood boards, sketches, annotated scripts, and photographs. Spanning nearly a century of cinematic history, the exhibition features over 800 items from more than 50 creatives, including renowned figures like Georges Méliès, artists at Walt Disney Studios and Hayao Miyazaki‘s Studio Ghibli, Sofia Coppola, and Federico Fellini.
In theory, the exhibition traces the evolution of storyboarding from its early use by pioneers like Méliès to its integral role in contemporary filmmaking. What really happens, is that you can explore original materials from classic animations like Disney’s Fantasia to modern masterpieces such as Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, but nothing is ever explained to you. While there clearly are differences on how directors visualize scenes, develop narratives, and plan technical aspects like camera angles and lighting, it’s all up to you to spot them. The exhibition just throws the materials out there, ans the rest is up to you.
Designed by Andrea Faraguna of the Berlin-based architecture firm Sub, the exhibition features two thematic corners. The rest is drafting tables displaying sequences of visual materials, each dedicated to a specific film. I’m not saying it isn’t worth the visit. I’m just saying you should arrive prepared.
“For many, creating storyboards is an integral part of the process. Visually setting up a scene and then defining its flow can help the team involved in making the film to reflect on the relationships between characters, imagine how to develop the narrative, or understand the best way to convey the essence of a particular sequence. It can also help to fix issues—such as when something doesn’t quite feel convincing in a character or a physical interaction—and offer a visual reference for the actors. On a technical level, storyboards can assist the director in determining the most effective angles for lighting and shooting, or the best way to use fades and any special effects.”
Pride Month 2025: Words of the Day
“You meet your friend, your face
Brightens – you have struck gold.”
— Hymn and epigrammatic poetry by Kassia (Kassiani), 9th century ByzantiumKassia (Kassiani) was a Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and intellectual who lived in Constantinople in the 9th century. Renowned as both a hymnographer and epigrammatist, she is one of the very few women from the Byzantine Empire whose writing survives under her own name. Her body of work includes devotional texts, political commentary, and lyric fragments — some of which suggest deep emotional ties between women.
In some of her works, Kassia writes with longing for female companionships and emotions going beyond generalized grief; it is personal, physical, and rooted in sensory memory. While Byzantine court culture often celebrated friendship between women in elevated, spiritualized terms — and flame and wound imagery are common poetic metaphors for longing and separation in Byzantine and medieval literature — Kassia’s phrasing is often highly intimate. As an abbess, Kassia had access to a literary and theological tradition that allowed women to express deep bonds with one another, especially within monastic life. Her compositions for Holy Week, still sung in Orthodox churches today, are celebrated for their emotional intensity and dramatic voice — often writing as women seeking closeness with the divine through very human, sensual imagery.
Icon of St. Kassia
June 11, 2025
Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (16)
A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père.
Thibault was delighted at seeing what had happened to the young Baron, whose hand, anything but light, had so shortly before made use of his whip on Thibault’s shoulders, which still smarted with the blow. The latter now ran at full speed to see how far Monsieur Raoul de Vauparfond was injured; he found a body lying insensible, stretched across the road, with the horse standing and snorting beside it.
But Thibault could hardly believe his senses on perceiving that the figure lying in the road was not the same as had but five minutes previously, ridden past him and given him the lash with the whip. In the first place, this figure was not in the dress of a gentleman, but clothed like a peasant, and, what was more, the clothes he had on seemed to Thibault to be the same as he himself had been wearing only a moment before His surprise increased more and more and amounted almost to stupefaction on further recognising, in the inert, unconscious figure, not only his own clothes but his own face. His astonishment naturally led him to turn his eyes from this second Thibault to his own person when he became aware that an equally remarkable change had come over his costume. Instead of shoes and gaiters his legs were now encased in an elegant pair of hunting boots, reaching to the knee, as soft and smooth as a pair of stockings, with a roll over the instep, and finished off with a pair of fine silver spurs. The knee-breeches were no longer of corduroy, but of the most beautiful buckskin, fastened with little gold buckles. His long coarse olive-coloured coat was replaced by a handsome green hunting-coat, with gold lace facings, thrown open to display a waistcoat of fine white jean, while over the artistically pleated shirt hung the soft wavy folds of a cambric cravat. Not a single article of dress about him but had been transformed, even to his old lantern-shaped hat, which was now a three-cornered one, trimmed with gold lace to match the coat. The tick also, such as workmen carry partly for walking and partly for self-defence, and which he had been holding in his land a minute before, had now given place to a light whip, with which he gave a cut through the air, listening with a sense of aristocratic pleasure to the whistling sound it made. And finally, his slender figure was drawn in at the waist by a belt, from which hung a hunting-knife, half-sword, half-dagger.
Thibault was pleased beyond measure at finding himself clothed in such a delightful costume, and with a feeling of vanity, natural under the circumstances, he was overcome with the desire to ascertain without delay how the dress suited his face. But where could he go to look at himself, out there in the midst of pitch darkness? Then, looking about him, he saw that he was only a stone’s throw from his own hut.
“Ah! to be sure!” he said, “nothing easier, for I have my glass there.”
And he made haste towards his hut, intending, like Narcissus, to enjoy his own beauty in peace and all to himself. But the door of the hut was locked, and Thibault felt vainly for the key. All he could find in his pockets was a well-filled purse, a sweet-meat box containing scented lozenges, and a little mother-of-pearl and gold penknife. What could he have done then with his door-key? Then suddenly a bright thought occurred to him possibly the key was in the pocket of that other Thibault who was lying out there in the road. He went back and felt in the breeches pocket, where he discovered the key at once, in company with a few sous. Holding the rough clumsy thing in the tips of his fingers, he returned to open the door. The inside of the hut was even darker that the night outside, and Thibault groped about to find the steel, the tinder and flint, and the matches, and then proceeded to try and light the candle, which consisted of an end stuck into an empty
bottle. In a second or two this was accomplished, but in the course of the operation Thibault was obliged to take hold of the candle with his fingers.
“Pah!” he said, “what pigs these peasants are! I wonder how they can live in this dirty sort of way!”
However, the candle was alight, which was the chief matter, and Thibault now took down his mirror, and bringing it to the light, looked at himself in it. His eye had scarcely caught sight of the reflected image, than he uttered a cry of astonishment, it was no longer himself that he saw, or rather, although it was still Thibault in spirit, it was no longer Thibault in body. His spirit had entered into the body of a handsome young man of twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, with blue eyes, pink fresh cheeks, red lips, and white teeth; in short, it had entered into the body of the Baron Raoul de Vauparfond. Then Thibault re-called the wish that he had uttered in his moment of anger after the blow from the whip and his collision with the horse. His wish had been that for four and twenty hours he might be the Baron de Vauparfond, and the Baron de Vauparfond be Thibault, which now explained to him what had at first seemed inexplicable, why the unconscious man now lying in the road was dressed in his clothes and had his face.
“But I must not forget one thing,” he said, “that is, that although I seem to be here, I am not really here, but lying out there, so I must be careful to see that during the twenty-four hours, during which I shall be imprudent enough to be away from myself, no irreparable harm comes to me. Come now, Monsieur de Vauparfond, do not be so fastidious; carry the poor man in, and lay him gently on his bed here.” And, although with his aristocratic instincts Monsieur de Vauparfond found the task very repugnant to him, Thibault, nevertheless, courageously took up his own body in his arms and carried himself from the road to the bed. Having thus placed the body in safety, he blew out the light, for fear that any harm should come to this other self before he came to; then, carefullv locking the door, he hid the key in the hollow of a tree, where he was in the habit of leaving it when not wishing to take it with him.
The next thing to do was to get hold of the. horse’s bridle and mount into the saddle. Once there, Thibault had a preliminary moment of some uneasiness, for, having travelled more on foot than on horseback, he was not an accomplished rider, and he naturally feared that he might not be able to keep his seat when the horse began to move. But it seemed, that, while inheriting Raoul’s body, he also inherited his physical qualities, for the horse, being an intelligent beast, and perfectly conscious of the momentary want of assurance on the part of his rider, made an effort to throw him, whereupon Thibault instinctively gathered up the reins, pressed his knees against the horse’s sides, dug his spurs into them, and gave the animal two or three cuts of the whip, which brought it to order on the spot.
Thibault, perfectly unknown to himself, was a past master in horsemanship. This little affair with the horse enabled Thibault more fully to realise his duality. As far as the body was concerned, he was the Baron Raoul de Vauparfond from top to toe; but as far as the spirit was concerned, he was still Thibault. It was, therefore, certain that the spirit of the young lord who had lent him his body was now sleeping in the form of the unconscious Thibault which he had left behind in the hut.
The division of substance and spirit between himself and the Baron, however, left him with a very vague idea of what he was going, or would have, to do. That he was going to Mont-Gobert in answer to the Countess’s letter, so much he knew. But what was in the letter? At what hour was he expected? How was he to gain admission to the Castle? Not one of these questions could he answer, and it only remained for him to discover what to do, step by step, as he proceeded. Suddenly it flashed across him that probably the Countess’s letter was somewhere on his person. He felt about his dress, and, sure enough, inside the side pocket of his coat was something, which by its shape, seemed to be the article he wanted. He stopped his horse, and putting his hand into his pocket, drew out a little scented leather case lined with white satin. In one side of the case were several letters, in the other only one; no doubt the latter would tell him what he wanted to know, if he could once get to read it. He was now only a short distance from the village of Fleury, and he galloped on hoping that he might find a house still lighted up. But villagers go to bed early, in those days even earlier than they do now, and Thibault went from one end of the street to the other without seeing a single light. At last, thinking he heard some kind of movement in the stables of an Inn, he called. A stable boy sallied out with a lantern, and Thibault, forgetting for the moment that he was a lord, said: “Friend, could you show me a light for a moment? You would be doing me a service.”
“And that’s what you go and call a chap out of bed for?” answered the stable-boy rudely. “Well, you are a nice sort of young’un, you are!” and turning his back on Thibault he was just going to re-enter the stable, when Thibault, perceiving that he had gone on a wrong tack, now raised his voice, calling out:
“Look here, sirrah, bring your lantern here and give me a light, or I’ll lay my whip across your back!”
“Ah! pardon, my lord!” said the stable-boy. “I did not see who it was I was speaking to.” And he immediately stood on tip-toe holding the lantern up as Thibault directed him:
Thibault unfolded the letter and read:
“MY DEAR RAOUL,
“The goddess Venus has certainly taken us under her protection. A grand hunt of some kind is to take place to morrow out in the direction of Thury; I know no particulars about it, all I do know is, that he is going away this evening. You, therefore, start at nine o’clock, so as to be here at half-past ten. Come in by the way you know; someone whom you know will be awaiting you, and will bring you, you know where. Last time you came, I don’t mean to upbraid you, but it did seem to me you stayed a long time in the corridors.
“Devil take it!” muttered Thibault.
“I beg your pardon, my lord?” said the stable-boy.
“Nothing, you lout, except that I do not require you any longer and you can go.”
“A good journey to you, my lord!” said the stable-boy, bowing to the ground, and he went back to his stable.
“Devil take it!” repeated Thibault, “the letter gives me precious little information, except that we are under the protection of the Goddess Venus, that he goes away this evening, that the Comtesse de Mont-Gobert expects me at half-past ten, and that her Christian name is Jane. As for the rest, I am to go in by the way I know, I shall be awaited by someone I know, and taken where I know.” Thibault scratched his ear, which is what everybody does, in every country of the world, when plunged into awkward circumstances. He longed to go and wake up the Lord of Vauparfond’s spirit, which was just now sleeping in Thibault’s body on Thibault’s bed; but, apart from the loss of time which this would involve, it might also cause considerable inconvenience, for the Baron’s spirit, on seeing its own body so near to it, might be taken with the desire of re-entering it. This would give rise to a struggle in which Thibault could not well defend himself without doing serious harm to his own person; some other way out of the difficulty must therefore be found. He had heard a great deal about the wonderful sagacity of animals, and had himself, during his life in the country, had occasion more than once to admire their instinct, and he now determined to trust to that of his horse. Riding back into the main road, he turned the horse in the direction of Mont-Gobert, and let it have its head. The horse immediately started off at a gallop; it had evidently understood. Thibault troubled himself no further, it was now the horse’s affair to bring him safely to his destination. On reaching the corner of the park wall the animal stopped, not apparently because it was in doubt as to which road to take, but something seemed to make it uneasy, and it pricked its ears. At the same time, Thibault also fancied that he caught sight of two shadows; but they must have been only shadows, for although he stood up in his stirrups and looked all around him, he could see absolutely nothing. They were probably poachers he thought, who had reasons like himself for wishing to get inside the park. There being no longer anything to bar his passage, he
had only, as before, to let the horse go its own way, and he accordingly did so. The horse followed the walls of the park at a quick trot, carefully choosing the soft edge of the road, and not uttering a single neigh; the intelligent animal seemed as if it knew that it must make no sound or at least as little sound as possible.
In this way, they went along the whole of one side of the park, and on reaching the corner, the horse turned as the wall turned, and stopped before a small breach in the same. “It’s through here, evidently,” said Thibault, “that we have to go.”
The horse answered by sniffing at the breach, and scraping the ground with its foot; Thibault gave the animal the rein, and it managed to climb up and through the breach, over the loose stones which rolled away beneath its hoof. Horse and rider were now within the park. One of the three difficulties had been successfully overcome: Thibault had got in by the way he knew; it now remained to find the person whom he knew, and he thought it wisest to leave this also to his horse. The horse went on for another five minutes, and then stopped at a short distance from the Castle, before the door of one of those little huts of rough logs and bark and clay, which are built up in parks, as painters introduce buildings into their landscapes, solely for the sake of ornament.
On hearing the horse’s hoofs, someone partly opened the door, and the horse stopped in front of it.
A pretty girl came out, and asked in a low voice, “Is it you, Monsieur Raoul?”
“Yes, my child, it is I,” answered Thibault, dismounting.
“Madame was terribly afraid that drunken fool of a Champagne might not have given you the letter.”
“She need not have been afraid; Champagne brought it me with the most exemplary punctuality.”
“Leave your horse then and come.”
“But who will look after it?”
“Why Cramoisi, of course, the man who always does.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure,” said Thibault, as if these details were familiar to him, “Cramoisi will look after it.”
“Come, come,” said the maid, “we must make haste or Madame will complain again that we loiter in the corridors.” And as she spoke these words, which recalled a phrase in the letter which had been written to Raoul, she laughed, and showed a row of pearly white teeth, and Thibault felt that he should like to loiter in the park, before waiting to get into the corridors.
Then the maid suddenly stood still a moment with her head bent, listening.
“What is it?” asked Thibault.
“I thought I heard the sound of a branch creaking under somebody’s foot.”
“Very likely,” said Thibault, “no doubt Cramoisi’s foot.”
“All the more reason that you should be careful what you do … at all events out here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you not know that Cramoisi is the man I am engaged to?”
“Ah! to be sure! But when I am alone with you, my dear Rose, I always forget that.”
“I am called Rose now, am I! I never knew such a forgetful man as you are, Monsieur Raoul.”
“I call you Rose, my pretty one, because the rose is the queen of flowers, as you are the queen of waiting-maids.”
“In good truth, my Lord,” said the maid, “I have always found you a lively, witty gentleman, but you surpass yourself this evening.”
Thibault drew himself up, flattered by this remark really a letter addressed to the Baron, but which it had fallen to the shoe-maker to unseal.
“Let us hope your mistress will think the same!” he said.
“As to that,” said the waiting maid, “any man can make one of these ladies of fashion think him the cleverest and wittiest in the world, simply by holding his tongue.”
“Thank you,” he said, “I will remember what you say.”
“Hush!” said the woman to Thibault, “there is Madame behind the dressing-room curtains; follow me now staidly.”
For they had now to cross an open space that lay between the wooded part of the park and the flight of steps leading up to the Castle. Thibault began walking towards the latter. “Now, now,” said the maid, catching hold of him by the arm, “what are you doing, you foolish man?”
“What am I doing? well, I confess Suzette, I don’t know in the least what I am doing!”
“Suzette! so that’s my name now, is it? I think Monsieur does me the honour of calling me in turn by the name of all his mistresses. But come, this way! You are not dreaming I suppose of going through the great reception rooms. That would give a fine opportunity to my lord the Count, truly!”
And the maid hurried Thibault towards a little door, to the right of which was a spiral staircase.
Half-way up, Thibault put his arm round his companion’s waist, which was as slender and supple as a snake.
“I think we must be in the corridors, now, eh?” he asked, trying to kiss the young woman’s pretty cheek.
“No, not yet,” she answered; “but never mind that.”
“By my faith,” he said, “if my name this evening were Thibault instead of Raoul, I would carry you up with me to the garrets, instead of stopping on the first floor!”
At that moment a door was heard grating on its hinges.
“Quick, quick, Monsieur!” said the maid, “Madame is growing impatient.”
And drawing Thibault after her, she ran up the remaining stairs to the corridor, opened a door, pushed Thibault into a room, and shut the door after him, firmly believing that it was the Baron Raoul de Vauparfond or, as she herself called him, the most forgetful man in the world, whom she had thus secured.
…to be continued.
Pride Month 2025: Art of the Day
Swapped Lives, Eternal Forms: Visualising Gender Fluidity in the Torikaebaya MonogatariTorikaebaya Monogatari (literally “If only I could exchange (them)!” often translated as “The Changelings”) is a 12th-century Japanese narrative that tells the story of two siblings: a boy raised as a girl and a girl raised as a boy, each excelling in their adopted roles within the imperial court. The tale delves into themes of gender identity, societal expectations, and personal fulfilment.
While original Heian-period illustrations are scarce (794 to 1185), Edo-period manuscripts and modern artistic interpretations have visualised this story, emphasising the fluidity and performative nature of gender. These artworks often portray the siblings in court attire appropriate to their adopted genders, engaging in activities and rituals that underscore their societal roles. For example, the artist Kubo Shumman (1757–1820) created a colour woodcut titled “Wakaki onokodomo warawabe nado to mari koyumi nado o mote asobitamau” (She played with little boys with balls and small bows), which is part of a portfolio series titled after the story.
The tale’s enduring relevance is evident in its adaptations across various media, including manga and theatre, where artists continue to explore and reinterpret its themes.
