The Queering of Joan’s Being, or The Church’s Attack on the Attire of Joan

Since the first prong of the prosecution of Joan fails, the Catholic Church must convict Joan on the basis of her cross-dressing. This chapter argues that Twain deliberately amplifies the importance of Joan’s transvestitism in order to bring out more clearly his particularly political critique of providential politics. To that end, the first section lays out the Thomistic case for preserving the distinctions between created and uncreated beings, an argument that would appear to authorize the sharp distinctions drawn by the Church, like those between men and women, that are required by the divine right of kings. The next section presents the political significance of transvestitism in Personal Recollections, a section whose insights are applied to the incarnation of Jesus Christ. As Twain presents it, both Joan and the Church have to embrace a kind of pluripotency of being if they are to gain any kind of traction on the devotional, i.e., political, energies of their would-be adherents, a pluripotency that flies in the face of the arguments for preserving the distinctions between created and uncreated beings.