Therese/Tiresias

 Observers of the American scene might be forgiven for thinking that the culture war obsessions of the recent midterm election were unique to this third decade of the twenty-first century. The Five Thirty-Eight politics podcast informed us the other week that rightfully-defeated Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker made a point-- for instance-- at every campaign event of bringing up the specter of Trans women competing against cis-women in sports (in their view, his harping on these esoteric themes was one of the reasons his campaign failed to resonate with average Georgia voters), and how unfair this would purportedly be. Then there was the distinctly post-Dobbs debate about state legislatures' role in regulating abortion, in which Walker's own alleged hypocritical funding of several abortions inevitably intruded. 

As 2022 as these debates might seem, however, world literature attests that they are as old as the culture war itself. Turning to Guillaume Apollinaire's groundbreaking surrealist drama, The Mammaries of Tiresias, we find all the same questions that still haunt our cultural warriors' imaginary: anxiety over a perceived breakdown in traditional gender roles, debates between pro- and anti-natalism, fear of looming catastrophe if people were permitted to cross over or otherwise defy the gender binary... Apollinaire's play--  in which a woman transforms herself into a man, goes off to conquer the world, and her husband starts to asexually procreate in her absence, in order to sustain the population of their local Zanzibar-- presages the modern-day world of far-right commentators raving about how the Trans movement will supposedly depopulate the Earth. 

It doesn't take much percipience to realize, after all, that when the Herschel Walkers of the world bring up the topic of Trans athletes at every opportunity, it really isn't because they are genuinely so concerned about a slight hypothesized risk of unfairness that might result in a handful of women's sporting events. For one thing, avoiding this one danger would be a weirdly specific basis on which to found our society's entire understanding of gender-- and the rules it enforces concerning gender norms until the end of time. For another, the hypothetical risk of unfairness in a physical contest could be avoided much more directly, justly, and logically by simply organizing more sports into weight categories. Gender has always been a poor proxy anyways for people's physical characteristics, strengths, and abilities. If the point is to ensure that people are competing against those with roughly similar physical traits, there are far more direct ways to measure them. 

But our cultural warriors are actually wholly uninterested in solving their own hypothesized problem, of course, because their real concern is something different: the fear of traditional gender roles giving way, and of men and women changing places. And this is what Apollinaire's play is all about. 

For all its modernism and iconoclasm, The Mammaries of Tiresias can be read at first blush as a profoundly conservative work, in terms of its social philosophy. In his famous preface (in which he offers an early artistic credo for surrealism as a movement), Apollinaire insists that the play's didactic content should be taken at face value. He really is trying to convince French people to have more sex and produce more offspring, and one reading of the play is simply the literal one that it is a manifesto for patriotic pro-natalism in the face of catastrophic depopulation during World War I. To be sure, the playwright's tongue is somewhere in his cheek during all this, even when he tells us to take him at his word-- but I can't see that it is in so deep that we can read him to be saying the exact opposite of what he claims. 

Read in this light, the play could be seen as a tract in favor of the Walker/DeSantis view of the world. People must not step out of the gender roles and identities they have been assigned at birth, otherwise everything will run riot! No one will be reproducing anymore, the population will stagnate, and society will prove incapable of sustaining itself! 

On the other hand, the play's portrayal of the husband's career as parthenogenic progenitor and single parent is entirely positive. The husband discovers the joys and rewards of giving birth and nurturing children into adulthood; most importantly of all, he realizes that children are not a drain on resources, but actually a source of family prosperity. While he is eventually reunited with his "wife-monsieur" Therese/Tiresias in the play's final scene, this does not diminish the joyfulness of the episodes in which he acts as primary caregiver to his offspring. 

The play's true satirical target, therefore, is not feminism or political progressivism-- it is the dour anti-natalism of the followers of Malthus, who could himself be described as neither feminist nor progressive in the least degree. Apollinaire's play addresses squarely, for instance, those "economists" who falsely equate children with a drain on income. In reality, having more babies will lead to greater prosperity, Apollinaire insists-- and in this he shows a greater understanding of economic principles than the gloomy eighteenth-century cleric. For social resources are not a fixed sum in which more people inevitably means less to go around for each. Rather, the true path to scarcity lies in allowing the population to age and stagnate without replenishing itself, because then there will be no working-age adults contributing to the public purse. 

Of course, this does not have to lead us back around to the social conservative position again-- and Apollinaire's play does not intend to take us there. We could, after all, keep the pro-natalism but jettison the gender binary. And this, most of all, is where Apollinaire seems to come down. In his preface, he insists that his didactic purpose is not to attack contraception (the balloons representing mammaries that Therese lets go do not double, despite the claims of some critics, as analogs to inflated rubbers). Rather, to the extent he has a specific policy in view, he says it is for the government to provide enough support to make it possible for people to have children in the first place. Then, as already mentioned, Apollinaire seems to endorse the idea of men taking on childcare responsibilities as an ideal solution to the problem of depopulation. 

And so at last his play subverts both the anti-natalist Malthusians and the anti-feminist Walker/DeSantisians. Apollinaire would in no way share modern conservatives' desperate hand-wringing over any mention of "pregnant persons" or the idea of Trans men conceiving and giving birth to babies. The playwright seems to endorse any and everyone reproducing, regardless of gender assigned at birth, and if they defy traditional roles in the process, all the better. This light-hearted pro-natalism is incompatible with the repressive patriarchy that today's social conservatives would wish to impose; and it has nothing at all to do with the policy goal of reinforcing the traditional gender binary. As the chorus of his play sings at the end: "It's fun to switch!" (Slater trans.)

And so we see that-- as much as conservatives would like to write off the notion of gender fluidity as a modern phenomenon-- it has actually been with us for as long as people have been talking about gender and sexuality at all. Apollinaire's play, after all, is not only itself more than a hundred years old at this point-- its title and central character's name hearken back to the Greek myth of a seer who changed genders from male to female and back again. His play therefore reminds us that our contemporary debates are nothing new. It also offers us a way of responding to social conservatives that does not simply accept their own premises. We don't need to oppose having babies in order to oppose patriarchy. We might just say that whoever wants babies should be free to have them and raise them, regardless of gender, that poverty should be no barrier to doing so, and that whoever does not want babies of their own (I count myself among them), also does not have to.