Passing Perfect

[bibliogramma]

De Secretis Mulierum, L. Timmel Duchamp

Duchamp’s new work is both an uncomfortably accurate picture of sexism and male privilege in the academy, and a challenging speculation on what impact a discovery that some of the most heralded intellects of the European tradition had been passing women might have on our perceptions of gender and history.

Set in an unspecified future, the novella’s protagonist, doctoral student Jane Pendler, is doing historical research, using a new scientific discovery that enables researchers to view selected moments in the past by focusing on specific individuals through the use of bone scrapings. The first historical luminary to be subjected to this new technological tool is Leonardo Da Vinci – and in eavesdropping on the great artist and inventor’s public and private lives, the technique reveals Leonardo to have been biologically female. The predominantly male elite within the field of historical research – including Pendler’s mentor, dissertation advisor and lover Teddy – have managed to accept and adapt to this news, largely because of an assumption that this explains why Leonardo was so often seen as gay.

But then the time-scanning technology is focused on its second target – the brilliant theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas – only to reveal that yet another of the great icons of Western Civilisation – and one as inescapably masculine in both quality of thought and in advocacy of an extreme misogyny – is also a biological female.

What follows on this discovery is at the same time a critique of the power relations and reluctance to embrace new paradigms so often found in the academy, and a fascinating thought experiment – how would our understanding of history and the role of women in history change if we were to be presented with evidence that women have always been – no matter how disguised their biological sex or their own, unknowable, perception of their gender – full participants in the intellectual, scientific, and cultural spheres of life.