#julie d’aubigny

[weltonboys]

mademoiselle and the nunnery blaze - bastille

[kujousaramybeloved]

clorinde is bisexual!

i know people throw this claim around a bit with vague explanations why, but i haven’t seen anything here that has actually explained why clorinde is implied to be bisexual.

she is named after a character from a french opera, tancrède, written by andré campra and antoine danchet.

clorinde is considered to be the first contralto role in french opera, which is interesting because this is a role for more masculine women.

this makes sense when you consider that the role was written with the intent of being played by a bisexual opera singer who wore men’s clothes in public and also was an exceptional swordswoman. she died soon after her female partner did.

julie d’aubigny was awesome btw

when hoyoverse wants to make a character queer, they put references to specific historical queer figures in their lore (for example, aventurine with oscar wilde, robin with emily dickinson, wriothesley with shakespeare), so it’s safe to say that clorinde is intended to be bisexual/queer!

[lamaupinfilm]

Pink Pony Club via 1700s Paris ����

Video description: A white non-binary person with short brown hair and glasses speaks into the camera and then sings while playing a piano. They are wearing a checkered sheer black button-up shirt and iridescent blue green dangling earrings.

Video text: Video text: This the the nerdiest nichest thing in the world but here's "Pink Pony Club" as if it was being sung by Julie d'Aubigny, AKA Mlle Maupin, also known as a queer opera singer from the 1700s. I know you wanted me to stay but I can't ignore the crasy visions of me in Paris. And I heard that there's a special place where I could sing and be myself every single day. I'm having wicked dreams of running from Versailles. I hear the Opéra, I swear it's calling me Won't make my father proud, it's gonna cause a scene. He sees his baby girl, I know he's gonna scream. God, what have you done? You're an opera actrice and you sing on the stage. Oh papa, I'm just having fun on the stage in my wig. It's where I belong down at the Académie. I'm gonna keep on singing at the Académie. I'm gonna keep on singing down by the Tuileries. I'm gonna keep on singing at the Académie Royal de Musique.

[nickysfacts]

Julie d’Aubigny, one of the coolest historical figures of all time!

🤺🎶🏳️‍🌈

[titles-for-tangents]

Listen

I think Chappell Roan kickstarted an artistic movement overnight. I mean this performance straight up struck a chord. Of course any good artist will inspire more art, but the sheer flood of illustrative art of her I’ve seen on Twitter earlier this afternoon and how so few of it appears to be on tumblr - there are SO many artists out there all finding inspiration in Roan’s MTV performance from last night and all of them are capturing her gaze and stance differently and extremely well. She is making people feel things, and process much, much more.

I haven’t seen a musician this artistically precise with her costume choices since Lady Gaga, and Roan is being even more precise about it, I would say. In Lady Gaga’s earlier years especially, she dressed just slightly veering off the “cute, blonde, young, female musician,” path to keep everyone on their toes, guessing, and at a proper distance, and all the while she was thematically exploring the concept of fame at a time when it had for so many years been so goddamn commercialized and processed. *chef’s kiss* The timing was genius and couldn’t have been more perfect. While I’ve not been paying attention to what most celebrities have been up to as of late, I get a strong impression Chappell Roan just reintroduced the medieval fashion craze from the past year/year and half-ish(?) to the larger pop public mindset. We’ve seen it at one of the recent Met galas where the theme was basically Medieval Western European Catholicism, and this is keeping in perfect theme with Roan’s album art for her single “Good Luck, Babe!” And while it’s easy to say she’s always been this precise with her appearance, Chappell Roan came, slapped, slayed, and pretty much obliterated everyone else as a musician and an artist. The biggest difference I noticed is that while overall everyone else looked fine and more or less how you can expect (Sabrina Carpenter in particular looked stunning!) Chappell Roan and her team captured what it was like to appear beautiful.

Roan’s outfits captured something timeless, ethereal, and sublime, and all the photos and portraits that were taken of her featured her facial expressions ranging anywhere from the kind of tragic, somber beauty captured in a pre-Raphaelite painting to a strong, stern look devoted to slicing everything and everyone in her path. She and her makeup and costume team had these looks honed like a knife. I’ve seen tags for both “Roan of Arc” and “Julie D’Aubigny” and used them myself; the key here is that instead of simply evoking Catholic oppression and suffering, Roan is evoking themes of queer liberation. Liberation from the way of life that other people choose for you and expect of you is possible, even amongst an oppressive, medieval, Catholic aesthetic.

But let us not forget what “Good Luck, Babe!” is actually about. Chappell Roan’s knightly costume on stage invites us to think about the tale of Julie d’Aubrigny, but the actions she takes on stage and the background set design present us with a very different ending for what would otherwise be a rescue mission. Instead of burning down a convent where her lover is trapped, Roan sets aflame what is presumably the castle of an upperclass nobleman - the golden birdcage her lover has chosen over her, the safe option, the far less satisfying option, instead of the passionate relationship they had together. Roan as the narrator approaches the audience with an army of men - noticeably all men - and shoots an arrow tipped with fire brimming with flames as hurt and furious as her heart is right into the very heart of the castle. We can presume her lover is inside but whether or not she is, the effect is still the same. Roan drops to her knees and comes to grips with loss. What they had was real and they both knew it, but without her lover’s devotion true, their love could never blossom. More specifically and historically typical to the queer experience, her lover was uncomfortable and wishy-washy about being in a relationship with our narrator in general, but like a shitty partner didn’t quite want to break up with her either and so strung her along and delayed taking any action at all, until she left her behind entirely in the most cutting way possible.

The message Roan sends is blatantly clear: “Your ‘safe’ option isn’t nearly as safe as you think it is.” And yet many of the song’s lyrics can be applied to our narrator herself here: she literally shoots her shot - a flaming arrow - into a symbol of patriarchal, feudalistic society’s top prize - her lover’s husband’s castle and all the social standing that comes with it - but one arrow is all it takes for our narrator to halt her crusade (for the time being anyway) and watch as her lover’s new world burns down. Her men and the knights of her lover fall dead from bloody battle behind her, and she is the only one left upright with her broken heart, spurned, abandoned, and scorned, but now utterly alone.

This entire, powerful tale is told in about four minutes or less. The male dancers behind Roan skillfully leap and swing their swords with surprisingly no audible clanging. The iron bars catch fire in perfect symmetry, and massive, projected explosions burst upwards from behind the castle walls. Smoke machines capture the hazy, burning atmosphere by the false night’s end. The entire audience just witnessed the climax to a play on par with anything written by Shakespeare, and those privileged enough to be in the front seat stretch out their hands hoping to be touched by her. Roan stays in character and doesn’t oblige, her character staring out into a future without her lover. The entire theater is shrieking with delight.

Finally, some good, fucking entertainment. I haven’t seen anything quite this compelling since Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West” performance in the 90’s. I would be surprised if a massive amount of fanfiction wasn’t written about this in the coming months - I certainly will be on the happy lookout for more artists’ interpretations of her costumes. Much like Roan’s narrator suggests to her lover, this is going to be one hard act to follow without true devotion to one’s craft, and given she focused her performance around a single that was released after her main album was, I think we can safely agree the next coming acts are going to be nothing short of enthralling.

[none-ofthisnonsense]

Julie d'Aubigny is underrated.

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

solid code, i’d say

[shamebats]

Podcast episode of the day. We love a messy gnc queer icon

[abusedunicornia]

Would you burn down a convent for me?

[lemonprick]

hollywood i have a film idea for you

historical-fantasy adjacent epic starring julie d’aubigny and antonio/catalina de erauso about their sword-slinging exploits after they escape from their convents

titled Nuns on the Run

[lamaupinfilm]

Introducing myself! 👋🏻

It's weird to think about, but I guess I'm one of the world's foremost experts on Julie d'Aubigny?? So I'm here to share her story!

Video description: A white non-binary person with short brown hair and glasses, wearing a white short sleeved turtleneck and dangly silver earrings, speaks into the camera.

Video text: Hi everyone, my name's Camille, and I think I'm one of the world's foremost experts on Julie d'Aubigny. If you don't know who that is, she was a queer, bisexual, gender nonconforming opera singer who lived in France in the 1700s. Like a lot of other queer people, I discovered Julie d’Aubigny by meandering down an internet rabbit hole. The stories about her life were so fun and exciting, and she just happened to be the same voice type as me, a mezzo. So of course when I started my doctorate in music I wrote my dissertation about her! But I also really wanted to share her story beyond just an academic thesis, which I knew wouldn't be read by that many people. So I started this account to share fun facts and stories about her life, and I'm also working on a feature film that tells her story through music. So follow to learn more about this chaotic bisexual icon!

[revolutionaryshiori]

Utena d’Aubigny?

[youroldpalsteph]

I am so pleased to see everything stated here was actually true (not a doubter, but folks do be spreading misinformation online).

Sieur d'Aubigny saw that Julie, his only child, received an education usually reserved for boys at the time. Learning academic subjects alongside future court pages, she also excelled at fencing, which she took up around the age of 12. Though this sport was not unheard of among women of the time, [Julie] was unusual for competing against men. Moreover, she was also known to be the best fencer of the group. Julie took up her life-long practice of dressing in male attire at this time.

It was at this time that she had her first lesbian affair. The family of the young woman with whom she had fallen in love sent the young woman away to a convent in Avignon to avoid contact with [D'Aubigny]. Julie followed the young lady and joined the convent so they could resume their relationship. The two then escaped the convent by placing the corpse of a recently deceased nun in Julie's paramour's bed, and setting the room on fire. The scheme was to prevent a search for the young woman by the authorities, as the couple hoped that the deceased nun's body would pass for the young woman herself. The plot was discovered,  and the Parliament of Aix-en-Provence sentenced her in absentia— under the male title "Sieur"— to death by fire.

After the death of her lover in 1705, Madame la Marquise de Florensac, with whom she had "dwelt in such affection they believed to be perfect", [Julie] retired from the opera and took refuge in a convent where she is believed to have died in 1707 at the age of 33.

Retellings of her life often focus on the more sensational aspects of her life at the expense of noting the achievements of her operatic career in the early days of the Paris Opera. As [D'Aubigny] herself once wrote,

"I am made for perils, as well as for tenderness."

(source, emphasis mine)

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

JULIE D’AUBIGNY ON PUPPET HISTORY GOD FUCKING BLESS

@wearewatcher

[will-wax-poetic-about-anything]

The fact that most do not know of Julie D' Aubigny is a crime by historians ignoring and burning their gays. The story of a woman who, in all forms of adversity (it was the 1600s), still threatened the institutions that oppressed people like her by being 100% herself all the time. This cross-dressing, openly bisexual sword-fighter should not be forgotten.

[mikey-way-enthusiast]

me when ppl keep saying roan of arc😞

JULIE D’AUBIGNY !!