A translike object? : composing the majesty of Sainte Foy and staging gender

Fierce, frontal, and formidable, the face of the Majesty of St Foy conflicts with the gendered imaginaries of the girl whose skull fragment once rested in this sculpture. This form has been intensely studied, yet its gendered presentation remains a marginal remark in nearly all analyses. The Majesty's gender reception is intrinsic to the history of the statue's compilation and use. Therefore, this paper addresses its seemingly ambiguous gender with a new proposal for the chronology of its form. Examining the formative technical (883–1100) and historiographic years (1900–present) I explore the Majesty's potential as a gender expansive object. Its form, gold, and gems are accepted as indicative of the saint's transfigured place in the Heavenly Jerusalem, but beyond that, they place it in tandem with medieval theology concerning the gender of celestial beings and the prelapsarian body. I conclude that the Majesty's suspension between and elaboration on gender identities purposefully presented a translike object, intended to create dissonance between the imaginary of a girl saint and the statue-in-flux. Staged in a shrine transmitting an air of the miraculous – by definition, a disorientation of the normative and "natural" – by a theological discourse community engaged with expansive theories of gender, the Majesty of St Foy materialized gendered imaginaries beyond the worldly.