Tea at Trianon: An Interview with Angela Franks, Author of “Body and Identity”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 27, 2025

An Interview with Angela Franks, Author of “Body and Identity”

From Notre Dame Press:

Angela Franks is an assistant professor of theology at the Catholic University of America. The University of Notre Dame Press is thrilled to publish her new book, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self (August 2025), which was also recently selected as a winner of the Expanded Reason Awards. She recently answered some of our questions about her research and writing processes.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?

The idea came gradually to me, over the last ten years, and the projected book went through many different inchoate forms. I knew I wanted to explore the meaning of the body. I settled on the importance of focusing on identity when it became clear to me that most of what we think are body-problems—especially those relating to how we appear to others—are actually identity-problems.

Certainly these are unprecedented times in the United States, Europe, and around the world. What can readers find in your book that will resonate with them during this era?

We swim in a sea of generalized identity-anxiety. This is both new and old. The intensity of our identity-distress is new, but Body and Identity shows that the ideas leading to our contemporary identity crises are hundreds and even thousands of years old. Teasing out these threads of influence can empower us to decide which philosophies of identity offer us something valuable and which should be rejected.

What did you learn while writing it?

Before I began researching this book, I had no idea that John Locke would be so important to the history of identity. (Read more.)

From Angela Franks at Fairer Disputations:

Outside of academia and other sites of rebellious conformity, most people have experienced the trans phenomenon as unprecedentedly weird. Almost on a dime, we were asked to turn from viewing the sexual binary as a basic reality to viewing it as a pernicious lie perpetuated to defend positions of power. The fact that the two sexes were an accepted part of human reality until the day before yesterday was waved off by the ideologues. Dissent would not be tolerated. Many of us were left shaking our heads and asking, “How on earth did we get here?”

Cultural critics have pointed to various incubators: liberal feminism, civil-rights law, and HR departments turned irrationally inclusive; “cultural Marxism” (understood often vaguely); leftist political traditions co-opted by post-modernism; the sexual revolution, especially the Pill, and its fallout; and so forth. Many of these analyses are helpful, and sometimes they are incisively brilliant. They tend to make transgenderism a recent development—which, in fact, it is. But, as one book puts it, “The gender cult begins and ends with identity.”

Our modern identity problems didn’t begin yesterday, or a few years ago, or even with the sexual revolution. The truth is, philosophers and theologians have grappled with the thorny question of identity since the earliest days of recorded human reflection.

In this essay, I’ll explain how I—a philosophically trained theologian—came to spend the last decade researching the intellectual history of identity and, in particular, its connection to the body. That history is much longer and stranger than you might expect. (Read more.)