1 Sándor/Sarolta Vay – a gender bender in fin-de-siècle Hungary Anna Borgos In: Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Louise O. Vasvári (szerk.): Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies. Purdue UP, West Lafayette, Indiana, 2011. 220-231. The protagonist of my paper is Sándor (born Sarolta) Vay, a Hungarian journalist at the turn of the 20 th century. She was born a woman, but was raised as a boy, and lived the life of the traditional gentry male of her/his age. My study introduces and interprets how (s)he was seen, described and placed by her/his contemporaries in different lay and expert discourses, and how (s)he saw and thought about herself. Her life and her controversial reception raise a set of questions regarding concepts of sex and gender, nature and performance, normality and perversion. I am going to use the pronouns she/he in turns, according to the context and the intention of Vay’s describers. (In Hungarian, there are no distinct male/female forms of personal pronouns.) Sarolta Vay was born in 1859 into an old, noble family. Her father, László Vay was the crown-keeper of József archduke, her mother was the daughter of the Beniczky family. Vay’s father’s intention was to raise his firstborn daughter as a man, while, interestingly, her younger brother, Peter was raised as a woman, and later became an abbot, a missionary and a writer of travel diaries. Historical sources provide no clues as to the intentions of Vay’s father in raising his two children in this most unusual way. Given the male name, Sándor, Vay learned fencing, horseback riding, and was later sent to study at the universities of Budapest, Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin. Because the family had become more and more declassed since the beginning of the 19 th century, losing most of its fortune, Vay, even though he was an aristocrat, had to find a source of livelihood. She started writing, at first literary texts, poetry and short stories under her female name, but she soon chose the profession and lifestyle of a journalist, writing articles in several dailies and weeklies under a variety of male pseudonyms, such as Vayk, D’Artagnan, Floridor, Celesztin, etc. She worked for the cultural and life-style magazines Magyar Géniusz (Hungarian Genius) and Magyar Szalon (Hungarian Salon) and published in the dailies Pesti Hírlap (Pest Newspaper) and Budapest among others. (Szinnyei 1016-1017.; Steinert 499-507.; Buza 38-41.; Fábri 177-178.) She maintained a correspondence with Renée Erdős, an early 20 th century woman writer who was known for