Cross-Dressing

When men wear women's clothes and/or attempt to impersonate what the culture considers to be a woman, and vice versa, this action is often referred to as cross-dressing. Acts of cross-dressing stress the nature of gender more than sexual pleasure or sexuality. Although the boundaries between sex and gender are never clear, cross-dressing can also pertain to gender performances associated with transvestites, transsexuals, and drag kings and drag queens. While male-to-female cross-dressers were common in Shakespearean theater, music hall, and melodrama, today, drag kings and queens are increasingly visible in urban bar subcultures in the United States and Britain, as well as Asia, Australasia, South Africa, and South America. Cross-dressers and cross-dressing are broad, encompassing terms. Cross-dressers are to be differentiated from transgendered persons whose actions and intentions much of the time run counter to those who cross-dress. No specific gender identity or identification is privileged in the process of cross-dressing, which is not the case with regard to trans-gender and transsexual practices. The psychic and social dimensions of gender identity are exposed in acts of cross-dressing, though such acts are to be understood more in relation to parody and satire than a desire to be or become a man or a woman.

Cross-dressing, however, may also be differentiated from drag and transvestite performances, something that is aptly exemplified in Sarah Waters's novel (1998) and subsequent primetime drama Tipping the Velvet (BBC, U.K., 2002). The two women protagonists, Kitty Butler and Nan Astley, both cross-dress as men. Kitty, a popular male impersonator in 19th-century London, poses as a man on the music hall stage and convinces audiences of both her masculinity and her femininity. Nan, an oyster girl who arrives in London and needs to earn a living, cross-dresses as a man to make money by having sex with men. Nan's and Kitty's performances as men are convincing because of the persuasive appeal of their clothes and stylization. Nan desires Kitty because of what she imagines to be male and female. Nan is desired by other men because of her “girlish” boy qualities. Cross-dressing, then, allows for a number of identities and identifications to function at the same time. This is because it is often difficult to distinguish between authentic femininity and femininity as masquerade.

As early as 1929, Joan Rivière, the feminist psychoanalyst, contended, in her ground-breaking “Womanliness As Masquerade” that notions of femininity were little more than a succession of masks donned by women in order to endure patriarchy. The core of Riviere's arguments has been reiterated by key feminists since that time and endorses claims that point to the constructed, mediated, and culturally specific nature of gender categories. Recent theory in gender and sexuality studies, as well as activist campaigns from the 1960s onward, suggest that there are uneven yet nonetheless politically significant relationships between gender appearance and clothing and the negotiation of identity in the social sphere. The fact that women can dress as men and can convincingly appear as men, and vice versa, suggests that there is no essential gendered self prior to the construction of masculine or feminine identities via the agency of representation or the trappings of apparel. Subjects come to know the other gendered subject on the basis of an encounter whose dimensions include voice, behavior, look, and dress.

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