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-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London, 1992); Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 1989); Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Cross-Dressed in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London, 1989). 13 5287P IMPOSTURES MUP-PT/lb.qxd 14/10/09 15:12 Page 14 Impostures in early modern England On castrati, see Roger Freitas, ‘The eroticism of emasculation: confronting the baroque body of the castrato’, Journal of Musicology, 20 (2003), pp. 196–249; id., ‘Un atto d’ingegno: a
political culture of the State. As important was the legitimation drawn from the claim that the community of commoners opposed enclosure. Even where this was not the case, crowds worked hard to represent themselves as the physical manifestation of community disapproval. To achieve this objective, they drew on the common social and cultural resources. Riots were organised in the twin centres of village life – hatched in the alehouse and announced in the church. They were deliberately public and carnivalesque in character, a colouring emphasised by masking and transvestism
the next. Activity deemed acceptable in one unit could be totally unacceptable in another. To this end, units were closed societies that were governed by their own unwritten codes of behaviour. As we shall see in the next chapter, such codes supplemented and sometimes surpassed the laws laid down in the King’s Regulations. Playing away on stage One final arena that allowed some men and women the means to ‘play away’ was literally, performance. Both in Britain and elsewhere, there is a long and celebrated tradition of transvestism in the armed forces.91 In the
regular cross-dressing, whatever the class of the man, was thought to indicate effeminacy. Magnus Hirschfeld, leading German sexologist, had coined the term ‘transvestism’ in his 1910 book Die Transvestiten. Here he had asserted that the behaviour was a sexual variation unrelated to homosexuality.49 In 1920s England however, Hirschfeld’s book was not yet translated and the term ‘transvestism’ appears not to have j j 184 ‘hunnish scenes’ and a ‘virgin birth’ 14 John Russell dressed as a woman j j 185 modern women on trial been generally known. Nevertheless John
setting it up, and then putting a couple of electrodes on this lad’s body, and plugging him to this machine – it was even crueller than ECT. I remember the first time I saw it [aversion therapy for transvestism] I thought it was barbaric. And I remember asking the Charge Nurse: ‘By administering the shock where is the treatment?’ And of course this was regarded as an insolent and impertinent question at the time. Because it went outside the training and the training was set pieces of knowledge you regurgitated in exams, and if you were able to do that you were a
exercised by the transvestism of the Elizabethan stage, arguing from both platonic and patristic examples that the wearing of female garments necessarily resulted in an effeminization of the actor’s masculine self, and from that to the corruption of the audience. The self, in such arguments, is the most fragile of entities, acutely permeable by externals. In the context of
. However, the first ‘psycho-biological questionnaire’ (psychobiologischer Fragebogen) for an ‘objective diagnosis of homosexuality’ had already been developed and published by Magnus Hirschfeld, sexologist and fervent defender of the rights of what he called ‘sexual intermediates’ in 1899.28 According to his theory, there existed an endless variety of sexes ‘between’ the ideal Male and Female. By that time, Hirschfeld had just started to differentiate within the category of ‘sexual inversion’ between homosexuality, transvestism and hermaphroditism, and his questionnaire
INTRODUCTION points of departure This book started with a single question. Ten years ago, when I was writing my book on masculine women on the European Continent in the nineteenth century, I found to my utter surprise that in narratives about passing women who sometimes lived as men for years the issue of an inner sexual identity was never raised. Not one text wondered about or discussed the possible inner motives of the woman involved, pointed to early childhood boyish inclinations, discussed the difficulties of transvestism in terms of identity, or tried to
way-out case of transvestism (if not indeed of trans-sexuality) was unfortunate, and could only add to the confusion of the public that the programme was meant to enlighten.67 MRG’s aim, ‘to promote intelligent and properly informed press and radio comment’, was indicative of a desire to emphasise those aspects of lesbianism which might be seen as more compatible with wider social mores.68 Press interest in the subject was, however, roused only sporadically, often prompted by related events. The formation of MRG and publication of Arena Three prompted a small
and ladylike, and her very modest garments would scarcely indicate transvestism to a modern viewer, her innovation generated numerous cartoons portraying women in trousers drinking, smoking and proposing to submissive men. Later in the century, trousers were associated with the new-fangled sport of bicycling, thus becoming a signifier of modernity, and specifically of modern femininity, mobile, healthy and independent