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with inhabitation, aggression, usurpation, and vampirism’. 55 In this sense the impersonation can be seen as a positive source of play and energy. 56 Yet it also ‘castrates’ the performer, first because of the inability to ever match the icon; second because of the implicit ‘transvestism’ which destabilises the normativity of race, gender, and sexuality. 57 It is this ambivalence of Elvis-as-Elvis, an empowering but also castrating performance, a site of passivity but also of resistance, which I explore in the
done. Ned’s feelings of losing his father date from the moment he discovers his father’s trunk with dresses in it (18), but the true meaning of this transvestism doesn’t become clear until Mary explains the activities of the Children of Molly or Sons of Sieve (271–3) that Hart is attempting to revive. Carey apparently got the idea for this thread of the novel from Sidney Nolan’s painting Steve Hart Dressed as a Girl 1947, which was based on historical sources for the Kelly story. 38 Anne Marsh has argued that the inclusion of transvestism is a ‘queering’ of the
encouraged to identify with and be sympathetic to Ruth in the opening scenes, by the end she is callous and evil: the final episodes can be seen as constituting a betrayal or trick in terms of the earlier characterisation. The change in direction has important ramifications for the semi-otic meanings attached to Ruth’s physical presentation, as it implies that her facial hair, which may originally have elicited pity, comes to allude to a range of ‘sexual perversions’: bestiality; lesbianism; transvestism; trans-sexuality and sado-masochism. Along with the editing style
other theorists, it seems clear to me that within Gender and Sexuality Studies, a hierarchy has been established which accepts that certain manifestations of gender ambiguity are more subversive than others: male-to-female cross-dressing is more subversive than female-to-male transvestism; queer subjects are more subversive than heterosexual subjects. Those who subscribe to such assumptions could learn from the work of a growing body of critics of passing, who recognise the redundancy of the subversive versus complicit debate and wonder what else passing could
’ celebration of the beauty of youths and boys, as it does to early modern social reality. On the nature of the ‘boy’ as an erotic object in this period, see (for example) P. Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the Body Beneath: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in Erotic Politics, ed. S. Zimmerman (New York, 1992), pp. 65–83; and L. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton, 1983). 12 Loughlin, Same-sex desire in early modern England.indd 12 18/12/2013 15:25:00 General Introduction relationship between sodomitical desire and statecraft. In the anonymous satirical poem The
-sexual phenomena in order to contextualise the various forms of cross-dressing and homosexual desire observable in Shakespeare’s play. What the chapter quickly abandons, however, is the intertextual debt the playwright may have owed to an anecdote told by Montaigne,62 an anecdote with which, tellingly, Greenblatt opens the chapter. While admitting that this tale of transvestism figures as ‘one of those shadow stories that haunt the plays’, Greenblatt in his analysis almost entirely shunts aside this literary source. What he rightfully chastises as ‘the textual isolation that is
as indicating the rise of new forms of ‘homosexuality’, involving markers of transvestism and effeminacy, and indicating ‘a radical extension of the meaning of homosexuality’ (Bray, Homosexuality 88–9); the largely ‘socially diffused homosexuality’ of the Renaissance and seventeenth century changed profoundly, becoming a ‘continuing culture’, with new material markers, such as ‘clothes, gestures, language, particular buildings and public places’ that came to connote ‘homosexuality’ for the subculture’s participants and for its observers in the larger society (92
, a knotted rope-end. Flattened nipples painted around with star-shapes, mapped skin: Sir William Withey Gull. 47 This scene of disguise and masquerade is overlaid with transvestism and the occult (‘painted around with star-shapes’), complicating the already troubled and split subjectivity of Gull. Hyde, the monstrous Doppelgänger , becomes Lady Gull, the monstrously impersonated wife. In the word ‘split’, the violence of the autopsy and of the murder is displaced onto images of somatic disruption, of the body
‘rich investment’ of clippings ‘that matured their hard-core innocence’ (CCB 3). In the fourth section, he confesses: When I was very young my thrill was travesty: my tiny aunt’s stilettos were smuggled to school in a bag (CCB 4) The passage thrills with violence and sexual potential. Is it travesty, transvestism or tragedy? Or all three? The aunt’s stilettos may be shoes, but they are also daggers that lacerate normative ideas of masculinity with the faux-innocent question they generate: Was virility the first sortie, to Fledermaus, craning at the rail to see the
to sudden inversion. In Elkin’s story there is merely a hint of androgyny and transvestism when Bertie dresses up in Norma Preminger’s clothes. The protagonists of Jacobson’s and Roth’s novels undergo more radical feminisation. Although Frank Ritz attempts to reduce male sexuality to a simple mathematical equation – ‘M.A.N. = F.U.C.K.’ – who, how, and why men fuck in Jacobson’s novel is a far from simple matter (Jacobson 1999: 140). Reminiscing about a former lover, Ritz muses that ‘[b]eauty in a woman either has to have some boy in it or some baby’ and later he