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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
’ 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
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
‘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
, 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
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
’s sense of identity is directly related to her chap 3.qxd 2/2/06 110 2:00 pm Page 110 Jeanette Winterson position in her mother’s religious community of female friends. In Boating for Beginners, the protagonist’s female friends decisively help Gloria in her maturation process and in the dismantling of Noah’s version of the Flood. In The Passion, the fluidity of Villanelle’s identity is symbolised in her transvestism: she dresses as a woman during the day and wears male drag during the night. In Sexing the Cherry, the Dog Woman enjoys the friendship of prostitutes
, Georgette, and a Roman Catholic priest with a taste for drinking and card-playing. Like the tender-hearted eponymous hero of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Henri abhors pain inflicted on animals. His friend Domino says that he ‘can’t pick up a musket to shoot a rabbit’ (P 28) and he himself admits that he can only bring himself to kill the moles that destroy the family crops ‘by looking the other way’ (P 31). By contrast, Villanelle is a resourceful and witty bisexual woman with sparkling blue eyes and flashing red hair (P 51) and a taste for transvestism (P 54), who
adventures – not least the transvestism of Damien himself – introducing new questions and explorations into the theme of transformation and mutable identity, and engaging more directly with issues of Anishinaabe cultural sovereignty. While Catholicism, particularly its emphasis on revelation and devotion, is central to the plot of Last Report , Damien’s faith wavers. And of course as Pauline, like the saintly archetype she ironically aspires to, insists on notions of perfection, Damien, like Nanapush, more closely reflects the imperfections of the Anishinaabe culture
