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Cross-Dressing and "Gender Trouble" in the Ovidian Corpus

2002; Texas Tech University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1935-0228

Shilpa Raval,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

The 1999 critically acclaimed indie film Boys Don't Cry tells tale of Teena Brandon, a young woman who, after living and dressing as a man (under name of Brandon Teena), was murdered for her assumption of a masculine identity. Much of film's power for many viewers may be traced to Hilary Swank's moving and persuasive performance as transgendered Brandon, while movie critics have commented on how Swank manages to embody visually both masculine and feminine characteristics and actually blur lines. (1) Director Kimberly Pierce revealed in an interview with London paper The Independent that it took her almost three years to cast role of Brandon, since she needed someone who could not only capture Brandon's spirit, but also pass as a guy (Spenser 11). Swank's real-life preparations for role mirrored Teena Brandon's own attempts to transform her gender. (2) She cut off all of her hair, bandaged her breasts, put a sock in her trousers, and began working out two hours a day to rem ove any body fat, since Pierce told her that she had to pass for in real life, because if she didn't whole premise would have been a joke (D'Souza 9). Before filming began, Swank put her altered appearance to test by hitting streets of New York cross-dressed. She recalls: Everyone stared and then looked away. Some people thought that I was a boy, others couldn't figure out what I was, and felt quite threatened (D'Souza 9). In its presentation of impersonation and its success in actively creating slippage, Boys Don't Cry differed from most of American transvestite narratives produced in 1980s and 1990s. Elisabeth Krimmer has observed (29) that female-to-male cross-dressing is exception rather than rule in American movies. Many of these films feature situations of female impersonation in which cross-dressing does not erode boundaries but rather allows characters to incorporate feminine within themselves and ultimately emerge stronger and more virile. Tootsie, for example, became, after its release in 1982, focus of debate in feminist and literary criticism circles. (3) Elaine Showalter has moments when performance of cross-dressed Michael/Dorothy is disrupted through physical gestures of masculinity, when we are reminded of the masculine power disguised and veiled by feminine costume. The different approaches to cross-dressing represented by Boys Don't Cry and Toots ie are perhaps symptomatic of a larger distinction between modem cinematic and theatrical depictions of male-to-female and female-to-male cross-dressing. Molly Haskell, for example, contends that male impersonation operates on a principle of aggrandizement (and is therefore not funny), while adoption of female characteristics, and female impersonation, resting as they do on principle of belittlement, will continue to be comical (cited in Bell-Metereau 67). Along similar lines, Alisa Solomon remarks in her discussion of female-to-male drag in twentieth-century American theater that men dressed as women often parody gender; women dressed as men, on other hand, tend to 'perform' gender (145; emphasis in original). In recent years, cross-dressing has been focus of investigations of and identity, both in artistic and critical texts, because it has potential to problematize simple equation of body and gender. For theorists such as Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber, material body does not exist as a fixed essence that serves to express and reinforce; rather, body and exist separately, yet coextensively, with each other. Butler remarks (6): If is cultural meanings that sexed body assumes, then a cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. …