Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cross-Dressing and John Lyly's Gallathea

2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sel.2001.0023

1522-9270

Christopher Wixson,

Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

A Broadway revival of Blake Edwards's gender-bending comedy Victor, Victoria caps off a flurry of contemporary critical and popular interest in cross-dressing, the most recent expressions of which range from the sensational thrills of The Crying Game to Marjorie Garber's popular exploration of Vested Interests. 1 Specifically within the academy, feminist and, more recently, gay and lesbian scholars since the mid-1980s have seized upon early modern dramatic texts because they seem to highlight gender impersonation and performativity with their all-male casts and frequent narrative incarnations of the "disguise" plot. These kinds of examinations are essential to understanding the concepts of gender and the dynamics of desire as (re)presented on the Renaissance stage. However, there are dangers. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub write that "the political left of critical theory could be said to be in the midst of a long love affair with the subversive potential of gender ambiguity, but this affair has not been an untroubled one." 2 They go on to say that critics who champion the lack of gendered clarity run into problems when challenged about the political efficacy of their work, about whether their valorizing of ambiguity sufficiently illuminates or further obscures complex cultural inscriptions and hinders current academic and "real world" political struggles. From a more literary perspective, does the intensive "staking out" of cross-dressing by feminist and gay/lesbian critics partially eclipse other historically contingent associations with cross-dressing that are "foreign" (or perhaps more invisible) within our own cultural anxieties and biases which inform our approaches? [End Page 241]