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Camp Transvestism in Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994)

2019; Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA); Issue: 16.2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/erea.7802

1638-1718

Justine Gonneaud,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

This essay focuses on the figure of the cross-dresser in Peter Ackroyd's Neo-Victorian novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, which uses both on and off-stage female-to-male and male-to-female cross-dressing as a backdrop for an investigation into a series of gruesome murders. The essay first explores the politics of cross-dressing, showing how the motif quite literally illustrates that gender is "performative", in a Butlerian acceptation of the term, therefore allowing for an analysis of the constructedness of gender categories. Secondly, it examines the camp aesthetics of cross-dressing in the novel, a sensibility that challenges narrative categories and literary genres by reappropriating the codes of high and low culture. Finally, it demonstrates that the politics and aesthetics of cross-dressing are tied to a spiritual experience, reconnecting transvestism with its initial shamanic or religious dimension, thus turning the writing experience into a sacred performance of dispossession of identity.