Introduction: Cross-Dressing Technologies of Mobility, Trauma, and Freedom

Abstract

t he essays in this special section revisit the use of the theatergram of cross-dressing from Plautus to the late Baroque Spanish theater of Ana Caro. 1 We offer them in the context of the emergence in our era of trans performers and trans audience members — as well as in terms of thinking about forms of trans: translation and transnationalism in particular. How might we recognize ways in which early modern drama anticipates contemporary discourses of gender neutrality and queer theory — and how do both the practice and the thematizing of cross-dressing in theater enable us to consider issues vital to gender identity? And how might attempts to conceptualize early modern theater as a fundamentally transnational phenomenon, dependent on the process of translat-ing not only words but gestures, dress, and genders, create a compelling context for examining the social unrest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well