Playing Women, Playing Men: Cross-Dressing in Sixteenth-Century France, 1980s New York, and Early Modern Critique

Abstract

hat is the techne—the art, craft, or skill—of cross-dressing? Of drag? What is a cross-dresser? A drag queen? A transvestite? In 2015, BBC w News offered “A Guide to Transgender Terms,” which distinguishes a cross-dresser from a drag queen and the sexuality of both from heterosexual norms. The guide tells readers that a cross-dresser is “a person who wears the clothes usually associated with the ‘opposite’ sex. This is seen as a form of gender expression. The word ‘transvestite’ is not used much these days. And the expression ‘drag queen’ is different, meaning a man who dresses ‘as a woman’ for purposes of entertainment.” What is at stake in such distinctions, particularly for early modern scholarship? Or when we talk about cross-dressing but not drag? Or about transvestism, a term that may “not [be] used much these days,” according to the popular press, but is still current in early modern literary studies? As Valerie Traub observed some thirty years ago, Renaissance drama “is increasingly called a ‘transvestite’ theatre.”