Hawkes, Gail L. "Dressing-Up—Cross-Dressing and Sexual Dissonance." Journal of Gender Studies 4.3 (1995): 261-70. Academic Search Premier. Web. 15 October. 2010.
Gail Hawkes’ article examines the role of cross-dressing within a society by building on the discourse of gender theory, particularly relying on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and to a lesser extent Foucault’s The History of Sexuality concepts of gender as cultural performance not biologically based. The article’s theorizes cross-dressing occurs for three reasons: as escape, expression of identity, and performance. Despite revealing gender as performance drag can be made to reinforce traditional gender roles. The article places itself within the discourse of gender studies, performativity at the center of the theoretical framework, but offers cross-dressing as a path that could lead away from the gender binary leaving room for appearance wholly expressive of an individual’s identity. It utilizes the genre conventions of humanities articles although in a somewhat confusing way mixing theoretic, literary, and historic evidence indiscriminately and moves from the renaissance to the modern period without taking enough time to consider the noteworthy contextual differences in drag.
Cross-dressing utilizes how everything from clothes, diet, hygiene, business, family, and of course sex all are bought believed or acted out along gendered roles, and by taking on these characteristics a person become the opposite sex. Dress is one of the major signifiers of gender rigidly maintained within a culture—though vary depending on the culture—along a male/female binary which, according to the article, became more defined from the development of bourgeoisie out of the aristocracy during the birth of modernization: a characteristic of modernism being categorization. Cross-dressing subverts the universal gender constructions of the masculine/feminine binary and reveals other sexual identities by being something other than a man or woman as traditionally defined, however they are limited by being defined with heterosexual terminology.
Cross-dressing is more commonly performed as drag where the audience knows the performer’s ‘real’ gender is known, and has broad range of motivations from stage acts to social commentary. Passing, where the cross-dressers ‘real’ gender is not known, and given the more secretive nature of the performance the reasons become less clear. In the premodern age women passed as men routinely to get work in order to support themselves, own property, have more freedoms like traveling alone, and even marry women. Men’s stricter dress code makes their gender easier to mimic for women, and women passing as men was far more common than men passing. The fact that women and men can pass as each other though reveals the whole concept of gender as fictional or at the very least not natural, innate, or unbreakable in any sense. Hawkes wants the causal relationships between gender, appearance, and sexuality to be disrupted and cross-dressing works to do so in a limited way. Drag unlike the passing is intentionally portrayed as off or incomplete portrayal of gender, it is meant to be recognized as a performance acknowledging gender is all performance. Every estimation of gender by those performing them, which is to say everyone, is an approximation—there is no core gender and therefore the binary between masculine and feminine falls apart.
I chose this article because it speaks directly to the unruly actions by the female protagonist in The Female Marine, namely Lucy Brewer’s passing as a male, serving as a marine, only to move again between male and female gender roles. The political implications for Brewer’s cross-dressing are particularly fascinating as it is readily codified. The Female Marine is meant to be patriotic, widely available as a cheap piece of propaganda, and therefore supportive of the state. The central character routinely acts in ways that the state would not support a proper woman doing (disobeying parents and prostitution specifically) and yet she is an extremely successful masculine figure and performs each gender role perfectly even as a failed woman, so she reinforces the idealized cultural gender constructions rather than what Hawkes would like to see. The solution while appealing does not come off as particularly plausible nor is much offered in terms of how this new appearance could be reached. There’s the simple practical purpose behind Brewer’s wildly interpretable actions Hawkes acknowledges: being a male leads to a better life with more rights and freedoms. Brewer’s passing as male entails new meaning in different political, sexual, and performative contexts within The Female Marine. The claim of Hawkes that male dress is completely nonsexual and women dressing as men avoid becoming sexualized is a compelling one for arguing the cross-dressing’s justification as overtly political—it is a sort of trial in homage to the state. The article will also be perfect for explaining how rigid dress of a soldier makes Brewer ability to pass for male lot easier since there are very rigid clothes and behaviors allowed in the military. The protagonist is sexualized by her early life as a prostitute however, but if her cross-dressing is not asexual it could explain how she earns a repurified femininity after her gender-bending. Lucy Brewer’s gaining more freedoms as a male in drag, defending a woman from a man, and later marrying will be analyzed using approaches in Hawke’s article. This is a text I can rely on as my backbone for discussing how her cross-dressing and passing as a male is much more palpable culturally as propaganda. The next area to take this research is to find articles which examine if are there unruly aspects of Lucy Brewer’s cross-dressing in The Female Marine, and explore the relationship between cross-dressing, femininity, and patriotism in early America. While these women’s actions are subversive just by their unruly behavior, rather than propose a new kind of woman or femininity, or at least question its validity, they hold onto traditional gender roles which places masculinity onto the pedestal of the ideal.
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