Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature

Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations

Simone Chess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317360858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors' crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers' genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.

1 Doublecrossdressing Encounters

Haec Vir and Hic Mulier, The Faerie Queene, May Day, and “Robin Hood and the Bishop”

In 2014, I watched a popular viral video of a “gender swap” experiment made possible through virtual reality technologies. In the video, a male and female user and performer move simultaneously, each wearing minimal clothing and an Oculus Rift headset. Through a split screen, viewers see how the male, looking down, sees a female body in place of his own, while the female, looking down, sees a male one in place of hers.¹ The video was produced by the “Machine to be Another” project at the international, interdisciplinary collective “Be Another Lab,” and uses a hybrid artistic and technological system—the combination of the virtual-reality system Oculus Rift with two volunteers in the roles of “performer” and “user”—to create the phenomenon in which the user looks down and sees his/her/their body as though it was the performer’s, seeing her body where he expects to see his own. The creators of BeAnotherLab frame the gender swap and other similar experiments as an “embodiment experience system,” offering users the “immersive experience of seeing themselves in the body of another person.”² In a whitepaper explaining their work, the collective of researchers argue that “the system has great potential as a social tool to stimulate empathy among different groups.”³ The reasons that this video became a viral sensation—our cultural fascination with what it would feel like to see oneself in another, differently sexed or gendered body, or to see one’s own body and gender from the outside—similarly motivate and help to explain the surprisingly popular plot device of “doublecrossdressing”—instances in prose, poetry, and especially drama where MTF and FTM crossdressing are simultaneously and relationally, even causally, deployed within a single text. Before virtual reality and other virtual methods of gender swapping, doublecrossdressing plots used the symmetry of MTF and FTM pairs in place of avatars to simulate the experience of gender exchange between the sexes and to demonstrate causality in the relationship between the two crossdressers. Setting aside the technology, what mobilizes the scene of gender swapping is the focused encounter between the two people, the relationship between the two as they navigate their gender play together.

In this way, fictional representations of queer gender prefigure the Machine to be Another—the crossdressers experience the perspectival shift that comes from inhabiting someone else’s subject position and seeing someone else inhabit theirs, and they witness the performance of their own original gender, now anatomized and displayed on another body. This mirroring technique is similar to the virtual reality situations where virtual or online technologies allow users to see and experience themselves in another gender, and it similarly provokes both perspective and empathy across genders. In many early modern doublecrossdressing cases, the pair of crossdressers encounters one another, watching their opposite inhabit their own discarded clothing and mannerisms, just as a modern gamer might encounter a gender-swapped avatar, or a virtual reality user might see his or her own body from a different subject position. Further, just as the user’s movements in the Machine to be Another cause equal, mirrored, movement from his partner in the virtual system, actions and decisions made by one crossdresser have direct causal impact on his/her/their doublecrossed pair. This experience is not only transformational for the characters in doublecrossdressing narratives, but possibly also for the texts and plays’ readers and audiences, who voyeuristically watch the results with a fascination that explains why these narratives might be such a popular, if not viral, crossdressing theme. By putting an MTF and FTM crossdresser in relationship to one another, doublecrossdressing narratives force them into a kind of confrontation in which one queer gender facilitates another, and both reveal the construction and maintenance of the more normative genders that surround them. Like the Machine to be Another, then, doublecrossdressing texts make visible the artificiality and constructedness not only of the MTF and FTM characters’ queer genders but of all genders in and out of the text, in relationship to one another. Further, the perspectival shift forced by doublecrossed encounters promotes empathy, cross-gender identification, and reflection which last even after the plots are resolved and clothing is switched back between the sexes, just as it did in the Machine to be Another experiments.

This chapter’s representative sample of early modern doublecrossdressing texts from several genres—the Hic Mulier and Haec Vir pamphlets, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and George Chapman’s May Day, and an anonymous Robin Hood ballad—will articulate the queerly symmetrical relationships between MTF and FTM crossdressers and to suggest the possibility that they serve a mirroring avatar-type role for one another and potentially for the reader/audience. Seen in this light, doublecrossdressing plots highlight the characters’ experiences of relational and interconnected gender and offer readers and audiences the brief experience of identifying with or imagining themselves in or in relation to their queer and cross-gender experiences. While I’ll discuss doublecrossdressing in poetry, prose and cheap print as well as drama, it is important to emphasize that the convention was especially popular on the stage—in the medium where the gender swap is both most embodied and most on display. Michael Shapiro traces doublecrossed plots, which he calls “Lelia motifs” to a genre sixteenth-century Italian secular vernacular neoclassical comedies, commedia erudite. In Bibbiena’s Calandria (1513), a male and female pair of twins disguise themselves as one another; the doublecrossdressing plot is revisited in the popular and influential play Gl’Ingannati (anonymous, 1531), from whose FTM crossdressed heroine Shapiro takes the name “Lelia” for the doublecrossdressing motif, which was performed in Cambridge in the 1540s.⁴ In addition to May Day, which I’ll discuss below, some of the more significant instances of doublecrossdressing plots on the English stage include The Wars of Cyrus (1594), Englishmen for my Money (Haughton, 1598), George a Green (1599), Antonio and Mellida (Marston, c.1599), Labyrinthus (Hawkesworth, c.1603), Amends for Ladies (Fields, c.1605–15), Love’s Cure, or the Martial Maid (Fletcher, c. 1612–15), and The School of Compliment, or Love Tricks (Shirley, 1625), Byrsa Basilica (Ricketts, c.1633), The Hollander (Glapthorpe, 1635), and Love’s Cure (1649).⁵

Alone, this set of plays is enough to qualify doublecrossdressing as a comedic sub-genre in its own right. Together with other instances in prose and poetry, doublecrossdressing instances are copious enough to prove that doublecrossdressing plots were one way for authors to articulate a model of gender that was interconnected and communal, flexible but rule-bound; they are a site to test the Machine to be Another hypothesis that gender swapping might provoke cross-gender empathy and identification, as well as a vehicle for showcasing these experiences for audiences concerned with the mechanics and rules of gendered social rules. Further, while doublecrossdressing is a fairly specific literary device, the rules and patterns of gender exchange that are demonstrated through the motif can be applied more abstractly to other expressions of gender in early modern texts. For example, while this chapter discuss the most controlled expressions of gender doublecrossing—instances in which an MTF character is matched by an FTM character, the idea of relational doublecrossdressing, of swapping gender characteristics and roles betwixt sex and sex like clothing, can also be seen in less clear-cut instances, like when an MTF crossdressing character is surrounded by masculine, though not crossdressed, female characters (as in Jonson’s Epicoene).

If doublecrossdressing plots prefigure virtual gender swaps, they also are grounded in the discourses around crossdressing in their own historical moment. One of the foremost early modern critiques of crossdressing comes from Philip Stubbes’ 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, where he explains the social and cultural purpose of gendered clothing: “Our Apparel was given us as a sign to discerne betwixt sex and sex, and therefore one to weare the Apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his owne kinde.”⁶ Even in warning that the exchange of clothing can lead to gender confusion, Stubbes focuses less on a single MTF or FTM crossdresser but on the exchange of clothing “betwixt sex and sex” and the risks that, through crossdressing, a person might “participate” with another sex, adulterating his or her own sex through that participation as much as through the clothing itself. Stubbes’s claim that clothing’s primary purpose is to categorize the sexes and prevent them from participatory exchange is most likely rooted in the biblical edict from Deuteronomy, which says that “the woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment.”⁷ While the biblical source, like Stubbe’s polemic, ostensibly forbids any individual act of crossdressing, its symmetrical, almost chiasmic, inversion of men-in-women’s-clothes and women-in-men’s clothes draws specific attention to the relationship between male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing and female-to-male (FTM) crossdressing; by arranging the two types of crossdressing in this way, linked by the “neither,” the passage creates a relationship of exchange between them. The ways that these two key arguments against crossdressing frame it as an act between two people’s sexes/garments, in relation to one another helps to generate the idea that a man in women’s clothing might logically find himself reflected in a woman in men’s clothing.

Modeling queer relational gender, these characters offer possible sites for audience and readers to experience, through the doublecrossed characters, some of the experiences and effects of gender swapping. Moderns and early moderns alike want to see what it’s like to experience embodiment in a differently sexed body. In these early modern textual instances, the relationship between the MTF/FTM crossdressing pair whose clothing and gender presentation are swapped “betwixt sex and sex” offers one way of exploring the gender swap experiment and, potentially, generating the kinds of empathy and perspective shifts that come from that experience. In the closed spaces of these textual worlds, just as in the modern virtual ones, one queer gender performance facilitates another, and both reveal the construction and maintenance of the more normative genders that surround them.

It is exciting and pleasurable to read doublecrossdressing plots as a demonstration of a kind of out-of-body genderqueer fluidity in which one queer act of crossdressing enables and even encourages another. However, there are strict limitations and restrictions that come with a relationally queer system of gender exchange. The empathetic mirroring that comes from doublecrossdressing, or from other types of gender “swapping,” is often contained and redirected by the end of the narrative, at least nominally. Thus, even as doublecrossdressing plots reveal and reflect upon the availability of genderqueer fluidity, they also by necessity demonstrate that it is always-already contained within the larger machine of normative sex, sexuality, and gender performance; the same is true of the viral Machine to be Another video, which was popularly reported as creating the experience of seeing yourself in the “opposite” sex. All doublecrossdressing plots in some ways re-conflate sex with gender, linking men to masculinity and women to femininity, because as much as crossdressing can and does indicate disjuncture in the sex-gender system, it also relies on that same system’s stability. As Chris Mounsey puts it, any “successful instance of crossdressing where the crossdressed “passes” as the gender of his or her choice must occur “within a social system that requires for its completion recognition of whether or not the passing has been successful.”⁸ If the crux of a doublecrossdressing plot is the moment where the two crossdressers to pass as the “opposite” sex, the plot reifies the idea that there are opposites in the first place. Despite their radical potential, then, doublecrossdressing and other kinds of gender swapping can therefore be seen as inherently conservative, as they reinforce the idea that there are only two sexes and only two genders (or, to follow Laqueur, only one homologous sex, but only two sexual and gendered presentations), with a very limited and contingent range of movement or exchange between them.⁹ Yet, while the many doublecrossdressing plots available in early modern texts reveal a cultural imagination simultaneously invested in a restrictive binary system of gender (one with two defined categories, male and female) they are simultaneously aware of and obsessed with the slippage and fluidity between those categories (in which exchange between sexes and genders is inevitable and has global societal effects). In this way, relational doublecrossdressing is compatible with, though distinct from, other dominant non-binary models for thinking about sex and gender in the early modern period, especially Galenic/humoral models and legal/coverture models, both of which see sex and gender difference as relational and, potentially, transferable.¹⁰

Even as doublecrosssdressing narratives can and do have the potential to restrict and limit sexual and gender differences, they also offer opportunities for transformative encounters across gender as it is performed through clothing and behavior. By articulating the action-reaction relationship between and across genders, both cis and queer, by re-orienting point of view and perspective, and by enabling mirroring and empathy within that relationship, plots that feature doublecrossed gender show the rich queer potential of MTF and FTM crossdresser dyads and reach still farther to queer their community and potentially trouble their society’s assumptions about sex and gender. To return to Jennifer J. Llewellyn and Jocelyn Downie’s definition of relational theory, “We define ourselves in relationship to others and through relationship with others.”¹¹

Hic Mulier ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Passing Relations
• 1 Doublecrossdressing Encounters: Haec Vir and Hic Mulier, The Faerie Queene, May Day, and “Robin Hood and the Bishop”
• 2 Crossdressed Brides and the Marriage Market: A Mad World, My Master, Epicoene, and “Phylotus and Emelia”
• 3 Crossdressing and Queer Heterosexuality: Arcadia, Urania, Isle of the Gulls, and “Sport Upon Sport”
• 4 Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband”
• Epilogue: Male-to-Female Crossdressing, Transfeminism, and Relational Gender
• Index