Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Penguin Social Sciences) - Softcover

Marjorie Garber

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140179291 ISBN 13: 9780140179293

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

A revolutionary and wide-ranging examination of transvestism ranging from Shakespeare and Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde and Peter Pan, from transsexual surgery and transvestite sororities to Madonna and Flip Wilson. The author examines the nature and importance of cross-dressing and society's recurring fascination with it. 40 pages of inserts, 8 in color.

About this title

About the Author

Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard

From Kirkus Reviews

An elaborate theory by Garber (English/Harvard), insisting that the transvestite is at the elusive heart of Western culture. In a century-sweeping book, Garber applies current critical thought to the phenomenon of ``cross-dressing'' in fact and fiction, high culture and low. Arguing that gender is culturally constructed, she contends that cross-dressing challenges the binary categories of male and female as well as the concept of category itself. It signals ``cultural, social or aesthetic dissonances.'' Garber argues that critics have looked ``through,'' not ``at,'' the transvestite, failing to see what is a Freudian ``primal scene.'' Defined here again and again, the transvestite is ``the space of desire,'' ``a space of possibility,'' a ``third.'' Garber plays out her theory in detailed analyses of countless transvestite figures- -Shakespearean heroines, Tootsie, Lawrence of Arabia, M. Butterfly, Madonna, and Laurence Olivier (here portrayed at death as ``the triumphant transvestite''). There is no shortage of provocative speculation and information, some worth considering and some--like that about transvestite magazines and the politics of transsexual surgery--not. Unfortunately, the sub-flooring of French critical terms sets Garber's argument on a slippery slope ending up too often in a theoretical mire where ``the transvestite is both a signifier and that which signifies the undecidability of signification.'' A discussion of Elizabethan dress codes and costuming concludes with the typically reductive claim that ``there is no ground of Shakespeare that is not already cross-dressed.'' Also, when critical terms are rampantly applied--Elvis and Liberace, for instance, labeled, like Peter Pan, ``changeling boys''--they quickly lose impact. Bound for controversy, this study admirably attempts to cross from the academy to popular culture, but theory here acts less as a window onto cultural evolution than as a screen drawing attention its own overwrought, repetitive pattern. (Color and b&w illustrations--150--some seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140179291
• ISBN 13: 9780140179293
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 458