Lición de llevar chapines: drag, footwear, and gender performance in Guillén de Castro'sLa fuerza de la costumbre

Abstract

This essay takes aim at the gender-performance trouble that Hipólita and her brother, Feliciano, face in the play by Guillén de Castro,La fuerza de la costumbreThe Force of Habit(c. 1610–1620?)]. Hipólita's chopines and Feliciano's sword call into question the validity of terms such as “functioning society” in the context of Spain's imperial realities in the seventeenth century and thecomedia's own conventions regarding transvestite characters. The brother's extreme familiarity with the chopines that his sister needs lessons to master suggests that footwear, drag and gender performance, even identity, are the main focus of this play. Linking the past of drag and performance with its present, the essay seeks as well to encourage the visualization of alternative more current meanings by readers and viewers of early modern Spanish theater.

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