Dressing‐up — cross‐dressing and sexual dissonance

Abstract

The use of dress as a signifier of gender category—of membership of the male or female sex—is familiar and for the most part taken for granted. What signifiers are used to make this fundamental distinction may vary over time and with cultural difference but there is a consistency in the deployment of dress for this purpose. The use of such dress codes are, in contemporary Western culture, mapped on to expressions of sexual preference in the form of masculine and feminine poles of heterosexuality. Yet the universality of these codes and their meanings allows for an additional use: to subvert the mainstream ‘messages’ they convey and through this to illuminate the existence of alternative sexual preferences or identities. This paper explores three possible trajectories of the act of ‘dressing‐up'— of the use of dress to challenge institutionalised sexual categories. It critically examines the extent to which cross‐gender dressing can pose an effective challenge while still operating within a binary framework of heterosexually orientated meanings of ‘gender’. Specifically it suggests that the radical potential of ‘dressing‐up as resistance’ is moderated by the persistence of notions of ‘masculine’ and feminine’ dress signifiers which derive their mainstream meaning as well as their subversive potential from the same source—the binary distinction which lies at the heart of the heterosexual hegemony.

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