Opengender

Specifically lesbian significances to the crossdressed figure (rather than the significance of crossdressing for gay men or for heterosexual women) has been elided in the field of queer discourse as well as in heterosexual feminism. Queer discourse shows a tendency towards a homogenising analysis of the crossdressed figure which does not take account of gender as a field of discursive power in which 'male' is the dominant, or substantive, category. Instead, an undifferentiated construct of 'normalisation' is treated as the dominant discursive formation. 'Heterosexuality' and 'gender' are treated more or less as interchangeable terms although the discourses of sex-gender very obviously continue to differentiate a dominant (male) category and a subordinate (female) category in the production and normalisation of cultural dominance. At the same time, feminist film studies has tended to treat both 'male' and 'female' as categorisations which exclusively constitute (white, middle-class) heterosexual relations. Either way, the specificities of lesbianism are ignored. Before analysing specific film texts, I will therefore attempt to outline the contestations surrounding crossdressing in specifically lesbian literatures, cultures, and theorisations — both within and independently of the contexts of cinema or film studies.

Lesbian feminism has tended to figure crossdressing as an identificatory practice, the significance of which remains fixed in a static (a-historically figured) structure of power relations. I will argue, on the contrary, that signifiers such as 'crossdressing' do not refer themselves to static forms or constructs but reference relatively fluid and mobile discursive strategies. The shifting significances of such tropes register transformations and proliferations in lesbian discourses which are produced in diverse struggles to challenge or maintain specific modes of dominance. In this way, I hope to delineate (very broadly) a discursive context for lesbian practices of spectatorship between the emergence of the discourses of first- and second-wave feminism.

There is a very limited amount of material specifically concerned with female-to-male crossdressing in film on which to draw. Those texts which do address crossdressing in cinema focus mainly on male-to-female transvestism as 'camp' — a theatrical mode of performativity. Where female-to-male crossdressing is theorised, it is treated as a similar phenomenon which operates performatively through denaturalisation effect (Kuhn, 1985; Straayer, 1992; Garber, 1992). On the other hand, commentaries such as Bell-Metereau's (1993), which do treat crossdressing as gender-specific, tend to leave lesbianism in the background. For example, whilst Bell-Metereau does briefly refer to lesbian undertones in a scene from Sylvia Scarlett (1935) in which the crossdressed Sylvia is kissed on the mouth by another woman, overall she treats the significance of the film's crossdressed protagonism in these far more general feminist terms:

Sylvia's character offers a delicate balance of ethical principles and a spirit of fun, a combination all too rare in film heroines of later decades. (Bell-Metereau, 1993: 113)

In order to avoid the overdetermination of my own account of the crossdressed cinematic figure by models of 'camp' or 'performativity,' I shall not focus on the much-discussed lesbian-appeal of theatrical crossdressing in films such as Sylvia Scarlett, or Morocco. The limited anecdotal material which is available tends to suggest that this was not the only mode — and probably not the defining mode — of lesbian appropriation of crossdressed imagery. I shall therefore begin by addressing specifically lesbian theorisations of crossdressing, 'mannishness' and 'butch' identifications, and relate these to the genesis of the crossdressed tomboy figure in mainstream popular literature. I will then look briefly at lesbian discussion of the emergence of 1940s and 1950s lesbian subcultures and of the relationship of these subcultures to popular literature and cinema.