RACHEL FENSHAM

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND
GYNEMIMESIS. PERFORMATIVE
STRATEGIES AND FEMINIST THEORY

This article considers cross-dressing within feminist and cultural theory from
the perspective of performance. It offers a close reading of the materiality of

context. The specificity of these performances reveals that bodies can both
reproduce and fail to comply with discursive regimes of gender.

KEYWORDS

• theory, burlesque, s mplete

The suburban bus passing my street carries the promotional slogan 'have
you been with Priscilla?', a reference to the recent video release of the Aus-
tralian film Pnscilla, Queen ofthe Desert. The boys at my daughter's school
camp decide to dress in drag for the final party, in imitation of this film
which most of them haven't seen. They dance and everyone loves it; and I
wonder about the critical attention given to cross-dressing m feminist
theory and more recently in queer theory.' Transvestism has helped to focus
attention on the fluidity of social gender and its representations, yet it
remains a not unproblematic analytical tool. In this article, without uphold-
ing fixed binary categories, I wish to reappraise the current celebration of
cross-dressing. My own interest is in performance events, deliberately the-
atrical occasions that can be analysed as representations but also as pro-
cesses in which gender codes, identifications and pleasures are enacted and
refashioned. I propose to examine several different sites of gender as per-
formance, from both high and popular culture, in Australia and elsewhere.
In doing so, I want to consider the ways in which transvestism may or may
not be 'troubling' in particular contexts.
Within the broad rubric of performance, it is the concepts of mimesis and
masquerade that have most frequently been explored by feminists. Thus for
Luce Irigaray, mimicry is the path historically assigned to the feminine, but

Cultural Studies 10(3) I O 1

 genesen
It IS ,ils() one thnt can, and should, be recuperated. 'To play with mimesis is
. tor a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse,
without allowuip herself to be simply reduced to it'(1985: 76). Mimesis is
therefore a game, investing eros and logos with the power of play, and a
delight in the aesthetic capacity to seduce and deceive.- Toril Moi, however,
questions whether the stagings of mimesis will not lead feminist theory
towards "miming the miming imposed on women'( 198,5: 140), thus rein-
forcing traditional patterns of idealization through imitation.
The equally ambiguous notion of masquerade has also been investigated
b\ psxchoanalysis and subsequently by feminism as a strategy of disguise.
Joan Riviere famously proposed that the "mask of womanliness' involves
scheinbar, angeblich
the display of ostensible characteristics opposed to the masculine, but that
It also operates as a defence, protecting 'woman' from over-identification
with the father (1986: 38). Yet there is a danger that 'in this masquerade of
femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her fem-
imnitv (Irigarav, 1 985: 84). The familiarity of the mask of womanliness as
a recognizable set of characteristics (lipstick, curved eyebrows, styled hair)
can become fixed through repetition, denying women the freedom of other
social appearances.^
In research involving workshops and performances of dressing 'like a
woman my students and 1 explored how acts of speaking, gesturing and
appearing can disrupt gender conventions. If, in male/female transvestism,
masquerade and mimesis converge around the image of the feminine, then
what social or psychological organizations of gendered subjectivity are
manipulated in the reversals of masculine/feminine? I should emphazise
that 1 do not consider pla\^ and performance to be necessarily subversive or
transgress!ve; rather, performative acts can both expose and conceal binary
relationships. And if thev do in fact destabilize gender, does this mean that
the feminine and feminist theory risk becoming resubsumed within the mas-
culine in the exchanges of cross-dressing (Showalter, 1987)? Does this new
aufgehoben
dress of a playful feminism give women the freedom to dress up or dress
down.>
One response to this question might be to explain that this article has
twice been actualized in performance, as a way of supplementing its theor-
etical concerns. First of all I dressed "as a woman' to deliver my inaugural
public lecture at Murdoch University, incorporating a mini-performative
sequence of ambiguous gestures and the showing of a dance video segment
into my presentation. Audience feedback would indicate that my "overtly
feminized' intervention - pink fake-fur coat, red satin dress, red and black
fluffv pillbox hat, fish-net stockings, black suede high heels, diamante ear-
rings - heightened the impact of the text and unsettled the usual sombre and
individuated responses of an academic audience. Many women have sub-
sequently affirmed their pleasure in my parodic presentation of femininity
in such a context. Second, I performed the same paper in the same costume
at a large dance event presented in a conventional theatre over three nights,
accompanied by a male friend dressed as a woman."* We were surrounded
by many overtly theatrical sequences, including mildly amusing variations

484 CULTURAL STUDIES

on the cross-dressing theme. But it was my direct public address from a
lectern that drew attention to the limitations of elaborate but unspecified
play. Unintentionally my performance began to function as an organizing
commentary upon the entire theatrical event, receiving the longest byline in
the published review:
A smartly dressed woman delivered an academic speech from a lectern on
the subject of feminism and trans-sexuality, until she was lured away by

(The Age, 21 iznuary 1993)

Was she or wasn't she? For theoretical enquiry which foregrounds per-
formance practices, the differences between these two presentations are
important indicators of the social, temporal and spatial specificity of
'appearance' and the significations operating on the body. While the cri-
tique of discourse current in other disciplines also informs performance
analysis, it is equally necessary to insist on a corporeal reality that is often
displaced in such representational schemas. Ontological questions within
ausdrueckend

resentation can be re-examined in the negotiations between material bodies.

For example, what constitutes absence and presence in any given circum-
stances? Who and what is there? Who is speaking? How? Who is seeing?
Who is acting? Performance and performance analysis can investigate not
only the illusions, but also the conventions, through which gender identi-

Transvestophilia and gynemimesis

Investigating cross-dressing as transgressive performance also i volved
more conventional modes of cultural analysis. I read extensively, atched
films and videos, studied famous transvestites, visited a transvestitee night
club, watched 'Raunchy Girls' in the pub, read the biography of Gertrude
Francisco and Sydney, inves
Stein, looked at photos of transvestites in San Fra
tigated legal history andd so on. At
A this
h point, theh meanings
anings accruing to these
the
diverse social practices became increasingly clouded, so that I turned to a
medical treatise called Gay, Straight and In-Bettceen: The Sexoloi^y of
Erotic Orientation (Money,' 1988).
Money's book provides a sympathetic analysis of the instability of cul-
tural conceptions of gender and sex, even as it organizes and classifies
diverse gender codings through the framework of clinical pathology. While
such diagnostic taxonomies have been resisted by transvestites and trans-
sexuals for political reasons, I would like to take up these categories, not in
order to ascribe fixed behavioural characteristics to bodies but rather as
terms that suggest the complex operations of imitation and desire associ-
ated with performing gender. Transvestism is, according to Money, 'any act
of cross dressing', whether it take the form of party gag, entertainment act,
undercover espionage, entrapment stratagem or expression of a 'sexological

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS

 syndrome'. In sexological discourse, persistent transvestism exists on a con-
tinuum with, and may in turn lead to, transvestophilia, gynemimesis, or
perhaps the surgical changes of transsexuality.
Transvestopbilta is in turn defined as 'the fetishistic dependence on cross
dressing for erotic arousal' (Money, 1988: 94). Money argues that this
fetishism is more common in men than women and that wearing women's
garments may be the 'partial manifestation of a more extensive gender
crosscoding from male to female that includes also the body image' (94).
Playing at being a woman may include a fluttering desire to be fulfilled in
private by the practices of femininity, as described in Freud's famous case
study of Judge Schreber: 'I am sometimes to be found standing before the
mirror or elsewhere, with the upper portion of my body bared, and wearing
sundry feminine adornments, such as ribbons, false necklaces, and the like.
This only occurs, I may add, when I am by myself (Freud, 1991: 151). In
the contemporary context there are many publicly sanctioned occasions for
these "small pretences', whether at the elaborate country weekends organ-
ized by the Beaumont Society of London, or the ritualized cross-dressings
that are enjoyed in male social groupings, such as football clubs. Money
claims that men are much more likely than women to experience erotic
arousal from the reversal of their gender status. However, given the less
developed literature on female eroticism, women wearing men's clothes
may be one of many unmarked', unnoticed spaces that have escaped his
gender coding. Marjorie Garber makes the point that "many transvestites
and transsexuals affirm the reality of pleasure, sexual as well as cultural, in
female-to-male as well as male-to-female cross-dressing'(1992: 4). The 'gay
boy look, for instance, has been popularized for women, while the butch-
femme dichotomy has been variously reworked in lesbian subcultures.''
Cyiiemtmests is the permanent shift to living like a woman while con-
tinuing to have a penis. In many cultures there are established communities
where individuals live as members of the opposite sex, either permanently
or for a prescribed period. Gayle Rubin cites several socially sanctioned
examples of gynemimesis and andromimesis, whereby "an anatomical man
could become a woman by means of a special ceremony, and an anatomi-
cal woman could in the same way become a man. The transvestite then took
a wife or husband of her/his own anatomical sex and opposite social sex'
(1975: 181). In contemporary society, gynemimetics can work as transves-
tite entertainers 'pretending that they cross-dress optionally' (Money, 1988:
100), rather than claiming impersonation as their permanent social identity.
The fictional frame of popular theatre sanctions a gender doubling that
does not always challenge the social construction of gender under other cir-
cumstances. In Jennie Livingstone's film Pans is Burning (1990), for
example, the world of black drag balls in New York operates as a sanctu-
ary from a still hostile "outside' world in which racial and gender difference
IS maintained through violent regulation (Phelan, 1993).
These various kinds of "eonism/" whether enacted in the theatre or in
everyday life, are not adequately explained by an analysis based on a restric-
tive Oedipal scenario or a notion of innate biological orientation. The terms

486 CULTURAL STUDIES

'transvestophilia' and 'gynemimesis'. I have suggested, foreground the
persistence of desire, imitation and public liminality in understanding
gender identities, and it is the fragility of these concepts that I will discuss
in relation to various performances of 'woman

Cross-sexual acts
The man who, for the first time, or in repetition of an act of childhood, slips
his foot into a woman's shoe will hesitate - the foot is contained, pressured,
exposed by the shape of the leather. The mass of his body is dislocated by
the remoulding of the foot. His walk, with its speed, gait, weight distri-
bution, is re-patterned; he may find his head at a different angle and the
direction of his gaze altered; perhaps a more tentative awareness of the
ground ensues. The walk is already a text with a particular morphology and
history but new movement patterns can be acquired or added. These acts
shift and reorient his 'performance of sex'
The attention to detail fascinates, and the intricacies of the feminine
produce a compelling fiction for the male performer. There is a seductive
pleasure in the repetition of the toilette, a reiterated grooming that gives the
performer permission to gaze upon the disguise of a woman/self. He dis-
covers and owns the feminine while remaining in possession of a hidden
male sex. His desire can be studied, not taken for granted. His arousal
happens all over his skin, as this desire takes external form. The perform-
ance may be received with applause, or praise, or condemnation. Its presen-
tation provides new cause to consider these acts, to repeat them, to stylize
them, to enjoy them or reject them. Each movement is singular; though it
becomes familiar, it can always be separated from the others which have
accumulated. These acts become 'second nature', a mimetic performance
that can be repeated. They can be observed and described in microcosmic
detail and this commentary registers the performance which produces the
commentary. And so, the transvestite man becomes 'like a woman
Judith Butler has proposed that this process of accumulation, or sedi-
mentation, constitutes gender identity and that neither gender nor sex can
be conceptualized in relation to an ontology of the male or female body.
The sexed body has no a priori constitution, nor does it simply exist as a
blank slate to be written upon by social discourses; rather, corporeality is
actively produced and reproduced through the intersection and elaboration
of multiple semiotic systems. 'As a result, it becomes impossible to separate
out "gender'' from the political and cultural intersections in which it is
invariably produced and maintained' (Butler, 1990a: 3). What we think of
as gender identity is fundamentally embedded within the fabric of the social
texts that produce it. In its crudest sense identity is materialized through a
double process of corporeal stylization and embodiment rehearsals (prac-
tice), an accumulation that represents the social text of femininity (or the
style of a subculture for that matter).
It is not possible, however, to escape, deny or simply oppose the repro-
duction of binary gender identities. Butler disagrees with Vecriture feminine

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS

as a potential elsewhere for 'woman outside a masculine Symbolic, but also
with a view of woman as a unitary oppressed body within patriarchal social
structures. A feminist identity politics that polarizes masculine and feminine
reifies existing distinctions within language and culture which support com-
pulsory heterosexuality and a hierarchical binarism. Instead, Butler argues
for a critical genealogy of the institutional and discursive means through
which gender differences are inscribed, a theoretical strategy to be supple-
mented by "a politics of performative acts 'From a feminist point of view,
one might try to reconceive the gendered body as the legacy of sedimented
acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact,
whether natural, cultural or linguistic' (Butler, 1990b: 274). An abiding
gendered self only takes shape through the organization of familiar and
mundane bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds,
whose repetition and sedimentation produce maleness or femaleness.
Stage actors are familiar with this process and typically retain an aware-
ness of self as non-unitary, even as they try to produce actions, sounds and
gestures which pertain to particular dramatic characters. Reg Livermore, a
well-known Australian actor, explicitly defines his role as the larger-than-
life figure Betty Blokk-Buster as theatrical pretence:
Drag is the great overstatement. It is grotesque, it is outrageous, it is
schmerzlich
bizarre, it is never pretty or glamorous. It is ultimately, I hope, poignant,
lonely, pathetic, and then beautiful. But I never want my audience to
believe I am the woman in question. I sometimes appear as a man also.
(Kenna, 1977: 9)
The performer is rearranged and reconstituted as a set of possibilities, or
potential actualities, as required by the mtse-en-scene of the performance.
Edna Everage, the stage double of Australia's most famous cross-dresser
Barry Humphries, has evolved over many years from a frumpish suburban
housewife to Dame Edna, a zealous caricature of the British aristocracy.
Humphries notes, 'there is very little danger of Edna going out of character
unless I lose the falsetto'(Eahr, 1984: 60). According to critic John Lahr,
when Humphries performed in New York in 1977, the depiction of a 'man
dressed as a woman' was 'alien to the American theatre' (not so today!), but
this 'didn't worry anyone because most thought Edna was a woman' (59).
Humphries works the gender binary carefully and viciously. He has no
doubt that he is a man impersonating a woman who happens to be prone
to excesses of style: iabia-like' lips, pink hair and winged glasses. Indeed,
as Lahr says, 'Edna works the room masterfully '(60, my emphasis).
Humphries incisively deploys his feminine alter ego to create a mock
identification with the women in the audience. 'We have these little ducts,
don't we?' he trills in a conversation about female organs and hormones.
Having invited a woman to tell all in front of the audience, he slowly humil-
iates her: 'and they squirt, don't they, in embarrassing places?' He plays the
role of maternal confidante, only to attack the women in the audience with
alacrity, undermining their spectatorial and sexual autonomy. Here the
character of Dame Edna draws directly on the traditionally misogynistic

CULTURAL STUDIES theme paper: cultural vulnerability

figure of the pantomime dame as a conservative historical force (Fantasia,
forthcoming). Over the years this superstar performer has covered up the
cracks in his woman's disguise, so that she is now a smooth, highly con-
structed replica of her former self.^
Not only does Humphries produce a perfected copy of a woman but he
does not allow his status as a man in charge to be questioned by the audi-
ence. He explains: 'they came in as adults, individuals; and then you reduce
them to the level of childish obedience. So in the end, they will do the most
infantile things' (Lahr, 1984: 59). His popularity may reside in the desire of
audiences to submit to regressive patterns of torment and pleasure inflicted
by a figure who is both cruel mother and detached father. Edna thus rein-
forces rather than disturbs gender binaries in her show. Barry Humphries
has become an increasingly orthodox figure in Australian political culture
as well as an established representative of the arts and international com-
mentator; Dame Edna, predictably, has declared herself to be against an
Australian republic. What may once have contested the social mores of
postwar suburban Australia has become conservative; in this cross-dresser,
gender parody is no longer critical.

Incomplete performance
Perhaps there are other ways of thinking about the performative appropri-
ation of gender as a resistive mode of practice. Monique Wittig, well known
for her work on the lesbian body' (1976) and the claim 'One is Not Born
a Woman' (1992), has also researched gender disruption through theatre.
She and her collaborator Sande Zeig started a theatre for 'lesbian actors'
whose gestures would be neither masculine nor feminine (Zeig, 1985).
Wittig wanted to discover whether there might be a lesbian language of
gesture - that is, a bodily language that does not predicate itself on a nor-
mative heterosexuality. Rather than impersonating one or other sex, actors
were to perform a multiplicity of roles that would subvert notions of a
definitive sexual identity as well as masculine pleasure in spectacle. For
Wittig, feminism has involved a "strategy of reappropriation and subversive
redeployment of precisely those "values' (or gestures) that have belonged
to the masculine domain'(Butler, 1990a: 126). Manipulating the signifi-
cations of the body was one way to enact a challenge to phallocentric fields
of representation. Wittig's 'lesbian actor' was not intended as a category
necessarily linked to sexual preference, but rather as a position open to
anyone who reappropriates gestural codes to the point where they no longer
denote a fixed sex for a particular character. (Don Quixote can become Red
Riding Hood, for instance.) Wittig thus proposes a performative, as well as
critical, model for manipulating gender signifiers.
Although Butler only partially acknowledges theatre as a mode of investi-
gation, she has argued for a proliferation of performative acts that can
parody or mock naturalized gender divisions. The transvestite does 'more
than express the distinction between sex and gender ; rather, he/she chal-
lenges, 'at least implicitly, the distinction between appearance and reality !!!!!!

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS 489

 that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity'
(199()b: 278). There can be no recourse to an essential 'sex' which is then
expressed by gender, because 'the transvestite's gender is as fully real as
anvone whose performance complies with social expectations' (278).
Transvestism thus undermines the notion of a true or original sex, thereby
exposing the inevitably artificial and restrictive nature of gender identity.
Yet not all gender parody is 'troubling'; the transvestite entertainer, as in the
case of Barry Humphries, may reproduce, impersonate and exaggerate the
feminine in a way that is seductive but not unsettling of gender norms.
While drag performances are often associated with the imitation of the
feminine, the repetition and modification of gestures may also, however,
destabilize fixed notions of masculinity. Whereas traditional theatre often
relies on notions of identity embodied through narrative, genre and char-
acter, dance explicitly draws our attention to such bodily signifiers as move-
ment, gesture and costume. Thus the work of Pina Bausch, choreographer
at the Wuppertaler DanzTeatr in Germany, distinctively tests the bound-
aries between everyday ritual and stylized movement. Although Bausch
does not identify herself as a feminist artist, her investigation of the social
codes inherent in masculine and femmine gesture frequently exposes the
oppression and commodification of women. As Elizabeth Wright notes,
"she reveals the masquerade that both sexes have to perform in order to
survive as gendered subiects'( 1989: 117). Bausch does this by asking her
dancers to repeat in real time phrases of movement that they have often
generated themselves. The excess of articulation generated by individuating
and framing these physical gestures can evoke intense emotional responses
not only in the audience, but also in the dancing subject.
In one sequence from Chantal Akerman's (1986) film featuring Bausch's
company in rehearsal as well as on stage, a female announcer welcomes us
to a performance where rows of men and women dressed as ballet dancers
are waiting. A male dancer comes forward, dressed in a ballet gown that is
not the usual young girl's pink, but rather a sombre black. It does not do
up at the back, it does not fit - the seams are splitting. S/he is under pres-
sure to perform, s/he wants to show us that s/he can dance. S/he must do
these difficult and absurd steps of the classical ballet. S/he must clear the
space of its clutter before s/he can dance, so s/he yells at everyone 'to move
the chairs' S/he dances frantically to the limits of his/her technical ability.
S/he asks of the audience, vulnerable in an aspiration to fulfil its desire:
what more must I show you? How can this body reveal itself more, must
woman dance as a sublime being? S/he collapses, s/he breaks down: 'I can't
do any more'
The performance appears uncontrolled, the performer appearing to lose
him/herself. While this performance parodies the ballerma, it does not offer
the spectator a unified text/body/meaning of man/woman. The actor's
status as virtuoso performer is disrupted by a display of frantic and futile
gestures and an inglorious anger. His performance exposes the oppressive
fictions of balletic femininity, at the same time as the frantic micro-
sequences of bodily acts disturb the compulsory division of gestures into

490 CULTURAL STUDIES

masculine/feminine. The question remains: is the actor in control of his
breakdown or is there real anger.' Is this a critique of feminine performance
from the perspective of the male subject? Or, alternatively, from the per-
spective of the female choreographer? The spectator must consider all these
possibilities.
Australian actor Reg Livermore also manipulates the juxtaposition of
ballet dancer and male performer in his appearance as The leading male
prima ballerina of the Australian Rules Ballet' ('Australian Rules' refers to
Australian football). This figure appears in one of the sketches in his very
successful vaudeville show The Betty Blokk-Bnster follies. Livermore
wears 'toe shoes, football socks, a tu-tu, football guernsey and a swan head-
dress. He is very ocker, not too bright and he swears, spits, scratches his
backside and dances on point'(Fletcher, 1995: 14). The sketch revolves
around the tensions and rivalry that circulate in the demanding perform-
ance domains of both ballet and football, posing the question: which is
really tougher? Livermore is, in fact, a fine dancer and when he takes to his
toes he begins to demonstrate his prowess. Yet the spotlight refuses to
follow him and he keeps ending up in stage darkness. He also erupts in
anger and swears with a peculiarly Australian vigour, combining se.xual
innuendo with crude repetition.
This breakdown further stretches the credibility of this ballet dancer-
cum-football player. Both dancers and football players serve as cultural
icons, attracting public admiration for their disciplined control of their
actions and bodies. The football player, however, is allowed to express
anger in a socially sanctioned form by shouting at other players and at the
referee. The ballet dancer, on the other hand, is expected to remain mute,
silently complicit with the role she performs. Both forms of spectacle are in
the business of normalizing gender identities and constructing two different
kinds of viewing public. By combining these two representative figures and
showing their equivalences and excesses, Livermore subverts the regulatory
authority of gender.
Both Bausch's dancer and Livermore could be described as instances of
incomplete performance. They create and expose key elements of an ideal-
ized femininity, while simultaneously destabilizing the notion of a cohesive
and controlling male identity behind the feminine mask (it is here that they
differ most clearly from Barry Humphries). Rather, one is confronted with
an excess of signification which dramatically exemplifies Butler's claim:
Verfügung, Aufforderung
'The injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a variety
of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the
injunction by which they are generated'( 1990a: 145). Sign systems (includ-
erbringen, erweisen
ing gestural, spatial and vestimentary codes) can serve to render gender
incoherent, even as the shifting between genres of film and theatre, high art
and popular culture, rehearsal and stage, vocal expletives and gesture,
deliberately invite the spectator's attention. In repeating the socially hegem-
onic, the performer does not simply reiterate its power, but rather points to
some of the cultural and material boundaries associated with particular
bodies. Unable to disguise himself adequately in a feminized costume, the

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS 491

 pnto u r thereby reveals the failure of a masculinity that would give him
' and control over appearance.
This incomplete or confused overacting of gender can also be found in
other popular settings. Some years ago, a group of actors from West Theatre
Ml Melbourne founded the Essendon Policewomen's Marching Band, an
Itinerant street performance that has become a favourite at agricultural
shows and festivals hoth in Australia and the United States. The perform-
ers draw upon a stock range of culturally entrenched gender identifications,
which they then disorder in marvellous carnivalesque fashion. Essendon is
the home of an 'Aussie Rules' football team and is perceived as the average,
middle-class Australian suburb (coincidentally bordering on Edna
F\ erat;e's Moonee Ponds). The police are often disliked as authority figures
in Australia, \vhi]c policfivo/ne/i are relatively rare and regarded as 'unfem-
mine'; and Marching Bands are associated with quasi-military groups and
twirling batons in public processions. Out of these signifiers was created a
I atin American-style musical cabaret of surly men and women who roamed
outdoor locations. Dressed in policewomen's uniforms and laddered stock-
ings or droopy socks, with all manner of wigs and make-up (including fake
tattoos), thev would routinely stop for brief sketches, in which 'Mavis'
would be lined up for 'lessons in domestic economy on the end of a stretchy
rope. The burlesque gags played on, and off, the audience's uncertainty as
to whether these grotesque feminine figures were really men or women or
even disorderly police officers.
A similar subversion of gender stereotypes takes place in the hugely suc-
c e s s f u l film Priscilla, (Jueen of the Desert (]994). H e r e t h e g e n r e of t h e r o a d
m()\ le IS taken over b)' a troupe of Jrag queens on a flamboyant journey
from inner suburban Sydney to the central Australian desert. The film
unashamedlv celebrates transvestophilia while also dealing sensitively with
the life of the gynemimetic via its seemingly inconsequential plot. The
queens camp it up through a range of encounters that address pervasive
mvthic symbols of rural Australia - the country town, the pub (hotel bar),
the Aboriginal community and the mining town. Their extravagant cos-
tumes are crucial to the film s parodistic spirit, seizing upon and comically
exaggerating other icons of Australianness - the thong, the Sydney opera
house, emblematic fauna and so on. The criticism levelled at Tootsie by
Elaine Showalter (1987) seems irrelevant here, since these boys (best known
as straight male actors in other roles) are for the most part not trying to
usurp the role and position of women or indeed to 'pass' as women in any
convincing way.
Local critics were initially enthusiastic about this film but seem currently
undecided as to whether it represents a weakening portrait of national char-
acter. When they complain that the film shows the ugly side of Australian
life rather than 'searching for certain truths and meanings about what it is
to be an Australian (The Australian, 29 October 1994), they appear to have
missed the point of this troubling parody altogether. What is perhaps most
successful about Priscilla is its disruption of vernacular representations and
images of Australian masculinity associated with such figures as Paul

492 CULTURAL STUDIES

Hogan. Towards the end of the film, when Hugo Weaving appears in
rawhide trousers and Akubra hat, every image of the Australian stockman,
he looks for the first time as if he is really m drag.
The film has also, however, provoked critical responses for its reproduc-
tion of gender and racial stereotypes. Some gays and lesbians tried to dis-
associate themselves from the film, regarding it as a misrepresentation of
their cultural identities through its exclusive focus on a highly spectacular
element. Furthermore, the Centre for Philippine Concerns-Australia has
condemned the film's representation of Cynthia, a Filipina unhappily
married to a rural car mechanic, as a "gold-digger, prostitute, sex enter-
tainer, bad wife, manic depressive, alcoholic and vulgar'(T/7(? Australian, 8
October 1994). Thus Cynthia interrupts the unappreciated entertainment
of the drag queens in a country hotel with an erotic stage show that includes
popping ping-pong balls at a cheering all-male audience. This "real woman
both shocks and usurps the position of the drag pretenders, while at the
same time invoking deeper anxieties about sexual exploitation and anti-
Asian sentiment in Australia. In narrative terms, however, she is not without
power; she chooses to come to Australia, even if it turns out not quite to be
what she expected, and the arrival of the three protagonists in turn provides
the catalyst for her to defiantly leave her husband. This brief episode in the
film displaces attention from the celebratory performances of the frocked
female impersonators to an under class whose political concerns continue
to need examination.**
As a popular culture text, then, Priscilla has engendered multiple reac-
tions to its disturbing as well as pleasurable performances that are fabri-
cated from the stereotypes and myths of urban and rural Australia. The
willingness of Australian audiences to laugh at themselves in this film, in
spite of discomfort about its representation of an appropriate masculinity,
has created an opportunity for community debate on different gender issues
Verbreitung
in the context of mainstream cultural politics. The popular dissemination
of images of gender transgression cannot, in other words, simply be reduced
to evidence of mass-market co-option. And it is precisely because the per-
formances in Prisctlla remain ambiguous that they demand analysis, since
the actions of Cynthia and of the other women in the film are indeed as sex-
ually and semiotically loaded as those of the three queens.

The politics of performance

Butler's original emphasis on "drag' was strategic and not intended to be
adopted literally as the quintessential model for subverting gender. None
the less, Butler s arguments have had a strong influence on both activist and
performative projects in Australia, indicating that even seemingly esoteric
theories can have politically powerful effects. Thus in a recent Australian
film on transgender politics. On Becoming, members of the Transvestite
Liberation Coalition in Sydney quote Butler to authorize their own refusal
to co-operate with prevailing medical and legal definitions of gender {On
Becoming, 1993).

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS 493

 However, Butler has been troubled by the convergence of her own argu-
ments with the current media obsession with what I've termed 'trans-
vestophilia and gynemimesis'. Her subsequent book Bodies that Matter
(1993) partially attempts to clarify the critical potential of a performative
theory of gender. Transvestism, she now suggests, should not be seen as
'exemplary of performativity' (230), nor is it a matter of choice. Gender is
not optional, but enacted in the context of binding conventions that precede
and condition the formation of the subject. Heterosexuality remains the
normative condition underpinning social discourses - legal, medical, peda-
gogic, theatrical - whose legislative powers regulate the appearance of
bodies.
Butler thus cautions against overestimating the effectiveness of perform-
ance as a strategy within feminist theory. Yet she fails to account adequately
for the problematic question of agency: how is change possible if subjects
are already written? Here Butler's approach to performance as discourse
seems insufficiently attentive to the specificity and materiality of particular
performances. Susan Bordo writes, 'Butler's analyses of how gender is con-
stituted and subverted take the body as just such a text whose meanings can
be analyzed in abstraction from experience, history, material practice, and
context' (1993: 292).
In her essay 'Critically queer (1993), however, Butler offers a more
nuanced analysis of the meanings and political communities associated with
the term 'queer' Here she acknowledges the theatricalization of queer
activism as a positive contribution to policy changes in the AIDS deba'-*;.
She also, however, suggests that the denaturalizing of gender at the drag
balls in Pans is Burning may be less significant than the film's documen-
tation of alternative patterns of kmship within the black community. Ulti-
mately, Butler seems to be increasingly uneasy about the politics of
performance: 'The reach of. . signifiability cannot be controlled by the one
who utters or writes, smce such productions are not owned by the one who
utters them. They contmue to signify m spite of . . . (1993: 241).
Such questions clearly cannot be resolved beyond the particularities of
specific texts, sites and bodies. Thus the value of performance theory lies in
investigating the accumulation and coding of stylized repetitive acts,
whether masculine or feminine, to be found in many and diverse 'scripts'.
This form of analysis acknowledges that gestures, voices, clothing and
scripts contribute to social, ritualized and mediated patterns of communi-
cation as well as shaping the specific interactions between particular bodies.
Research into the performances of gender, whether their context be the law,
cinema, academia, popular culture or theatre, requires deciphering the con-
ventions through which particular representations of masculinity and fem-
ininity are given power.
Here the actual practice of performance, m workshops and discussions,
can provide a useful supplement to the critique of existing texts. Individuals
can dismantle taken-for-granted social conventions by not showing what is
said; dis/covering what is not said; acting not like a woman; showing there
is no semblance to a woman. In this way, bodies can resist the seduction of

494 CULTURAL STUDIES

imitation by questioning what is already an image, a mask or a reflection
of gender, by undoing the performative acts of gender as opposed to con-
structing genders. Sometimes these gaps are revealed in non-mimetic
actions or non-lovely bodies: a falter in the voice, a breaking sound, a
hiccup, a stifled (laugh), a slurred tone, choking; bodies which are discon-
nected, disjointed, segmented, dismembered, desynchronized; clothes and
masks which undress, strip off, are taken off; when someone loses face;
about-faces; is effaced or effacing; has no front; is faceless; and the per-
formance is an undecided w/hole, a between-ness.
It is such imperfections of representation in performance which can
expose the fictions of gender identity. When Bob Hawke, the one time Aus-
tralian Prime Minister, cried in front of television cameras at a time of per-
sonal vulnerability, the image of his quivering face was widely circulated.
While an unusual response for a prominent male public figure, it did not
undermine his popularity; rather, viewers sought to make sense of the
relationship between his public role and private life. This unrehearsed
moment nevertheless upset the power of normative significations linking
masculinity, authority and nation. It is this kind of sliding between cat-
egories which can be most provocative in performance, markmg a point of
rupture in the reproduction of gender.
The fascination with cross-dressing in feminist and cultural theory may
be reaching its end, yet it has usefully focused attention on the relationship
between differently sexed bodies and processes of cultural identification.
Here the value of performance for cultural studies lies in its interest in the
incompleteness of identity, the moments when gender fails to perform a
'mimesis' well, or when a 'philia becomes an odium. In performance actors
are not simply vehicles of discursive regimes, but material bodies differen-
tially positioned in space and time - bodies able to demonstrate both the
power as well as the fragility of prevailing fictions of gender.

Notes
1 Thus Mariorie Garber regards the transvestite as 'an index of category destabil-
isation' (1992:36), while Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1988) explore cross-
is extensively discussed and celebrated in much recent theatre criticism (Freed-
man, 1991; Kaite, 1988; Dolan, 1985; Davy, 1989; Ferris, 1993), while )udith
Butler (1990a) has influentially argued for the cultural significance of drag as
potentially troubling gender categories.
2 Froma Zeitlin's discussion of the powers of mimesis m her essay on 'Aristo-
phanes' Thesmophoriazousae' (1981) is exemplary in drawing out the complex-
ity of imitations and the price attached to mimesis.
3 1970s feminism, with its emphasis on no make-up and other refusals of conven-
tionalized feminine appearance, was clearly a rebellion against these over-codings
of the mask.
4 The performance event was called 'Dance' and was organized by Jude Walton for
the Green Mill Dance Project, Melbourne 1993.
5 Kath Weston's analysis (1993) of a lesbian prom night describes the varied
pleasures of appearing as butch or femme, while arguing forcefully for the

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS 495

 exaiiimation of social relations rather than performance alone. 'Gender no more
resides in gesture or apparel than it lies buried in bodies and psyches' (17).
6 1 he term 'eonisni' as a synonym for cross-dressing was coined by Havelock Ellis
(l'-JUi), referencing the infamous eighteenth-century Chevalier d'Eon de Beau-

7 Sc, precise is this impersonation that Edna Everage look-nlikes frequently appear
at parties, and her characteristic glasses are available in costume shops.
S The Australian media has subsequently given considerable attention to this issue
(see, for example. The Anstrulidii, 6 May 1995), and changes in migration law

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FILMS
On Becoming (1993) Director Teresa Rizzo, Murdoch University and Eilm and
Television Institute (Western Australia).
Pans is Burning (1990) Director Jennie Livingstone. Off White Productions, dist.
Miramax.
Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Danztheater (1986) Director Chantal Akerman.
A2-BRT-INA-RTBf-RMArts.
Priscilla. Queen of the Desert (1994) Director Stephen Elliot. Latent Image/Specific
Films Production., dist. Polygram Filmed Fntertainment.

TRANSVESTOPHILIA AND GYNEMIMESIS 497