Cross-dressing is the act of wearing clothes traditionally or stereotypically associated with a different gender. From as early as pre-modern history, cross-dressing has been practiced in order to disguise, comfort, entertain, and express oneself.
A stripper or exotic dancer is a person whose occupation involves performing striptease in a public adult entertainment venue such as a strip club. At times, a stripper may be hired to perform at private events.
The Second Sex is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. She published the work in two volumes: Facts and Myths, and Lived Experience. Some chapters first appeared in the journal Les Temps modernes.
The House on Mango Street is a 1984 novel by Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros. Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Based in part on Cisneros's own experience, the novel follows Esperanza over the span of one year in her life, as she enters adolescence and begins to face the realities of life as a young woman in a poor and patriarchal community. Elements of the Mexican-American culture and themes of social class, race, sexuality, identity, and gender are interwoven throughout the novel.
Many people have engaged in cross-dressing during wartime under various circumstances and for various motives. This has been especially true of women, whether while serving as a soldier in otherwise all-male armies, while protecting themselves or disguising their identity in dangerous circumstances, or for other purposes.
Cross-dressing and drag in film and television has followed a long history of cross-dressing and drag on the English stage, and made its appearance in the early days of the silent films. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel brought the tradition from the English music halls when they came to the United States with Fred Karno's comedy troupe in 1910. Both Chaplin and Laurel occasionally dressed as women in their films. Even the beefy American actor Wallace Beery appeared in a series of silent films as a Swedish woman. The Three Stooges, especially Curly, sometimes appeared in drag in their short films. The tradition has continued for many years, usually played for laughs. Only in recent decades have there been dramatic films which included cross-dressing, possibly because of strict censorship of American films until the mid-1960s. One early exception was Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Murder!, where the murderer is a transvestite who wears particularly frilly dresses and petticoats. Cross-gender acting, on the other hand, refers to actors or actresses portraying a character of the opposite gender.
Norah Mary Vincent was an American writer. She was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a quarterly columnist on politics and culture for the national gay news magazine The Advocate. She was a columnist for The Village Voice and Salon.com. Her writing appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, New York Post, The Washington Post and other periodicals. She gained particular attention in 2006 for her book Self-Made Man, detailing her experiences when she lived as a man for eighteen months.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture is a 2005 book by Ariel Levy that critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as "raunch culture".
Euphrosyne of Alexandria, also called Euphrosynē, was a saint who disguised herself as a male to enter a monastery and live, for 38 years, as an ascetic. Her feast day is celebrated on September 25 by the Greek Orthodox Church and Byzantine Rite Catholics, on September 27 by the Episcopal Church, and on January 16 by the Roman Catholic Church.
The strip search phone call scam was a series of incidents, mostly occurring in rural areas of the United States, that extended over a period of at least ten years, starting in 1994. The incidents involved a man calling a restaurant or grocery store, claiming to be a police officer, and then convincing managers to conduct strip searches of employees, and to perform other bizarre and humiliating acts on behalf of "the police". The calls were most often made to fast-food restaurants in small towns.
Hypnota is a supervillain appearing in DC Comics publications and related media, commonly as a recurring adversary of the superhero Wonder Woman. Created by writer William Moulton Marston and artist Harry G. Peter, the character debuted in 1944 in Wonder Woman #11 as a stage magician and human trafficker with powerful superhuman mind-control abilities. The gender presentation of her stage persona, Hypnota the Great, was that of an ostensibly male figure in Orientalized Middle-Eastern costume, complete with a false mustache and goatee. Though initially disguising her gender to deflect criminal suspicion, Hypnota made subsequent Golden Age appearances in her masculine stage garb; even after her supposedly "true" gender identity was revealed, she chose to present as a man – a move that might be understood in the 21st century as genderqueer. The Modern Age Hypnota has abandoned her false facial hair and is now depicted as a cisgender woman, albeit one who wears a somewhat masculine costume similar to her Golden Age look: a closed-front vest, salwar and a man's turban.
The portrayal of women inAmerican comic books has often been the subject of controversy since the medium's beginning. Critics have noted the roles of women as both supporting characters and lead characters are substantially more subjected to gender stereotypes, with femininity and/or sexual characteristics having a larger presence in their overall character.
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a personal travel narrative by the eighteenth-century British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity. Published by Wollstonecraft's career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson, it was the last work issued during her lifetime.
Yentl is a 1983 American romantic musical drama film directed, co-written, co-produced by, and starring American entertainer Barbra Streisand. It is based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy".
Cross-dressing as a literary motif is well attested in older literature but is becoming increasingly popular in modern literature as well. It is often associated with character nonconformity and sexuality rather than gender identity.
This article details the history of cross-dressing, the act of wearing the clothes of the sex or gender one does not identify with.
Bacha posh is an Afghan tradition in which some families will pick a daughter to live and behave as a boy. This enables the child to behave more freely: attending school, escorting her sisters in public, and working. The practice is more common among families with a large number of daughters, particularly if there are no sons. Girls raised bacha posh typically resume living as a girl around the time they hit puberty, as it becomes more difficult for them to pass.
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image.
King Kong Theory is a book by filmmaker and novelist Virginie Despentes, first published in French in 2006 by Grasset. English-language editions have been published in 2010 by The Feminist Press and in 2020 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
