Mirroring men: the actress in drag

Bratton, Jacky

doi:10.1017/ccol9780521846066.013

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Bratton argues that the most complex acting challenged gender binaries and masculine power, and even notions of the 'real'. 25 This might prompt us to think again about those later Irish parts. In Myles, Conn, and Shaun, Boucicault gave the stage Irishman a new appeal: how did this relate to the characters' origin in an ambiguously gendered boy?…”

Section: Cross-dressingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Andy Blake; or, the Irish Diamond

Meer¹,

Zetter²

2022

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

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This scholarly edition of Andy Blake includes an introduction arguing for its claim to be Dion Boucicault’s first Irish drama. It also emphasises Agnes Robertson’s part in developing Boucicault’s comic heroes, while playing a boy. Consideration of the French source text reveals a connection with a revolutionary figure, the gamin de Paris, and demonstrates how Boucicault’s adaptation added a backdrop of British military imperialism.

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Section: Cross-dressingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Andy Blake; or, the Irish Diamond

Meer¹,

Zetter²

2022

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

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“…Women, in other words, perform on stage in male clothes, or parts or versions of male clothing, for various reasons and with extremely different effects at different points in the history of the actress. 5 As Leslie Ferris has observed, such performances are too complex to be reduced to single critical readings or summed up in generalisations. Alluding to Roland Barthes' concept of the 'writerly text' in his S/Z (1970), she posits that transvestite theatrecross-dressing in performanceis an exemplary source of the writerly text, a work that forces the reader/spectator to see multiple meanings in the very act of reading itself, of listening, watching a performance.…”

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confidence: 99%

Is She A Woman?: Alternative Critical Frameworks for Understanding Cross-Dressing and Cross-Gender Casting on the Victorian Stage

Eltis¹

2023

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

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As the study of nineteenth-century theatre has expanded over the decades, the extent and popularity of cross-dressing and cross-gender casting on the Victorian stage is being revealed. Yet there is an enduring tendency in Victorian theatre criticism to situate transvestite performances within broad-brush assumptions of binary attitudes towards gender amongst theatre audiences. Universalised gender norms and assumptions of binary thinking have long been discarded in critical analysis of Victorian fiction, and their lingering influence on Victorian theatre studies has arguably been unhelpful. Building on the vital pioneering work of Jacky Bratton, this article will focus on the careers of Louisa Cranstoun Nisbett and Mary Anne Keeley, two prominent and acclaimed mid-century actresses, drawing on reviews, memoirs, and commentaries on their performances to attempt to construct alternative theories for how they were viewed and understood. The critical and popular success of their performances and the language and ideas employed by reviewers and commentators to record and explain them reveal far more flexible, multiple, fluid, complex, and imaginative attitudes to gender roles and identities than allowed for in established critical narratives.

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‘Slap On! Slap Ever!’: Victorian Pantomime, Gender Variance, and Cross-Dressing

Davis¹

2014

New Theatre Quarterly

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In this article Jim Davis considers gender representation in Victorian pantomime alongside variance in Victorian life, examining male and female impersonation in pantomime within the context of cross-dressing (often a manifestation of gender variance) in everyday life. While accepting that male heterosexual, gay, and lesbian gazes may have informed the reception of Victorian pantomime, he argues for the existence of a transgendered gaze and a contextual awareness of gender variant behaviour, with a more nuanced view of cross-dressed performance. The principal boy role and its relationship to variant ways of seeing suggests its appeal goes beyond what Jacky Bratton calls the 'boy', a notion she applies to the dynamic androgyny of male impersonators in burlesque, music hall, and occasionally melodrama. For the principal 'boy' is clearly transmuting back into a girl, at least physically. Equally, while the dame role is usually unambiguously male, Dan Leno's late-Victorian dames seem based on observation of real women. There has been enormous scholarly interest in theatrical cross-dressing, but also a partial tendency to associate it with what Marjorie Garber calls 'an emerging gay and lesbian identity'. This is appropriate, but should not obscure the relevance of cross-dressed performances to an emerging transgender identity, even if such an identity has partially been hidden from history. Any discussion of cross-dressing in Victorian pantomime should heed the multifaceted functions of cross dressing in its society and the multiplicity of gendered perspectives and gazes that this elicited.

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Mirroring men: the actress in drag

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Andy Blake; or, the Irish Diamond

Andy Blake; or, the Irish Diamond

Is She A Woman?: Alternative Critical Frameworks for Understanding Cross-Dressing and Cross-Gender Casting on the Victorian Stage

‘Slap On! Slap Ever!’: Victorian Pantomime, Gender Variance, and Cross-Dressing

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