p. 3 Therefore, most taboos against cross-dressing, except when they are rooted in religious belief, are related to ‘elemental’ or ‘fundamental’ concepts of gender than to codes of conduct and social status.‘gender role’

p. 5 The problem with the masquerade approach to gender is that its distinction between the real and the false is almost Manichaean (or perhaps Platonic, in its implication that the real is better, more authentic, than the assumed). It is tied to the sociologist’s search for a ‘fixed code’ or ‘deep structure’ underlying surfasse behaviour, but since this deep structure has to be imputed from surfasse elements and cannot be known except through them, the whole exercise becomes a circular one. Western thought has a tendency to seek the static and constant behind the fluid and mutable, a tendency Norbert Elias has called ‘process-reduction’, whereby ‘the changeless aspects of all phenomena [are] interpreted as most real and significant’.

p. 5 A less judgemental approach was to return to the theatrical processes of creating or building a ‘role’ and to hypothesize the ‘performative’ nature of gender, a thesis expounded most fully by Judith Butler. In this postulation, we are not dissembling when we perform gender: it may be ‘unnatural’, na artífice insofar as we created it, but with its own integrity and not simply a superfícies overlying some other reality. This applies to men as well to women. Gender is no longer a disguise that has to be stripped away, but a congeries of actions, statements, appearances, constantly in flux. Transvestism is simply na appliance to enhance the performativity.

p. 11 [...] the transvestite in the theatre dows not confute or elude categories; it creates new ones. The actor, cross-dressed or not, resembles the nadleehi or derdache of the Navajo, ‘simultaneously male, female and hermaphrodite’, or Nanabush, the central hero figure in Cree mythology, described by the gay Cree dramatist Tomson Highway as ‘neither exclusively male nor exclusively female, or... both simultaneously’. No potentiality is foreclosed.

The categories themselves, rather than being in crisis, are ignored for fresh configurations of gender never seen outside the theatre. The onnagata and wakashu of Kabuki, the dame and principal boy of English pantomime are only superficially connected to any off-stage gender categories. [...] Even drag queens of pre-Disney 42nd Street wished not to appear as woman but as larger than life, as ultra-glamorous, in-your-face superwoman.

Stage gendered creatures are chimeras which elude the standard taxonomies and offer alternatives to the limited possibilitie of lived reality. That these alternatives cannot exist outside the realm of the theatre makes them all the more cogente to the imagination.