Vested Interests

Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety

Marjorie Garber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136615771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Beginning with the bold claim, "There can be no culture without the transvestite, " Marjorie Garber explores the nature and significance of cross-dressing and of the West's recurring fascination with it. Rich in anecdote and insight, Vested Interests offers a provocative and entertaining view of our ongoing obsession with dressing up--and with the power of clothes.

I

TRANVESTITE LOGICS

1

DRESS CODES, OR THE THEATRICALITY OF DIFFERENCE

The distinction between men and women is an important matter to the state, and so dress and ornament differ according to regulations. Nowadays women are using weapons as ornaments; in fact, this is prodigious in the extreme. Following this, the Empress Jia affair ensued.

Gan Bao, Soushen ji (Seeking the Spirits), a record of anomalies and portents in fourth century China¹

Dress Codes and Sumptuary Laws

All over Europe in the medieval and early modern periods sumptuary laws were promulgated by cities, towns, and nation states, attempting, with apparently indifferent success, to regulate who wore what, and on what occasion. The term “sumptuary” is related to “consumption”; the laws were designed in part to regulate commerce and to support local industries, as well as to prevent—or at least to hold to a minimum—what today would be known as “conspicuous consumption,” the flaunting of wealth by those whose class or other social designation made such display seem transgressive.

The idea of a “sumptuary law” designed to regulate dress may seem at first an alien concept to modern sensibilities, but only if we think of it in national or civic rather than more local terms. I was brought up with both written and unwritten “dress codes” that seemed as rigid as any Elizabethan edict. In my middle-class, suburban community girls were not permitted to wear pants to school, except for “snow pants” in excessively inclement weather. Boys, if I am remembering correctly, were not allowed to wear shoes without socks. (That girls could wear shoes without socks, and boys could wear pants, makes clear the fact that regulation, rather than another vestimentary or anatomical logic, was the main object here.)

At college and at some private boarding schools, young women were expected to wear skirts or dresses to dinner, and young men, shirts and ties, or ties and jackets. (During the time when this system was breaking down, when I was at Swarthmore College in the early sixties, several daredevil men in my class appeared at dinner with ties and jackets, but no shirts; people tell me that at other institutions undergoing similar changes male students came to dinner wearing only jackets and ties.)

These “dress codes,” remnants of which are still in force in certain restaurants and private clubs, had as their apparent motivation the imposition of discipline, with the implication that you were how you dressed (and would be less likely to hurl buttered rolls across the room if you were wearing a jacket and tie), and also a sense of hierarchy: the school board, or the Deans, or the House Committee, ordained a certain set of behaviors, which happened in this case to be vestimentary. Your submission to those rules signified your acceptance of your position within the hierarchy—which was, to borrow a baseball term, low and inside. Those who preferred to be high and outside declined the hegemonic structure (and membership in the club), and often manifested overt sartorial signs of this self-designated exclusion—by, for example, wearing black, or growing their hair long.

At times of national strife or social change, as, for instance, with the onset of protests against the Vietnam War, aspects of dress often become emblematic of political positions. It would have been surprising to find leftists in those years wearing bow ties, or members of the Young Americans for Freedom sporting black clothes, long hair, or shaggy beards. Yet, as anyone who has gone through these rites of passage can attest, the political/sartorial and the social/sartorial (or even, perhaps especially, the pubescent/sartorial) have no clear sequence of causality across the board. A young man might begin growing a beard in college because it was forbidden by his high school (or by his parents) and find that his facial hair had become, without his fully being aware of the fact, a politically powerful sign. Sometimes the politics followed the fashion, and sometimes the fashion followed the politics.

Nor are such practices now clearly out of date. In fact dress codes for social regulatory purposes are making something of a comeback, especially in schools and communities where discipline and self-respect are constantly being renegotiated—and where income levels are low. Frank Mickens, the principal of Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, made headlines when he banned gold jewelry, removable gold caps for teeth, expensive shearling and leather coats, and personal tape players for his students, who come from neighborhoods that are largely poor and black. A few months later Mickens instituted a shirt-and-tie rule for boys at the school. In accordance with hierarchy, this rule was to be applied first to senior boys, and on Fridays only; a few months later, once the community had become accustomed to this style for its eldest male cohort, all boys would be expected to wear shirts and ties, and not only on Fridays, but every school day. “When the juniors see the seniors doing it, they’ll want to be down [i.e., in fashion],” commented one senior man. “Then when the sophomores see the juniors, they’ll want to be down with them.”²

Mickens, a veteran of the letter-of-the-law school of adolescent rule evaders, specified light-colored shirts, and sought donations of suitable shirts and ties from local clothiers so that even the poorest students could comply with the rules. He also initiated talks with girls at the school about a dress code for them, while noting that the male population was in more immediate need of guidance and support. Although the imposition of a mandatory dress code was technically prohibited by school board policy, the idea of the code was enthusiastically supported by both parents and students. One mother told her son that “kids carry themselves a little differently with a shirt and tie on. They walk with a little more respect for themselves,” and students suggested that the shirt-and-tie rule would add discipline, and “help people see themselves entering the working world.”³ On Dress for Success Day, the first day the suggested code went into effect, almost all the senior boys wore neckties to school.

As these examples indicate, modern dress codes differ somewhat from sumptuary laws in that their general objective seems to be to class up, to enhance upward mobility by requiring a higher standard of dress, whereas the sumptuary laws enacted in Western Europe from the late medieval through the early modern period were designed to keep down social climbers, to keep the rising social groups in their sartorial place.⁴ In any case, however, when gender enters into such codes, as, inevitably, it does, it is usually as a subset of class, status, rank or wealth—that is to say, as a further concomitant of either the subordination or the commodification of women. If women are conceived of as “status symbols” (or, more recently, as “trophy wives”) in their dress, adding to the perceived social luster of their husbands or fathers, sumptuous dress for women becomes a desideratum. If, on the other hand, it is deemed important to put women in their place, rules like “no women in pants” or “ladies must wear hats” or “any woman entering a church must have her shoulders covered” come into force.

Another way in which sumptuary laws may appear to differ from modern dress codes is in their overtly economic and nationalistic or patriotic purposes. Although one of the aims (or, at least, the results) of sumptuary legislation was the subordination of social classes to one another and the sartorial encoding of visible markers for rank and degree, another, related aim was to promote national industries and products and to discourage, at certain times when trade balances were unfavorable, the widespread importation of foreign goods. But even a brief glance at the social history of dress in the twentieth century suggests that political and economic motives are always at work, no matter how much “fashion” may seem to have a will of its own.

According to the New York Times, for example, an extremely rigorous dress code remains in force for schoolchildren in contemporary Japan, one of the most highly regulated and regimented of modern societies, through both junior and senior high school. The rules prescribe every aspect of clothing and appearance, from shoes to hair, including the exact width of the pants cuff for boys—with allowances for overweight students—the number of buttons and tucks in pants and skirts and the number of eyelets in shoes. Girls are forbidden to wear ribbons or bright gloves, or to have permanent waves. Boys’ hair must be cut short enough not to touch their collars, their ears, or their eyebrows. When a young boy wore pants about one inch narrower than regulation width on a school trip, the article reported, his teacher called his mother, who traveled 370 miles with a new pair of pants and wept in apology before the teacher. Only recently have student protests been vigorous enough for this practice to gain publicity in the West.⁵

In the West as well fashion, if not regulation, has followed economic contingencies in this century. The shorter skirts for women that came in during World War II saved cloth while they afforded women a new look (and perhaps a greater mobility). The invention of nylon in the 1930’s, and the replacement of “silk stockings” with “nylons,” corresponds to a war industry advance in chemistry. A synthetic fabric designed for parachutes turned out to have the flexibility and strength requisite for women’s hosiery, and the silk stockings celebrated by Cole Porter as a metonym of class privilege were democratized, after a fashion, into the nylons bestowed upon civilians by GIs abroad during the war. Both kinds of stockings, however, remained favorite kinds of “payment” to women, by men: what was democratized by this invention was class, not gender. But stockings themselves had, in fact, crossed the gender line a long time before. Silk stockings appear first in England in the wardrobe of Henry VIII, and only much later become primarily associated with women’s dress.⁶

As our discussion of sumptuary legislation will make clear, the regulation of gender and rank through dress codes can be a slippery business at a time of widespread social change. Consider what happens when women are admitted to that most regulation-conscious of contexts, the all-male military academy.

The first class of women to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1976 quickly became subject to institutional gender paranoia—and to their own. At the Plebe Hop, a required social event held in September, the Academy brought in a rock and roll band, only to register its consternation at the sight of “mirror-image couples dancing in short hair and dress gray trousers.”⁷ The rule book was swiftly amended; women were still permitted to attend future hops in trousers, but if they wanted to dance they were required to wear uniform skirts.

The Full Dress uniforms supplied for these first female cadets were, significantly, different from those given to the men. The trousers had no back pockets, and the women’s coats, unlike the traditional male tailcoats, were cut off at the waist. Both sartorial alterations were intended—or at least so the new cadets speculated—to deemphasize the curve of a woman’s buttocks, but the changes in fact called attention to gender differences they were designed to conceal. Three years later the Academy changed its mind—or, at least, its regulations—and issued the women coats with tails.

One female plebe had her face scrubbed till it burned by a superior officer convinced that she was wearing “blush” (though he didn’t know the term). Yet a few months later, during Plebe-Parent Weekend, the women cadets were summoned to a mandatory two-and-a-half hour lecture sponsored by the Revlon company, in which professional makeup artists taught them how to apply cosmetics. Apparently the administration had been disconcerted, once again, by the sight of women in trousers and short haircuts—cut weekly by Academy regulation—who didn’t look like women. That this special instruction took place during a parental visit suggests that the Academy brass were looking at the new cadets with different, and defensive, eyes.

Nor was this double vision limited to those who set and enforced the dress regulations. A member of the pioneer entering class reported that on her first trip off-post since becoming a cadet she ran in the rain to a local fast food shop. By the time she arrived, her uniform and short hair were drenched; the young woman behind the counter took one look at her and asked, politely, “Can I help you, sir?” Shaken, the cadet rushed out of the shop and locked herself in the bathroom, staring in the mirror. “Did I look like a man? What was West Point doing to me?” Her distress was the greater because the experience marked her as a double outsider. Inside the Academy’s grounds she was regarded by hardliners as a misfit because she was a woman; outside, dressed in her military uniform, she was read as a man.

The defining and distorting presence of the “mirror” in these incidents is suggestive. Same and different; self and “other.” Just as the Academy looked at its female cadets through the eyes of the parents and the heterosexual social order, just as the woman in her new military uniform looked in the mirror and saw self-difference, saw the question of gender in the eyes of the clerk, so dress codes function in the social world and the world of social hierarchy as structures that simultaneously regulate and critique normative categories like rank (or its civilian counterpart, class) and gender. But the implications of such sartorial codes, as these examples have already suggested, cannot be limited to the social or the economic spheres. With cultural legislation comes cultural legibility, or illegibility—and with them comes, inevitably, the collective and individual paranoia on which much social and psychic life depends. It is not surprising, in view of this, to find that anxiety about cross-dressing is manifested by authoritarian structures (the Academy, the army, the absolute monarch, the local school board) as a sign and symptom of the dissolution of boundaries, and of the arbitrariness of social law and custom.

“None Shall Wear…”

The medieval and Renaissance sumptuary laws, as we have already noted, appear to have been patriotic, economic, and conservatively class-oriented; they sought to restrict the wearing of certain furs, fabrics, and styles to members of particular social and economic classes, ranks, or “states.” While protecting, at times, such native industries as the wool trade or the linen trade, and purporting, at least, to guard the public morality a...