Notes 1. Introduction 1. On the castrating effects on men of female laughter, see Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Castration as a metaphor refers to a man’s deepest fear that his manhood might be lost or seriously compromised. 2. Endocrinology is defined as ‘a new science that attempted to locate the essence of sex, gender, and sexuality in the secretions of the gonads’ (Meyerowitz, 2002: 16). 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others, has recognised that transgender is a particularly good reason for developing a new theory of sexuality as dis- tinct from gender (see Sedgwick, 1990: 37–8). 4. See Jagose (1996) for a useful overview of the subject. 5. Butler refers to Foucault’s work on the nineteenth-century French hermaph- rodite, Herculine Barbin, as demonstrating the inadequacy of conventional medico-legal discourse to account for the sexual practices of such people: ‘Herculine is not an “identity”, but the sexual impossibility of an identity . The linguistic conventions that produce intelligible gendered selves find their limit in Herculine precisely because she/he occasions a convergence and disorganization of the rules that govern sex/gender/desire’ (Butler, 1999: 31). 6. In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Butler had also referred to the transsexual in a limited way as representing an ambiva- lence as regards sex. 7. Janice Raymond’s lesbian feminist The Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-male (1979) had argued that ‘transsexuals are constructs of an evil phallocratic empire and were designed to invade women’s spaces and appropriate women’s power’ (see Sandy Stone, 1991: 283). 8. For Judith Butler, Aretha Franklin’s song reinforces the fiction of a natural or true gender identity, while simultaneously pointing to its constructed- ness: ‘she seems at first to suggest that some natural potential of her bio- logical sex is actualised by her participation in the cultural position of “woman” as object of heterosexual recognition. Something in her “sex” is thus expressed by her “gender” which is then fully known and consecrated within the heterosexual scene. There is no breakage, no discontinuity between “sex” as biological facticity and essence, or between gender and sexuality. Although Aretha appears to be all too glad to have her naturalness confirmed, she also seems fully and paradoxically mindful that confirm- ation is never guaranteed, that the effect of naturalness is only achieved as a consequence of that moment of heterosexual recognition. After all, Aretha sings, you make me feel like a natural woman, suggesting that this is a kind of metaphorical substitution, an act of imposture, a kind of sublime 174 Notes 175 and momentary participation in an ontological illusion produced by the mundane operation of heterosexual drag’ (Butler, 1991: 27–8). 9. The word ‘perversion’ is regularly misused in this culture. In the UK, col- loquial working-class discourses (those of tabloid newspapers, for example) frequently apply the term ‘perv’ or ‘pervy’ to what the popular culture regards as unacceptable expressions of sexuality, for example, the sexual attraction of an older man for a young woman, whereas ‘perversion’ in its strict psychological sense means ‘deviation from the “normal” sexual act when this is defined as coitus with a person of the opposite sex directed towards the achievement of orgasm by means of genital penetration’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985: 306). 10. ‘Under the hermeneutic code, we list the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed’ (Barthes, 1990: 19). 11. This and other related terms were developed by the French structuralist, Gérard Genette: for Genette, ‘intradiegetic’ describes a second-level narra- tor (or narratee), who is a character, telling (or listening to) a tale which is embedded in a primary narrative (see Genette, 1972: 238–41). However, I am using the term here in its literal sense of ‘within the diegesis or primary narrative as opposed to outside it’. 12. In S/Z, Barthes sees the search for truth in realist literature as the comple- tion of a sentence. In the dramatic theatre, according to Brecht, there is pas- sionate interest in the dénouement. Sarrasine is a dramatic story, in which the dénouement is an unveiling: ‘what constitutes the dénouement is the truth’ (Barthes, 1990: 187). The sentence of truth is completed: ‘truth is the predicate at last discovered, the subject at last provided with its comple- ment’ (ibid., 188). The subject, at least from an epic point of view, is con- stantly wandering in search of its predicate, and ‘This temporary wandering of the predicate can be described in terms of a game. The dramatic narrative is a game with two players: the snare and the truth’ (ibid.). Once the game is over, the drama has its dénouement, and the subject is united with its predicate, the discourse ‘can do nothing more than fall silent’ (ibid.). 2. Transgender in the historical imagination 1. The dangers of knowledge of the other sex is a common motif of the comedies discussed in Chapter 3. 2. As the title of Graille’s book suggests, he is principally concerned with the representation of hermaphrodites in the discourses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but like my own, his study takes full account of an essential historical background, offering a unique exploration of the evolution of thinking about hermaphrodites in the mythical, medical and legal discourses of western culture since ancient times. Graille cites a number of similar cases of hermaphrodites executed for having used the forbidden sex, including that in the early 1600s of a Scottish maidservant 176 Notes who was accused of making her master’s daughter pregnant and was tor- tured and buried alive (see Graille, 2001: 107 ff.). Hermaphrodites are still persecuted by laws which forbid them from marrying or from entering the religious life (ibid.: 175 n.123). 3. John O’Brien’s unpublished paper, ‘Betwixt and Between: Hermaphroditism and Masculinity’, also emphasises the role of the imagination in the per- ception of hermaphrodites in late sixteenth-century France, suggesting a historical continuity of this theme from the ancients through the medieval period to the European Renaissance. I am grateful to Professor O’Brien for allowing me access to his work. 4. See my Sade: the Libertine Novels and The Marquis de Sade: a Very Short Introduction. 5. For Marjorie Garber the codpiece from Renaissance theatre is a sign of gender indecisiveness, the mark of ‘seeming’, Lacan’s third term inter- posed between ‘having’ and ‘being’ the phallus – the space, as Garber argues, occupied by the transvestite (see Garber, 1993: 122). 6. In eighteenth-century England, feminine men and masculine women, known as mollies and tommies respectively, were regarded as third and fourth genders (see Trumbach, 1991: 112–13; also Norton, 1992). 3. Cross-dressing in film comedy 1. See Chapter 2 for discussion of the antiquity of this theme. The Hollywood comedy, What Women Want (2000), in which a man suddenly acquires the ability to read women’s thoughts, bears testimony to the enduring appeal of this theme. 2. This phrase was coined by Adrienne Rich in 1978 in her enormously influ- ential essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. In it, Rich identifies heterosexuality as a ‘political institution’ which systematically works to the disadvantage of all women (see Jagose, 1996: 49–50, 53–4). 3. Lieberfeld and Sanders also hint at the carnivalesque role of Florida in the narrative: ‘Whereas Chicago mainly is depicted in nightmares and noirish interiors, Florida is a romantic leisure land “by the beautiful sea”, as the soundtrack informs us, where boundaries dissolve and transgression is the norm. Joe and Jerry, like disguised revelers during Carnival, are free to adopt identities distinct from their own. Participants in carnivalesque ritual are permitted, even expected, to temporarily lose control, to go “running wild” – which is Some Like it Hot’s theme-song’ (1998: 2). 4. Terry Eagleton also believes that Bakhtin’s view of carnival is too positive: ‘Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art’ (Eagleton, 1981: 148; quoted by Stallybrass and White, 1986: 13). 5. See Garber (1993: 6; quoting Showalter, 1983: 138) ‘As Showalter points out, the success of the film comes primarily “from the masculine power disguised and veiled by the feminine costume”.’ Not all feminist critics have Notes 177 condemned the film in such terms, a notable exception being Susan Dworkin (1983). 6. That this belief is deeply rooted in our popular culture is evidenced by the enormous success of John Gray’s book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. 7. Waller’s argument is well made and my reader is referred to p. 3 of her article for a detailed analysis of the positioning of actors on screen. 8. Caroline Warman (2000: 94) links the unveiling of truth in Sade’s fiction with the forbidden unveiling of the female body. Thus, revelation of truth is always, in a sense, an unconscious expression of male sexual desire for the naked female body. 9. The pantomime’s farcical dame figure thrusts her gender-bending in the audience’s face (literally in some cases!), in sharp contrast to the muted and disavowed ambivalence of the principal boy who is nevertheless clearly an eroticised object, while female singers in the nineteenth-century music halls frequently performed in men’s clothes, mirroring the principal boy’s gender undecidability and its erotic impact on the audience. 10. Cohan (1998: 51–5) himself gives a number of additional reasons for viewing this ending as ‘not that fully recuperative’.