Peer-reviewed
The Clothes Make the Man: Cross-Dressing, Gender Performance, and Female Desire in Johann Elias Schlegel's Der Triumph der guten Frauen
Schlegel's 1748 comedy takes the potentially liberating historical practice of female cross-dressing and restructures it by using it to promote a sentimental conception of marriage based on love, mutual compatibility, and free partner choice and by emptying this contemporary cultural phenomenon of any potentially liberating features, thereby defusing non-normative gender performance. Schlegel's text highlights culturally constructed aspects of gender by placing gender performance at the play's core. By staging a successful performance of male gender, the female character Hilaria reintegrates two wayward husbands into the sentimental marriage. Via Hilaria's disguise, the text explores: how the control of information establishes power relationships; how cross-dressing is used to reinscribe traditional gender roles; how mutual respect and friendship are promoted as a strong basis for marriage; and finally, how sexual desire is construed as a purely male phenomenon, thereby ironizing the possibility of female desire in general and female same-sex desire in particular
Article, 2008
Blackwell Publishing, 2008