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Essay on Crossover Fashion Through The Ages
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the puritan and religiously conservative eras. Women and men had very strongly defined social roles and so was their dressing. Any deviation was regarded as a sin and immediately condemned and if required put down with force. Unlike today, a woman wearing trousers or a bow tie would have caused a scandal and she would be taken to task for trying to be a man. Oddly enough cross dressing was a major part of the theater scene where young boys dressed up as women to play feminine parts.
Discussing both disruptions of gender and class hierarchies here and subsequently as they relate to cross dressing in plays, one may explore possible ideological gaps and discontinuities, as well as homologies, between the various levels of theatrical practice. One is also reminded that the stage did not do its ideological work in a seamless manner. It can also be argued that injunctions against women's cross dressing existed to create and enforce differences between men and women that were important in order to create subordination "as a key part of its hierarchical view of the social order and to buttress its gendered division of labor. . . . Then, as now, gender relations, however eroticized, were relations of power, produced and held in place through enormous cultural labor in the interests of the dominant gender" (98). Howard notes that, although antitheatrical tract writers frequently decried crossdressing as a major sin of the theater, plays that involved crossdressingfrequently emphasized the patriarchal order and are intensely preoccupied with threats to the gender system.
Jonson's Epicoene shows women pitted against one another along class lines and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It allow women to pretend to be men briefly, while reinforcing male dominance, in the end playing on the audience's knowledge that even the cross dressing women are really little boys.......
