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Apr. 22nd, 2003 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaLate to work and I have a feeling there is a meeting I'm forgetting that probably starts in about 10 minutes. But wotthehell wotthehell.
In my neverending quest to a) ignore the real world in all its scary vileness; and b) find out what it is about tortured heroes in frilly shirts that is so ... yes, that, I did what I always do.
I went to a bookstore.
An academic bookstore. Nothing better than watching academic minds get tangled in frilly shirts, I feel.
Here is what I bought:
Bunch of essay collections on cross-dressing, mostly way too theoretical, and all with axes to grind, bleah.
Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which is a good book, but is more about the experience of being gay, out, and loving opera than it is about the cross-dressing in opera & why it is so compelling. Still, interesting.
The winner is Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Despite academic title (and she is a fine scholar of Renaissance studies, especially Shakespeare, a fellow who knew a little about gender-switching), this is a fabulous book. Readable, funny, full of ideas.
I mean, how can you not love a book that has a chapter on transvestism called "Clothes Encounters of the Third Kind"? And a whole chapter on Elvis and Valentino, which says this:
"Once again 'hypermale' and 'feminized' become, somehow, versions of the same description: these men are too seductive to be 'really' men." Hence, Elvis appealed (musically and as a figure of eros) to straight men as much as to women. The fact that he dyed his hair and wore makeup does not seem to bother the beefy white guys at the Mississippi truck stop at all. He is Still King. (Aragorn will have to wait for a long time before he gets Elvis's crown.) But then, I've always had my suspicions about those guys at the truck stop.
Garber notes that a crossover figure (in the gender sense, not the fandom sense) is a figure "of disruption, rupture." And later, "The drag queen foregrounds illusion and falsehood as material reality: being a drag queen means the constant assertion of the body. But ... which body? The fashion garment of the drag queen signifies the absent or phantom body. Paradoxically, the body here is no body, and nobody, the clothes without the Emperor."
Yes, yes, terribly academic, but she's onto something: the male body clothed in the "wrong" clothes produces an effect of mystery--of a phantom other presence. Because of the frilly shirt, for readers (viewers, if it's a movie) that presence is a female or feminized one--so for straight female and gay male readers at least, it is the self. And, I suspect, for all readers, since the absent "other presence" is an empty space into which every reader can place him- or herself.
Mystery itself is sexy; doubleness is sexy: the idea of the secret twin, the other self, is sexy. Shocking reversalsare sexy. Is that a man in a frilly shirt, or do the frills make that a female body? In HP terms, the Mirror of Erised is exactly that: the mirror of desire. Desire has to do with looking at the Object of Desire and seeing oneself. Or, conversely, with looking at oneself (in the Mirror) and seeing something alien, strange, other, unknowable, secret and mysterious: the perfect object of desire.
(I do wonder if Rowling will use this with her boys and girls when they get old enough for Erised to have a more specifically romantic or erotic meaning.)
Which is why nude scenes in movies are not nearly as hot as half-clothed ones. And put the guy in a flowing wig and a frilly shirt and even John Malkovich can look pretty amazing (Dangerous Liaisons), not to mention the otherwise reptilian Keanu Reeves. And don't get me started on "The Draughtsman's Contract."
*pauses, recovers equilibrium*
This is the thing H/D slash plays with: dark Harry and pale Draco, the reversal of darkness and fairness as signifiers of good and evil; the ambiguous sexual identity of fair, delicate Draco. Though I think it works better when the slash itself is ambiguous--a possibility rather than a confirmed fact. Because mystery is sexy, and the hero whose romance is undefined because his/her gender is indeterminate is Everyone's Object of Desire. Certainly Cassie is doing some of that in DV.
I also bought a bunch of other books on opera, looking for discussions of the idea of the trouser role--women dressed as men, singing in soprano register, playing male roles, or else playing woman-in-disguise, both of which are standard opera formulas. But so far I haven't found anything too useful. Books on Handel's passionate love duets for male and female characters in which both voices are soprano (or soprano and mezzo-soprano, or soprano and contralto) tend to say things like, "It was a convention" or "it was written so that the singers could be either male or female." Period. Sigh.
I fear I shall have to start reading books about the castrati singers. Eek.
But at least it keeps me from thinking about the great Christian Smashing of Images Over There.
Edited to add:
Well, I was right. I did have a meeting. Was half an hour late. This business of being a grownup... how does it work, again?
In my neverending quest to a) ignore the real world in all its scary vileness; and b) find out what it is about tortured heroes in frilly shirts that is so ... yes, that, I did what I always do.
I went to a bookstore.
An academic bookstore. Nothing better than watching academic minds get tangled in frilly shirts, I feel.
Here is what I bought:
Bunch of essay collections on cross-dressing, mostly way too theoretical, and all with axes to grind, bleah.
Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which is a good book, but is more about the experience of being gay, out, and loving opera than it is about the cross-dressing in opera & why it is so compelling. Still, interesting.
The winner is Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Despite academic title (and she is a fine scholar of Renaissance studies, especially Shakespeare, a fellow who knew a little about gender-switching), this is a fabulous book. Readable, funny, full of ideas.
I mean, how can you not love a book that has a chapter on transvestism called "Clothes Encounters of the Third Kind"? And a whole chapter on Elvis and Valentino, which says this:
"Once again 'hypermale' and 'feminized' become, somehow, versions of the same description: these men are too seductive to be 'really' men." Hence, Elvis appealed (musically and as a figure of eros) to straight men as much as to women. The fact that he dyed his hair and wore makeup does not seem to bother the beefy white guys at the Mississippi truck stop at all. He is Still King. (Aragorn will have to wait for a long time before he gets Elvis's crown.) But then, I've always had my suspicions about those guys at the truck stop.
Garber notes that a crossover figure (in the gender sense, not the fandom sense) is a figure "of disruption, rupture." And later, "The drag queen foregrounds illusion and falsehood as material reality: being a drag queen means the constant assertion of the body. But ... which body? The fashion garment of the drag queen signifies the absent or phantom body. Paradoxically, the body here is no body, and nobody, the clothes without the Emperor."
Yes, yes, terribly academic, but she's onto something: the male body clothed in the "wrong" clothes produces an effect of mystery--of a phantom other presence. Because of the frilly shirt, for readers (viewers, if it's a movie) that presence is a female or feminized one--so for straight female and gay male readers at least, it is the self. And, I suspect, for all readers, since the absent "other presence" is an empty space into which every reader can place him- or herself.
Mystery itself is sexy; doubleness is sexy: the idea of the secret twin, the other self, is sexy. Shocking reversalsare sexy. Is that a man in a frilly shirt, or do the frills make that a female body? In HP terms, the Mirror of Erised is exactly that: the mirror of desire. Desire has to do with looking at the Object of Desire and seeing oneself. Or, conversely, with looking at oneself (in the Mirror) and seeing something alien, strange, other, unknowable, secret and mysterious: the perfect object of desire.
(I do wonder if Rowling will use this with her boys and girls when they get old enough for Erised to have a more specifically romantic or erotic meaning.)
Which is why nude scenes in movies are not nearly as hot as half-clothed ones. And put the guy in a flowing wig and a frilly shirt and even John Malkovich can look pretty amazing (Dangerous Liaisons), not to mention the otherwise reptilian Keanu Reeves. And don't get me started on "The Draughtsman's Contract."
*pauses, recovers equilibrium*
This is the thing H/D slash plays with: dark Harry and pale Draco, the reversal of darkness and fairness as signifiers of good and evil; the ambiguous sexual identity of fair, delicate Draco. Though I think it works better when the slash itself is ambiguous--a possibility rather than a confirmed fact. Because mystery is sexy, and the hero whose romance is undefined because his/her gender is indeterminate is Everyone's Object of Desire. Certainly Cassie is doing some of that in DV.
I also bought a bunch of other books on opera, looking for discussions of the idea of the trouser role--women dressed as men, singing in soprano register, playing male roles, or else playing woman-in-disguise, both of which are standard opera formulas. But so far I haven't found anything too useful. Books on Handel's passionate love duets for male and female characters in which both voices are soprano (or soprano and mezzo-soprano, or soprano and contralto) tend to say things like, "It was a convention" or "it was written so that the singers could be either male or female." Period. Sigh.
I fear I shall have to start reading books about the castrati singers. Eek.
But at least it keeps me from thinking about the great Christian Smashing of Images Over There.
Edited to add:
Well, I was right. I did have a meeting. Was half an hour late. This business of being a grownup... how does it work, again?
