Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-109).

Masculinities in Drag offers a largely speculative but theoretically engaged analysis of female masculinity as it is enacted through the forum of drag kinging. Drag kinging is the predominantly lesbian and queer female sub-cultural practice of female-to-male cross dressing, with most drag king performances promoting ‘the woman behind the man’. This emphasis on ‘femaleness’, even as it is ostensibly disguised in male drag, remains crucial to the many dynamics that arise through performing as a drag king and within drag king culture. This thesis promotes that emphasis by exploring and arguing for drag kinging as a performance of female identifications, erotic or otherwise, with masculinity within an exclusively queer female economy of desire. I employ various and varying theories on subjectivity, gender, desire, and fantasy to explore this, and further expand my analysis of female masculinity by focusing on the embodied and corporeal effects of performing as a drag king. This investigation reveals the refusal of drag kings to differentiate between traditional notions of mind/body, material/immaterial, and other adversarial boundaries in order to revel in new-found and provocative forms of embodiment and corporeality. Further, I develop the term ‘drag king embodiment’ to explain and expand on this, and to promote drag king embodiment as the corporeal ‘outcome’ of embodying desires for and fantasies of masculinity. This analysis extends to theoretically challenging accepted heteronormative models of gender, female desire, sexuality and subjectivity. However, such challenges reveal their dependency on these models, in so far as any perversion or subversion of them relies on acknowledging them as constraints – literally and figuratively. The ‘struggle’ against such models is not theorised as an inherently futile affair, but rather is viewed as a defining narrative that informs much of the erotic, sexual, and other dynamics of drag kinging and drag king culture. Exploration and analysis of female masculinity, in all its guises, calls into question the ‘natural’ socio-cultural position of women and their desires. By producing certain configurations of female identity, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and desire outside notions of ‘proper’ feminine identifications is to produce those identities fully inside. Effectively, drag king performances work this ‘weakness’ in the laws that govern ‘femaleness’ in order to promote, eroticise, and celebrate female masculinity. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1331403 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008

Adakemisk avhandling--Gothenburg. / Extra t.p., with thesis statement, inserted. Bibliography: p. 89-99.

Adakemisk avhandling--Gothenburg. / Extra t.p., with thesis statement, inserted. Bibliography: p. 89-99.

This study considers the processes by which film and play-texts engage with the mythic figure of Joan of Arc. Chapter One provides an overview of the vast body of work that has been inspired by Joan's history. Chapter Two addresses the tragic configuration of Joan's story, especially with regard to ethical conflict and culpability. In Chapter Three, I discuss the displacement of notions of innocence onto Joan's virginity, youth, illiteracy, and rusticity and examine the ideologically-loaded textual constructions and uses of these elements of her myth. Chapter Four is a consideration of her textually-constructed exclusion from the ordinary run of humanity and of the implications of her strangeness and estrangement. Chapter Five is focused upon representations of Joan's condemnation trial. I consider the processes of narrativisation by which means documentary records become historical accounts. I consider fictional reenactments of Joan's trial as 'texts within texts, ' engaged in a double process of interrogation which allows Joan to be both persecuted for her transgressiveness and elevated to the status of a saint. Chapter Six examines the central importance of Joan's transgressiveness, exploring the disciplinary strategies employed by a variety of film and play texts as they attempt to counter her troublesome ambiguousness, to identify and define her, and to effect her epistemological assimilation. Chapter Seven is a consideration of the similarities and differences between the myths of Joan of Arc and of Christ and their representation in film. It explores the semantic association between transgression and transcendence, between the 'unnatural' and the 'supernatural, ' with regard to their crucial relation to the limits of discourse and epistemology. In Chapter Eight, I explore myth as a discursive practice and examine the operations of myth and of ideology in relation to the obsessive cultural reiteration of the myth of Joan of Arc.

A sample of 12 males, 7 transvestites and 5 homosexuals, obtained mainly from a non-psychiatric population underwent a variety of tests in order to investigate: (1) Early developmental patterns (through the use of an unstructured clinical interview, an Interview Schedule of Money and Primrose 1969 and a questionnaire of early childhood relationships of Evans 1969); (2) The phenomenon of alienation (through the use of Rotter's I-E scale 1966 and Nettler's Alienation Scale 1957); (3) The amount of heterosexual activity (through the use of Bentler's Heterosexual Behaviour Assessment Questionnaire 1968); and (4) Personality dynamics (through the use of the Rorschach, MMPI and CPI). Mention should be made that early developmental patterns were studied only with the transvestite sample. A multi-dimensional approach was used which aimed at obtaining a comprehensive, overall picture of personality. No significant differences were obtained between .the groups on the tests measuring alienation and heterosexual activity. However on all the tests of personality the transvestite sample clearly showed themselves to be more psychologically and socially disturbed than did the homosexuals. The grossly retarded personalities of the transvestites was assumed to have been a result of their grossly disturbed early developmental patterns especially their pathologically dependent relationship with their mothers. A schizophrenic process was clearly evident in the transvestite sample, but was markedly absent from the homosexual sample.

This dissertation discusses medieval and Renaissance clerical and cultural constructions of femininity and female masculinity, and it analyses the complex relationship between such conceptions and the literary representation of the transvestite woman. Medieval theology legitimated female masculinity as transcendence of temporal sexuality. A woman who contained her affective femininity and replaced it with rational and ascetic behaviour was frequently lauded for having become male in all but body. In the middle of the first millennium, hagiographic legends abounded in which women appear to have embodied the patristic equation between spiritual rationality and masculinity. This dissertation proposes a radically different interpretation: the saint exchanges a sexualised form of femininity--ironically imposed upon her by a male society--for a non sexual but nevertheless feminine self valuation. / Early modern culture perceived transvestism in a multiform manner. It signifies monstrosity in the polemical pamphlet, serves to indicate an estimable apex of humanity in Shakespearean comedy, and represents women in roles that range from monstrous disrupter to adept uniter in the works of such other playwrights as Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. While the pamphlet's social commentary argues that masculinity rendered a woman monstrously unfeminine, the literature finds ways of interrogating definitions of the sex-gender system in a world which was constantly and fundamentally mutating. The drama employs elements such as inversion, monstrosity and transgressions of class to negotiate a society in flux.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Over a 6-year period, 106 women involved with men who cross-dress (mostly heterosexual transvestites) completed a questionnaire regarding themselves, their male partners, and their relationships. Interview data supplemented these questionnaires for 75% of the respondents. All respondents were recruited from nonclinical settings. The "modal" female partner was a 40-year-old Protestant, Caucasian woman, who was a firstborn child, in her first marriage. She was more likely than other women her age to be childless, and to have earned at least a 2-year college degree. She was no more likely to have had lesbian experiences or substance use problems than comparably aged American women. She had been married to her cross-dressing mate for 13 years and had known of his activities for 9 years. A quarter of women reported at least occasional sexual arousal to their mate's cross-dressing. The two variables associated with low acceptance of cross-dressing were discovery of their partner's cross-dressing after marriage and lack of sexual arousal to cross-dressing stimuli. Low acceptance was unrelated to firstborn status, amount of exposure to cross-dressing activities, or having had children. This group may be more representative of women in relationships with cross-dressing men than previous reports limited to cross-dressers and spouses who are in treatment.