Suchergebnisse

In this article, I focus on the childhood and adolescent life experiences of dansō (female-to-male crossdressers) who work as escorts in contemporary Japan, and on the process that led to their presentation of self as gendered masculine in their private and working lives. During their childhood and adolescence, dansō have to negotiate their identity and self-presentation to adhere to the gendered pressures of Japanese society. Through an analysis of interviews undertaken with 14 dansō informants, I explore dansō's construction of a male identity before adulthood, highlighting the societal impositions they experienced and the coping strategies to which they resorted in order to create and maintain a space in which to express their queer selves.

This essay studies a tanci work, A Histoire of Heroic Women and Men (1905), as a case which reflects the intersecting themes of crossdressing, gender representation and the literary form of tanci. Written tanci, appropriated and redeveloped by educated women to tell stories of female crossdressers, scholars, and military leaders, offers a meaningful intervention in the dominant social and cultural discourses of womanhood in late imperial China. In the fictional realm, women's acts of crossdressing transcend the Confucian ideological prescriptions of feminine identity, displaying their heroic efforts to pursue autonomy in a patriarchal culture. This essay will analyze how these examples of crossdressing interact with and modify current critical accounts of gender and sexuality. A Histoire, in particular, holds a place of prominence in late imperial Chinese literature because of its revelation of the troubled relationship between gender construction, narrative agency, and women's identity. The text manifestly destabilizes conventional attitudes toward gendered identity, yet simultaneously exposes the social and practical challenges of such temporary and often imagined transgressions, which are exercised by incarcerating the feminine and borrowing the male subjective position through transvestite performance.

Resumo: Este texto discute dados coletados em pesquisa com mulheres que se identificam como "esposas" ou "S/O's" de homens que "praticam crossdressing". É, também, um desdobramento de minha tese de Doutorado, sobre como homens que se identificam como crossdressers negociam esta prática em suas vidas cotidianas. A pesquisa parte de uma etnografia e é complementada por entrevistas semiestruturadas com estas mulheres. Busca-se compreender como elas lidam com as tensões relativas às convenções sobre gênero e sexualidade e com o manejo de segredo ao conviverem com esta prática. Também se discute como o crossdressing impacta a vida privada e a afetivo-sexual/conjugal de pessoas que se montam, em especial, naqueles casos em que os desejos e práticas relativas ao crossdressing do cônjuge foram revelados após vários anos de casamento.