ABSTRACT
The evidence of the previous chapter leads me to conclude that there were in fact two groups of FTM cross-dressers in early modern London. The rst, a range of proto-feminists whose self-fashioning, assertive cultural agency was undertaken in an attempt to liberate themselves from the mechanics of patriarchal subordination and to critique the cultural dominance of social hierarchies based on distinctions of biological sex. These women made use of the freedoms afforded by appropriations of male attire and exploited transvestism in order to reveal social injustice. The other group of cross-dressers were, of course, the same women, but in their misconstrued (or deliberately reconstructed) incarnations as ctitious phantasms fashioned by and for the pleasure of men. These latter women were perceived as erotically charged androgen playmates; women who lacked subjectivity and existed as the projected objects of homoerotic and heteroerotic male fantasies. Whilst it is true that the majority of representations of FTM transvestism found in sermons, poetry and pamphlet literature tend towards the second version, the treatment of FTM cross-dressers in early modern drama is argued to have been a more nuanced affair. It is therefore to dramatic representation that I now turn.
