ABSTRACT
Indeed, why would a woman be more like a man? I wonder if that is a fantasy that only men have about women or whether women also think this. In an interview in The New York Times Sunday magazine section Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) was asked about how, in the 1970s, she used to drive her Mercedes to Studio 54 alone at midnight. She replied: “That image of me driving the Mercedes and walking in alone is like the cowboy going to a saloon, you know? It was really a fantasy of mine, living a man’s life in a woman’s body” (Goldman, 2013). Is this the response Henry Higgins is longing for, a woman who fantasizes and plays with being a man? DVF uses the cross-dressing fantasy of the American cowboy – is this incubated within the Hollywood dream machine to “clothe” her sense of identity? Gender? I believe this particular kind of fantasy rests partially on an edge of otherness within gender. While there is recognition of how different the “other” gender is and acknowledgement of that, there is simultaneously a wish to collapse that difference into sameness: “why can’t a woman be more like a man?”, and with that movement eradicate otherness into non-difference. Is this a form of pass ing as a black might pass for white, or a Jew as a non-Jew? And is there even more to it? Why would a man need to fantasize this, or woman wish this since not everyone does?
