ABSTRACT
The normalization of operatic drag can be explained, in part, by the same mechanisms that hide all of opera’s other sexual transgressions so effectively: the elegant surroundings; the fiction of musical “purity”; the intense emotionality of the music itself. Anne Rice confuses the representation with the embodiment and conflates the terms “feminine” and “woman,” but the trouble with this configuration runs even deeper, for it belies the function of cross-dressing in opera. The female-to-male cross-dresser, however, always poses a threat. Women dressed as men violate male hegemony by attempting to reject their secondary social role and to assume male power or, more powerfully, to reject the whole concept of binary gender division. The free-wheeling gender crisis induced by transvestism has inspired one more variation on operatic cross-dressing in the twentieth century: opera travesty, where male performers take on standard women’s roles in a parody of opera.
