ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how costume is worn, invoked and imagined to express difference and/or sameness between categories of performer. It considers how particular meanings are invested in dressed bodies. The chapter explores the way relationships between costume, biological sex and gender are constructed to express perspectives on women bullfighters. The combination of a traje de luces and a female body is problematised or reconciled in different ways. Whilst women bullfighters of the 1970s and some earlier women performers also wore trajes with trousers their outfits were interpreted in ways specific to the historical contexts. In the 1990s when a woman appears dressed to perform in her traje de luces she presents herself in terms of visual metaphors that may be referred to both the visual history of bullfighting and a contemporary visual culture. Historically the torero/torera distinction was significant, the toreras were in a class apart from their male contemporaries.
