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Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband”
DOI link for Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband”
Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband” book
Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband”
DOI link for Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband”
Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor: Convent of Pleasure, Gallathea, and “The Male and Female Husband” book
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ABSTRACT
As in Chapter 3, in this final chapter I am interested in the ways that FTM crossdressers enable new ways of thinking and talking about relational gender and sexualities in romantic dyads in early modern literature and culture; here, though, I want to expand that idea to include not only romantic pairs, but also relationship between MTF crossdressers, their partners, and their communities. In this chapter I use representations of the relationships between MTF crossdressed characters and the cisgender characters around them to explore the notion of “gender labor,” in which a cisgender partner (one whose gender identity matches his or her assigned sex) participates in cocreating his or her partner’s queer gender for the benefit of those around them. As in my discussion of queer heterosexuality, this approach relocates the crux of queerness from the crossdressed or genderqueer partner to include both lovers while considering their sexuality in its shared context. Further, attention to gender labor productively moves the discussion of crossdressers or genderqueer individuals and their partners beyond sex to include other aspects of their lived experience. While work on gender labor thus far has been situated primarily in the social sciences and has focused on contemporary subjects, as I will discuss, in this chapter I demonstrate the ways in which the concept can be generatively applied to literary analysis and fictional characters in an early modern context.