Cross-Dressing Through the Ages

Being a communication major, a lot my courses deal with the media and the way in which gender, sex, and sexuality are portrayed within it. For a group project this semester I had to analyze in depth the film, She’s the Man.  The main character, Viola, is a seemingly strong female heroine that goes beyond traditional gender roles to join the boys’ soccer team (after her team was cut from the roster because of school funding). Historically, there have been films in which female characters have taken the persona of a male role to break into a male dominated society.

I saw this repeating theme of cross-dressing in another of my classes, The Quixotic Search For Meaning. In this class we had to read the novel Don Quixote. Throughout the novel, we encountered characters that have cross-dressed for one reason or another. One of these characters is the curate who decides to dress as a woman, to trick Don Quixote into coming home. I think that the curate understood the power that women have over men, especially that which the damsel in distress had over Don Quixote. Other interesting characters that have cross-dressed are Claudia Jeronima and Anna Felix. These women dressed as the opposite sex to escape from their current reality of misfortune.

It is quite surprising that even though Don Quixote was written in 1605 and She’s the Man was filmed in 2006, centuries later, the idea of cross-dressing is still being played with. I think cross-dressing is a way in which people break societal norms to try to change the system for the better.