What Butler Saw: Cross-Dressing and Spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article. What Butler Saw: Cross-Dressing and Spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century France Joseph Harris Introduction For the past fifteen years or so, Judith Butler?s theories have been both contentious and profoundly influential in our understanding of sex and gender. Her most striking claim, laid out at the end of Gender Trouble, is that gender has no essence, but is instead constituted through a repeated and performative ?citation? of pre-existing models of gender. In typical post-structuralist fashion, Butler develops this theory by examining how the exception reveals the conditions that govern the norm; accordingly, she shows how cross-dressing and other marginal forms of gender play can reveal gender in its entirety to be constructed and performative. For Butler, apparently dissonant forms of gender performance have the potential to transgress and subvert sexual norms by revealing all gender to be a copy without an original: ?in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself?as well as its contingency?.1 At the same time, Butler?s theories are open to a number of criticisms, whichI intend to interrogate here byreassessing her thought in the light of three seventeenth-century poems about cross-dressing. Above all, Butler?s theories are profoundly ahistorical; although not in itself a criticism, this does mean that she can tell us little about the particular ways in which sex and gender might be constructed in different historical or...