Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality

by Tsedlon,Efrat

• ISBN13: 9780415251051
• ISBN10: 0415251052
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-26
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Where does identity lie in masquerade, or contrariwise, where does masquerade lie in identity? This collection of essays explores the role of the mask in constructing and expressing marginalized identities, and in so doing, it calls attention to the "nature" of identity and its relationship to outward manifestations of itself. The essays span a range of disciplines and cultures, from gender studies to visual art to fashion theory and from American to Israeli to German, and investigate such themes as illegitimate birth, lesbian and fetish fashions, Jewish folk theatre, women's face masks of 17th century England and 18th century France, theCarnivalefool, and cross-dressing inThe Crying Game.

Table of Contents

List of plates	ix
List of contributors	xi
Foreword	xiii
Susan B. Kaiser
Preface	xvii
Acknowledgements	xix
Introduction: masquerade and identities	1	(17)
Efrat Tseelon
Reflections on mask and carnival	18	(20)
Efrat Tseelon
Stigma, uncertain identity and skill in disguise	38	(16)
Christie Davies
Lesbian masks: beauty and other negotiations	54	(19)
Halla Beloff
Fashion, fetish, fantasy	73	(10)
Valerie Steele
Is womanliness nothing but a masquerade? An analysis of The Crying Game	83	(18)
Alkeline Van Lenning
Saskia Maas
Wendy Leeks
The scarf and the toothache: cross-dressing in the Jewish folk theatre	101	(13)
Ahuva Belkin
The metamorphosis of the mask in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century London	114	(21)
Christoph Heyl
Masked and unmasked at the opera balls: Parisian women celebrate carnival	135	(18)
Ann Ilan-Alter
On women and clothes and carnival fools	153	(22)
Efrat Tseelon
Index	175