Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality

by Efrat Tseëlon

Overview

Masquerade, both literal and metaphorical, is now a central concept on many disciplines. This timely volume explores and revisits the role of disguise in constructing, expressing and representing marginalised identities, and in undermining easy distinctions between 'true' identity and artifice.
The book is interdisciplinary in approach, spanning a diverse range of cultures and narrative voices. It provides provocative and nuanced ways of thinking about masquerade as a tool for construction, and a tool for critique. The essays interrogate such themes as:
*mask and carnival
*fetish fashion
*stigma of illegitimacy
*femininity as masquerade
*lesbian masks
*cross-dressing in Jewish folk theatre
*the mask in seventeenth and eighteenth century London and nineteenth century France
*the voice as mask.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134530700
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/29/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Efrat Tseëlon; Susan Kaiser

Table of Contents

List of plates, List of contributors, Foreword by Susan B. Kaiser, Preface, Acknowledgements, Introduction: masquerade and identities, 1. Reflections on mask and carnival, 2. Stigma, uncertain identity and skill in disguise, 3. Lesbian masks: beauty and other negotiations, 4. Fashion, fetish, fantasy, 5. Is womanliness nothing but a masquerade? An analysis of The Crying Game, 6. The scarf and the toothache: cross-dressing in the Jewish folk theatre, 7. The metamorphosis of the mask in seventeenth and eighteenth-century London, 8. Masked and unmasked at the opera balls: Parisian women celebrate carnival, 9. On women and clothes and carnival fools, Index