The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Street wisdom warns not to tamper with a transvestite's clothing; do not lay a finger on her hair, her make-up, anything that will alter her appearance and reveal the skin underneath. If you do, you might well be attacked with a ferocity that outstrips the most testosterone-ridden boy. Treat the goods with respect, and if you stare, try to smile. There are many stories like this, and, apocryphal or true, they advise one to keep one's distance, at best, in order to respect what you do not know, at worst, not to be tainted by an urban freak. A drag queen is a singular phenomenon after all, because she is not like a transsexual who sloughs one skin to become a different breed, rather the transvestite wears two skins at once, parading the signs of each unequally but with exaggerated relish. Most often, the transvestite is the male made female, though of an exaggerated femaleness which is a genus all of its own, historically inscribed since the beginning of the twentieth century but existing since ancient times, and with a degree of recognisability and cultural endurance that makes it a third gender. Whether that third gender, which conceivably encompasses both transvestites and transsexuals, will be at all recognised is still a long way off, because it threatens 'essential' values, those fictions used to cover up the spaces of uncertainty. But what is harder to deny is that trans-gender people do have an inner life and codes of behaviour that are particular and the norm to them. It is a way of life that New Zealand artist Fiona Clark depicts with a frankness that does not buy into conventional questions of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline