Dismembering Desire: Cross(dress)ing the Boundaries of Gender and Genre in The Life and Death of Mary Frith, Commonly Called Moll Cutpurse

摘要

“Dismembering Desire” examines the contradictory sartorial and literary strategies through which Mary Frith constructs herself in her autographical Life as a transgendered subject who defies society's attempts to contain and control her. It argues that although Frith escapes the violation of being disrobed and dissected by contemporary readers seeking the naked truth beneath her sartorial hermaphroditism, she does so by erasing her body from her text. The essay demonstrates how the self-repressed female form surfaces to challenge Frith's assumption that cross-gendering can only be achieved by severing gender identity from corporeality. Ultimately it shows how female same sex desire and the female body's maternal potential both threaten and found Frith's fragmented self, and it suggests that Frith's refusal to acknowledge her debt to female literary traditions prevents her from radically reinscribing her body to accord with her transgendered identity and sexuality.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2011.574396