"We are what we wear": The Politics of Transvestism and Cross-dressing in "The Fox" (1923) and Orlando (1928)

Far more than being reflections of choices driven by fashion, dressing constitutes a spy of our own identities; it is an insignia of class or ethnical origins or, of course, of sexual identity. If clothes are symbols for the definition of gender categories, then the same clothes can be used to upset prefixed sexual identities. Throughout the XXth century, female and male authors have tried to represent the transvestite character in their works but in a diametrical opposite point of view: acceptance and even mimesis from women, refusal and punishment from men. To blur gender cathegories means to challenge the unwritten moral law imposed by the old patriarchal system.