Masquerade is now a central topic in many disciplines. This text explores and revisits the role of disguise in constructing, expressing, or representing marginalised identities.Where does identity lie in masquerade, or contrariwise, where does masquerade lie in identity? This book 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 writing covers a range of disciplines and cultures, from gender studies to visual art to fashion theory and from American to Israeli to German, and investigates such themes as illegitimate birth, lesbian and fetish fashions, Jewish folk theatre, women's face masks of 17th century England and 18th century France, the Carnivale fool, and cross-dressing in The Crying Game.
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| List of plates | |
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| List of contributors | |
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| Foreword | |
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| Preface | |
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| Acknowledgements | |
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| Introduction: masquerade and identities | |
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| Reflections on mask and carnival | |
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| Stigma, uncertain identity and skill in disguise | |
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| Lesbian masks: beauty and other negotiations | |
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| Fashion, fetish, fantasy | |
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| Is womanliness nothing but a masquerade? An analysis of The Crying Game | |
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| The scraf and the toothache: cross-dressing in the Jewish folk theatre | |
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| The metamorphosis of the mask in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century London | |
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| Masked and unmasked at the opera balls: Parisian women celebrate carnival | |
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| On women and clothes and carnival fools | |
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| Index | |
Susan Kaiser is Professor of Textiles and Clothing, as well as Women and Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies, at the University of California, Davis.
