What Butler Saw: Cross-Dressing and Spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century France

At the same time, Butler’s theories are open to a number of criticisms,whichIintendtointerrogateherebyreassessingherthought in the light of three seventeenth-century poems about cross-dressing. Above all, Butler’s theories are profoundly ahistorical; although not in itself a criticism, this does mean that she can tell us little about the particular ways in which sex and gender might be constructed in different historical or geographical contexts. My own research, for example, has demonstrated that the significance of cross-dressing can rarely be reduced to a matter of gender alone; indeed, cross-dressing can even become reified as a third term, quasi-independent of the two conventional genders. 2 Yet these problems of ahistoricity can be most helpfully explored through a second lacuna in Butler’s thought: the role of the spectator. Crucially, as Nicholas Hammond stresses, Butler’s exploration of cross-dressing ‘does not examine the importance of the body as