For my Independent Study I will be looking at the topic of cross-dressing and it's portrayal in film and television. I originally planned to focus on transvestism alone but decided that cross-dressing in general would be a more interesting topic as it includes a much wider range of genres and texts. For example characters in comedy programmes such as "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (1969-1974) and "The Two Ronnies" (1970-1987) are often seen cross-dressing, but this would not be considered as transvestism.

I will therefore be looking at a wide variety of texts from small screen to silver screen including films such as "Transamerica" (2005), Ed Wood (1994) and television programmes such as "Little Britain" (2003-).

The main focus for my Independent Study will be "Breakfast On Pluto", a 2005 film directed by Neil Jordan. Although it is a comedy it takes the cross-dressing of main character "Kitten" in a serious manner. This is relatively rare considering the comedy element of cross-dressing utilised in such texts such as "She's The Man" (2006) and "The League of Gentlemen" (1999-2002).