Cross Dressing in the Media
This is a few paragraphs from:
In her book, Girlfriend: Men, Women and Drag, Holly Brubach identified four different types of crossdressers, [including] “drag queens” with their flamboyant public displays.
Besides Brubach’s types (which may be more or less valid), there are other factors too, underlying the general public’s view of crossdressing. There exist unflattering media images such as we saw in “Psycho”, “Dressed to Kill”, and “Silence of the Lambs”, each of which featured mental misfits who wove crossdressing into their psychotic activities. In “Silence of the Lambs”, for instance, serial killer “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, played by Ted Levine, liked to wear women’s clothing- and, chillingly, much more. Gumb tried desperately to take on “feminine” qualities, but he seemed to provide the best insight into himself when he screamed, “You don’t know what pain is”” at one of his terrified victims.
One recent critically acclaimed film, “Transamerica”, did give a sympathetic portrayal of a transsexual and should be commended for that. Starring Felicity Huffman as Sabrina “Bree” Osborne (previously known as Stanley), the film gave perhaps the most sympathetic media portrayal of any kind of gender complexity. Also, the made-for-TV movie, “A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story”, showed us what family values really mean. Unfortunately, such films rarely succeed at the box office.
Besides Brubach’s types (which may be more or less valid), there are other factors too, underlying the general public’s view of crossdressing. There exist unflattering media images such as we saw in “Psycho”, “Dressed to Kill”, and “Silence of the Lambs”, each of which featured mental misfits who wove crossdressing into their psychotic activities. In “Silence of the Lambs”, for instance, serial killer “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, played by Ted Levine, liked to wear women’s clothing- and, chillingly, much more. Gumb tried desperately to take on “feminine” qualities, but he seemed to provide the best insight into himself when he screamed, “You don’t know what pain is”” at one of his terrified victims.
One recent critically acclaimed film, “Transamerica”, did give a sympathetic portrayal of a transsexual and should be commended for that. Starring Felicity Huffman as Sabrina “Bree” Osborne (previously known as Stanley), the film gave perhaps the most sympathetic media portrayal of any kind of gender complexity. Also, the made-for-TV movie, “A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story”, showed us what family values really mean. Unfortunately, such films rarely succeed at the box office.
Interwoven with the more negative (and, unfortunately, more common) media images is a notion that crossdressers are driven by aberrant sexual urges, which probably rests on what psychologist call illusory correlations. Consistent with that, there also exists a genre of pornography that features men dressed as women. Given the images we most often encounter, is it any wonder that the average person views crossdressers with discomfort and even alarm?
This piece is particularly relevant to my independent study and also highlights some negative portrayals of crossdressing which I have not yet looked into, such as "Silence of the Lambs". This association with such deranged characters means that crossdressing has previously been represented negativley. However, as can be seen from this, that seems to be changing with more sensitive texts such as "Transamerica".
posted by a_moran at 11/20/2006
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