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This chapter attempts to locate the Butlerian model of gender performance within a conception of performativity as a nationalist act of memory. My goal, however, is not to discuss the stereotypes of Spanish and Southern womanhood: the Southern “belle” and the “sencilla” (“simple”) Spanish mother. Instead, exploring the performativity of that image, I expose the slippage and excess that occurs when that performance fails, creating the “bad” woman—whom I describe as the “picarona” in Spanish and that Betina Entzminger has termed the “bad belle” in the Southern tradition. In Spain and the South, that figure becomes a heroine precisely because she is masculine while ambivalently adhering to and subverting the image from the past meant to define her.

This chapter focuses on androgyny, embodied differently by Edo-period Kabuki onnagata and modern Takarazuka otokoyaku, whose gender performances constitute a type of strategic ambivalence: that is, they create bodies capable of being read or understood in more than one way. This subject was inspired by the many early articles linking the establishment of the Takarazuka Revue to the problematic emergence in Japan of “androgynous” females, and the diagnosis in women of the newly coined affliction, “abnormal sexual desire.” The chapter analyzes at length the two basic ways in which androgyny has been rendered in Japanese either to stress sexuality or to bracket it.

A music video by New York-based Dominican-American “tropical punk” artist Maluca Mala frames this chapter exploring the state of gender and performance studies in the Caribbean, particularly with regards to traditional and popular musics. After providing a review of the literature on gender, movement, and performance, exploring the connections between gender and genre in the Dominican Republic, and framing these topics within transnational and Black Atlantic studies, the chapter goes on to argue that genre and gender are intimately related, so that changes in one impact and stimulate changes in the other. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the author finds that it is often traditional musics that offer greater leeway for the performance of subversive or atypical gender identities. Ethnomusicology, she states, is ideally positioned to bring attention to such identifications because of its commitment to including the voices of Others. This particular ethnography sheds light on Dominicans who use music and its performance to disidentify with mainstream identities represented by nationalized genres like orquesta or popular merengue, instead performing marginalized gender identities like that of the streetwise tíguere and tíguera through genres like the merengue típico, which even when modernized and transnational, is framed as traditional and intimate.

This chapter discusses the changing terrain of gender performance and homo- and heterosexuality within the theater, describing the rise of a new form of female role known as the huashan (flower gown/garment). If women were becoming increasingly influential in urban theaters, both as actresses and audience, why was the Peking opera stage overwhelmingly dominated by male dan actors? Borrowing in part from the works of Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Faye Dudden, this chapter explores the ramifications of the representational practices of enframing for constructions of sex and gender, arguing that this regime of representation clearly had uneven effects on the public perception and reception of male and female actors.

This chapter addresses the understandings and experiences of gender identity prior to transition and the formation of transgender identities. Next, it draws upon recollections of ‘significant moments’ within the process of transgender identity formation. Then, the chapter develops the theme of embodiment to consider the impact of bodily changes upon identity. The relevance of analysing transgender identity positions as gender performances and the discourses around gender authenticity are investigated. The ways in which transgender identities are linguistically articulated to produce distinct identity positions are explained. The narrative of the ‘wrong body’ within discourses of ‘gender dysphoria’ is repeated to gain surgical reconstruction. The debates show how definitions of authenticity may lend themselves to essentialist identity claims that refute the non-normative identities of others. A central theme emerging from narratives of transgender experiences and identity relates to the importance of developing a queer sociological approach to transgender.

The conclusion revisits the major theoretical themes of the book to suggest how the issue of women’s representation in the Indian Parliament is framed within the context of neoliberal development and the politics of recognition. It looks forward to outline some trends that are becoming visible in Indian parliamentary politics and suggest ways in which these might affect women’s participation. It argues that we need to see parliamentary politics for what it is—a limited but critically important gendered performance of politics, where women members play their roles through participating in its deliberations, law-making, ceremonies, and rituals. In so doing they reproduce dominant forms of gendered power relations while at the same time challenge them.

This chapter examines the ways in which Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) emerged into open conflict with the Spanish state at the end of that decade. It argues that nationalist movements are constructed in part through public performance and spectacle, and that a striking feature of nationalist public performance was the way in which it mirrored the gendered performances and discourse of the Franco state. The interviews with women active in Basque nationalist politics in the 1960s highlight the contrast between the public rituals of Francoism and the opposing political culture of family and local community.

This chapter will explore feminist possibilities presented through steampunk, and negotiate the complexities of gender empowerment through Victorian style. Although not a universal sentiment, many would argue that steampunk exists as an egalitarian ideal, where gender dichotomies are blurred. Accordingly, this chapter will investigate feminist claims and attempt to reconcile the notion that “Victorian” can also be feminist, or at the very least, feminist in style. In order to explore this thesis, the chapter draws on several resources in steampunk fashion, as well as the representation of women on fan sites, and in media portrayals. The critical analysis in this chapter will examine the comic Steampunk Palin as the primary text, and argue that claims of feminism and an egalitarian ideal are premature.

This essay explores the widespread support that the 800m athletic world champion Caster Semenya received in 2009 in the name of South African patriotism, and argues that the heteronormative and patriarchal home base of nationalism, its gendered matrix, reflects a dilemma: popular support for Semenya reinforced the very concepts that first led to her international exposure and the violation of her human rights. The “Caster Debacle” can be seen as one moment in a chain of ongoing events in South Africa that link a critique of certain gender performances with postcolonial collective identity formations. This results in a culturally and politically conservative backlash, as well as in a rejection of supposedly Western phenomena of women’s rights or LGBTQ rights. The crisis of representation around Semenya’s questioned sex status sits in direct relation to her being a black woman who was exposed by a Western-dominated international sports body. Her case became mired in a collective outburst of gender-normative post-colonial patriotism but it also points to how western feminism and queer politics still need to be intersected with postcolonial realities and a critique of dominant, racialised body politics.

This chapter examines three documentaries, Harlan County USA (1976), Shut Up and Sing! (2006), and This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous (2017), in which individuals consciously subvert traditional gender roles as they battle contexts of discrimination and forces of oppression in the United States and globally. The chapter explores how these documentaries trace coal miners’ wives, female musicians, and a youthful YouTube transgender personality, as they become extraordinary in their fights for living wages, civil rights, justice and equality. It reflects on potential connections between Kopple’s personal story as a woman documentary filmmaker, persevering in making films in a predominantly male-driven industry, and casting an empathetic eye on her subjects as they resiliently perform gender in unexpected and empowering ways.

This book explores issues of gender performance and national identity as they are personalized and individualized and then themselves performed by women musicians of Uzbekistan. It considers the rich relationship that dutar music has with women's culture and history in Uzbekistan but shows that the performance of national identity, of femininity, and of a sense of tradition that engaged the modern world was not limited to the dutar but encompassed a wide range of professional musical activities. The book demonstrates the central place of women in the musical project of nationalism, not only as symbols but also as agents, actors, and innovators; they are the drivers of much of the musical activity that supports Uzbekistan's new national project and they engage in a variety of strategies of identity to make a place for themselves in these musical styles, musical worlds, and, ultimately, in Uzbekistan.

Using feminist theories, Maryna Matlock examines Leigh Bardugo’s Tsarpunk trilogy that lays bare the binaries between humanism and posthumanism, anthropocentrism and feminist multiplicity. Cartographer Alina becomes a Sun Summoner, a hybrid being yoked with magical antlers that amplify her extra-human powers but also put her under the control of the enigmatic, seductive Darkling. Matlock shows how Alina joins other female characters who resist humanist hegemony by means of self-aware gender performance. The border wars play out on land as well as on the bodies of these characters who embrace posthuman possibilities.

This chapter problematizes Japan’s premiere diva of popular song, Misora Hibari (1937–1989), as a child star who grows up in postwar Japan to become a transgressive diva. I ask what defines this female child star, this singing shōjo (young female) on stage? What kinds of gendered negotiations between childhood and adulthood does the child star have to make, in what kinds of historical contexts, and to what effects? And finally, how does the shōjo—here, the child star–turned–diva—help define the period? The remnants of the child star give poignancy to her adult divahood as the Japanese public stood witness to her continual transformations. And in witnessing these transformations, I contend that Misora Hibari’s star-text enacted postwar Japan’s supra-text, with the complexities of an era and a nation.

This chapter examines Clotilde Graves’s hit comedy, A Mother of Three (1896), and the play’s use of costume to communicate its message of Social Purity feminism and female economic agency. In the play, Mrs Murgatroyd – the titular mother of three – must disguise herself as a man in the absence of her husband. While theatrically Graves uses female cross-dressing to humorous effect, in her own life she used it for professional advantage, preferring the masculine attire of the New Woman and the gender-ambiguous pen name “Clo.” This chapter explores how, both theatrically and practically, Graves played with blurring the visual boundaries of gender roles, contrasting and combining petticoats and trousers to advocate for a new way for both men and women to be in the world.

Tommy Tune’s earliest work as a director-choreographer engaged with issues of gender, sexuality, culture, and politics. The Club was an evening of songs and jokes set in an exclusive Victorian-era men’s club that featured all roles played by women. Tune led the cast in creating a stylized body language that approximated male behavior but, as performed by women, blurred gender lines in ways both challenging and exhilarating. The cross-gender performance of this material laid bare its misogyny without overstatement, and The Club was a long-running off-Broadway hit. Tune next joined the creative team of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, based on a true story about the closing of a bordello prompted by a crusading television personality. As choreographer and co-director, with Peter Masterson, Tune injected a burst of musical comedy brightness into the homey musical. His creativity was boundless, and numbers featuring macho, clog-dancing football players and a female drill team made up of both live dancers and life-size sex dolls were crowd pleasers that also contributed to the show’s sly skewing of culture and politics.

This chapter provides a comparative analysis between European and Muslim communities. This comparative analysis shows that Europeans are in the forefront, while the Muslims are regarded as inferior. The inferiority view on Muslims can be seen by how women and homosexuals are treated in Muslim communities. The influential Christian identity in Europe also explains why European countries such as Denmark and Netherlands find it hard to accept Muslim communities in their territorial spaces. This chapter then explores European Muslim communities, particularly those of Muslim youths which include violent Muslim men and veiled young Muslim women, by considering the Muslims’ culture and gender performances.

This chapter explores the apparent efforts of the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie to restore the symbol of the horse and of horsemanship as a noble and masculine ideal towards the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter focuses on those discourses around man and horse that arose during the Third Republic, especially with the strange institution of the Cirque Molier in 1880, and continuing through to debates within the new and growing field of sport science at the turn of the century that culminated in the reinstatement of the Olympic Games. On the one hand, such discourses attempted to revitalize riding as a male sport that could both promote and exhibit ideal masculinity by revealing man himself as something of a thoroughbred. But by concentrating on this “revealing” the men were engaged in a feminine activity—they sought the gaze. Indeed, as this chapter argues, the showiness of the breed and the notion of exhibitionism with which horse-back riding became associated worked against the normative masculinity it was said to promote, tainting both the noble and the bourgeois horseman with the feminizing effects of spectacle, or the homoerotic possibilities of a male object of the male gaze.

This chapter introduces the subject matter of the book and sources of historical evidence. The first section provides questions and tools needed to approach the study of ancient women. Although “women” can seem easy to identify in history, it is difficult to explore this ancient category without importing contemporary notions of sex and gender. The “one-sex” theory is an ancient understanding of gender that differs strongly from modern notions. This section argues that the one-sex model is useful but not sufficient to understand ancient women’s lives. It should be supplemented with evidence of how gender was performed in a specific place and time. The second section introduces readers to the complexity and scope of the “New Testament world.” It outlines the time frame, geographic scope, and some important cultural influences in the context of the New Testament. The third section describes the evidence available to study women’s lives in this period. Literary sources, inscriptions, and papyrus fragments each offer different kinds of insights and challenges for this task.