Wednesday 16 February 2011

DEFINITIONS OF TRANSVESTISM

Hello Ladies, sorry this is my first major post on here - took a while to collate all my bits of reading and research into something comprehensible! I'm going to do four posts covering four broad headings of research I have done: definitions, history, other cultures, and gender/sexuality issues.

DEFINITIONS OF TRANSVESTISM

"Cross dressing is a simple term for a complex set of phenomena. It ranges from simply wearing one or two items of clothing to a full scale burlesque, from comic impersonation to a serious attempt to pass as the opposite gender, from an occasional desire to experiment with gender identity to attempting to live most of one's life as a member or the opposite sex
The term transvestism (Latin for 'cross dressing') was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910. Havelock Ellis, his contemporary, felt that the term was much too literal, and that it overemphasized the importance of clothing while failing to include the 'feminine' identity factors present in male cross dressers.
Since that time other terms have been advnaced, including gynemimesis (literally 'woman mime') and its counterpart andromimesis, gender dysphoria, female or male impersonataion, transgenderist, femmiphile, androphile, femme mimic, fetishist, crossing, transsexual (both preoperative and postoperative)... "

(Introduction, Page vii) 'Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender'. Vern L. Bullough/Bonnie Bullough. University of Pennsylvania Press. 1993

"Recently, as distinctions have emerged between sex and gender, the term supernumerary gender has been used by many to descrive individuals who adopt the tole and many of the customs of the opposite sex. Still others hold that it is not so much an extra gender as a blending together of the masculine and feminine."
(Cross dressing in perspective: Status and the social implications of class dressing. Page 3)

"Hamburger and his colleagues, using the theories of the time, diagnosed the case as one of genuine transvestism and differentiated it from the two other types of transvestism: the fetishist who, as a consequence of a neurotic obsession, concentrates on one or more articles of dress, thereby developing an interest in cross dressing, and the homosexual man of a passive type who desires to dress in women's clothing. "  

(Transsexualism: Early cases. Page 254)   

"Although Hamburger had called the condition "gender transvestism" to distinguish it from other types of cross dressing, the label transsexualism was soon applied, and the operation came to be called sex reassignment surgery (SRS). Obviously plastic surgery on the genital organs does not change the chromosomal sex, even though it gives the appearance of a sex change."

(Transsexualism: changing definitions and terminology. Page 256) 
 
"In explaining the term transsexualism, Benjamin divided male transevestites into three major types. The first groups included transvestites who led reasonably normal lives. Most of them were heterosexual men who could appease their feelings of gender role disharmony by cross dressing. They derived erotic satisfaction from cross dressing, but this might decrease over time. Though these patients might display neurotic symptoms, they were seldom seen by doctors. Their clash was with society and the law. Transvestites in the second group were more emotionally disturbed. They required psychological guidance and endocrine therapy. The third type of transvestism was identical to transsexualism. This type represented a disturbance of the normal sex and gender role orientation. The individual wanted to be a full-fledged woman and have a male sex partner, or vice versa. The condition could present as fully developed transsexualism from the beginning, or it might gradually appear after short or long periods of transvestism. However the male transexual was much less interested in the symbol of female attire. He wanted to be a woman and function as a woman. Transsexuals, he noted, were very often unhappy people."

(Transsexualism: Changing definitions and terminology. Page 257)

"Transvestism in all contexts uses items of material culture of a very personal and individual nature to cross both sex and gender boundaries... The Oxford English Dictionary (1976) gives teh definition of 'transvest' and subsequently, transvestism as 'clothe (usually oneself) in other garments, especially those of the opposite sex'; and this meaning would appear to be universally accepted - that 'trans' = a/cross and 'vest' = 'dress'. Cross-dressing (trans-vestism) must also imply that there must be some movement across, a place of coming from and a place of going to which is between the worlds of gender polarity, otherwise a person would simply be getting dressed. And these in turn involved the notion that they are moving from the place transgendered individuals 'naturally' inhabit, dictated by birth-sex and gender. ... I would define transvestism as the deliberate and conscious wearing of clothes which, in that particular society, are perceived as the doman of the opposite sex, usually to knowingly create an image of the self as a person of the opposite sex."

(Clothing Sex, Sexing Clothes: Transvestism, A material Culture and the Sex and Gender Debate. Dress and Identity: Transvestism and Material Culture. Page 17) ‘Unzipping Gender. Sex, Cross-dressing and culture’. Charlotte Suthrell. Berg. Oxford. 2004.

Tasha







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