Product Description

The First Major history of cross-dressing in theatre

Whether it's Ziggie Stardust strutting the stage in a white satin gown or a troupe of Kabuki actors masquerading as women to a mesmerized male audience, the evocative transvestite performer offers a subliminal homoerotic fantasy and provides the lasting image of the show long after its closing night. Award-winning theater historian and critic Laurence Senelick synthesizes a vast array of material from archival research and a lifetime of theater-going to provide a monumental record of cross-dressing on the stage. Pantomimists, dame comedians, principal boys, glamour drag artistes, androgyne rock stars, and male impersonators are traced from their roots in tribal ritual and Christian pageantry to today's forms -- the dandyism of Little Richard, the queer sensibility of Sylvester and the Coquettes, the thrift-shop drag of Boy George -- capturing the allure and excitement of gender-bending performance: its rebellion, it's public spectacle, its amusements, its tragedies, its escapism. Senelick brilliantly elucidates the dynamic between the theater as both mainstream forum and anti-establishment haven for misfits, ravers, radical activists, and outcasts. With 100 rare photographs, The Changing Room offers a voyeuristic vision of a lifestyle watched by many, but lived by few, and a compulsively readable, authoritative account of the theater at its most sexual and effective.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #813002 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

From Library Journal
The research behind this substantial work is exceptionally impressive. It spans ancient times to modern ones, exploring cross-dressing and drag culture in theater and performance practice, with related references to art and world traditions. Senelick (drama, Tufts Univ.) presents hundreds of examples that dissect the subject with its various underlying myths, meanings, and customs, studying the historical significance and sexual implications of each. From the Greeks and Shakespeare to the lineage of female impersonators to the more current M. Butterfly, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Barry Humphries's most popular Dame Edna Everage, Senelick studies so many facets of the topic that many readers will be startled by its enormity. Despite such eye-catching chapter/section titles as "Skirting Christ," "Stages of Sodomy," "Putting on the Drag," and "Queens of Clubs," as well as the provocative nature of the subject matter itself, this is definitely a serious scholarly work with all of the trimmings and should be of prime interest to large academic, theater, and entertainment history collections.DCarol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
The Changing Room is the first major history of cross-dressing in theater. Award-winning theater historian and critic, Laurence Senelick, synthesizes a vast array of material from archival reserach and a lifetime of theater-going to provide a monumental record of cross-dressing on the stage. With 100 rare photographs, The Changing Room offers a voyeuristic vision of a lifestyle watched by many, but lived by few, and a compulsively readable, authoritative account of the theater at its most sexual.
Senelick...has written a work whose comprehensiveness, depth, and originality are only hinted at in the catchy title..
–Choice, April 2001

Senelicks strong opinions, his focus on performace as fundamentally erotic, make the book absorbing and provocative..
–Choice, April 2001

...every serious scholar will want this book and every library collection in the field must own it..
–Choice, April 2001

Hard-bitten libertarians and libertines alike will delight in this encyclopedic work from respected scholar of all things stagy and gay, Laurence Senelick. This is a book that doesnt make a demand for tolerance, just common sense. His prose [is] always droll and incisive. [A] superb piece of research..
–Metrotimes

About the Author
Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts University. He is the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His many publications include lovesick (1998), The Chekhov Theatre, and the Age and Stage of George L. Fox.

Customer Reviews

It's Not a Drag!
Laurence Senelick's The Changing Room is an entertaining and well-written exploration of the "inherent sexuality of all performance, the ability of the live theatre to construct gender variants unencountered anywhere else, and an abiding 'queerness' in the most authentic types of theatre...."

Scholars will mine the rich lode of material found in the text and the footnotes. Less exacting readers, including this reviewer, will find the book a curious admixture of fascinating, funny, and illuminating. I am still smiling at Senelick's description of the untimely passage of Bert Savoy, an entertainer with whom i was not familiar: "Rumour ran that he had exclaimed 'Mercy, ain't Miss God cutting up something awful!' just before he was struck by lightning.

The book is illustrated by numerous photographs which are equally interesting.

The Changing Room's greatest accomplishment is to synthesize many centuries of material in a manner which places our contemporary experience in perspective. I ordered the book to read about an entertainer who particularly intrigues me. I ended up spending the weekend reading the whole book. It is without any reservation that I heartily recommend The Changing Room to all readers.

Cool topic, but as enjoyable as reading a phone book
Drag performances tend to be funny and light. Of course, studying gender and studying gender in relation to theatre warrants a "heavier" reading of such performances..... But STILL, this book is as fat as a binder and is as dense as a computer manual.... Nothing you could read from cover to cover -- and I think that this would have been a lot more fun.