Feb 9
The border is crossed twice, once when Song Liling becomes a "woman," and the second time when René Gallimard does so, indicat[ing] the play's preoccupation with the transvestite as a figure not only for the conundrum of gender and erotic style, but also for other kinds of border-crossing, like acting and spying, both of which are appropriates of alternative and socially constructed subject positions for cultural and political ends. "Actor" and "spy" both become, like "transvestite," "third terms," or, more accurately, terms form within the third space of possibility, the cultural Symbolic, the place of signification.
garber, vested interests: cross-dressing and cultural anxiety
