Cross Dressing In Elizabethan England Essay

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Before the times of Elizabethan England, there was the administration of something called the sumptuary laws. These laws were put up in almost every city, town and nation state with the goal to regulate who wore what. The main purposes of this law were to regulate commerce, to help support local industries, and help prevent the flaunting of wealth. This law ended up being very important when it came to gender roles during this time. While this law was mainly put in place because of wealth, gender was a subset effect of this law and this could be seen very clearly especially when it came to the theater. Cross-dressing was very common on the English stage because the majority of the time they had men playing all the roles including the women. Therefore it began a conversation about what the true effects of this law

It was actually becoming fashionable to have this confusion display. This resulted with people dressing more freely and them having less concern about how they looked and its impact on class, gender, sexuality, and race. There were some people who argued against this way of dressing. One of them was Putian Dr. John Rainolds. He warned against dress like this saying it was bad for your manhood to dress as a woman. There was even those like Freud who claimed that the men who dressed like woman where only doing it because of fetishes.

So the questions lays do clothes make the man or woman? During this time there was a lot of anxiety about how they thought their identities were not fixed. This mean if you acted or dress a certain way one could change their identity from a man to a woman or vice versa. So those who believed that doing certain things could change your identity tended to think that they had to protect their identities. So they would do everything they could to make sure that they did not act in accordance with the other