Their She Condition': Crossdressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan

This chapter identifies some of the many traditional presentations of gender in the poem Don Juan. It analyses a different impulse in the poem to transgress the laws of gender and genre, identified as related cultural absolutes by Jacques Derrida. The chapter focuses on earlier research by Susan J. Wolfson into the politics of poetic style and explains the reader to ways in which poetic form might offer a mode of resistance to dominant cultural authority. It draws on biographical research, cultural anthropology, history and psychoanalysis to explore the dynamics and subversive potential of cross-dressing in Don Juan. The cross-dressings of Don Juan are significant not so much for showing the poem’s male hero appropriating and internalizing female otherness, as for provoking the poem’s readers to attend to what happens — politically, socially and psychologically — when women and men are allowed, or forced, to adopt the external properties and prerogatives of the other.