Harvard professor and literary critic Stephen Burt on why his desire to dress like a woman hasn't been easy:
When I’m dressed informally, as I often am, with girly accessories (nail polish, candy-bright rings) and a T-shirt and jeans, and I’m walking around outdoors, I sometimes feel that I look wrong, I should go home and change. When I’m fully dressed up as a girl I can feel the same way. It’s a voice in my head, a critical friend or frenemy; sometimes it gives me helpful tips (that green doesn’t work with this blue; you should shave again first) and sometimes it says I should give up and look like a man.
But when I look entirely gender-appropriate, with nothing sparkly, lacy, or violet, I hear or feel a grinding basso continuo of inward sadness, saying, "This doesn’t quite work, and it doesn’t represent you." I can put up with that, ignore it, for days, but it gets to me. It sets my teeth on edge. The truth is that I’m going to feel slightly wrong, slightly out of alignment with my own body, no matter what I wear or what I do. So why not feel pretty?
He connects his crossdressing desires to a larger problem of never feeling comfortable in our own bodies:
Is it even possible to be who you really are, to show your inward self? John Ashbery’s great long poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" considers our desire to look at a face or a body and see the soul "inside"; its trigger, or subject, is the distorted self-portrait that the painter Parmigianino created by looking at his own face in a mirrored ball, where
The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look.Do we have inner cores, selves that cannot be seen? So Ashbery’s poem suggests. On the other hand, "your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there / And nothing can exist except what’s there." If I am a girl or a woman only when I am by myself, unseen, then I was never a girl.
(Image: Andy Warhol's "Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975", via Andrew Russeth)
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