Crossdressing Harvard poetry professor Stephen Burt reviews William T. Vollmann’s The Book of Dolores:
Vollmann’s cross-dressing—unlike, say, the comedian and actor Eddie Izzard’s cross-dressing, or mine—is not an expression of deep identity (it is not something he has always done, nor something he always wanted to do) but something he seems to have done on a dare; having explored the mountains of Afghanistan, the red-light districts of Phnom Penh, and the polluted croplands of Calexico, Vollmann finds a new adventure in dresses and wigs. He cannot, he writes, “know what it is like to be a woman,” but he can “perform femininity for myself.” And why not? Like me, he won’t be fired, or even stigmatized, let alone physically harmed, for cross-dressing (though every year—as he must know—many people still are); like me, Vollmann works in a field where you can embarrass yourself without much professional penalty, as long as your audience still likes the language you use. There is nothing morally wrong—though nothing morally praiseworthy—in drag per se; when a man so invested in straight male desire as Vollmann tries it on, and describes how he feels with prolix honesty, the results may be creepy or charming, or both.
What’s sad here is how much he seems to have done it alone, without even trying to figure out how other cross-dressers or trans people, or their communities or their literary precursors, might help:
sometimes he talks without listening. When Vollmann is not explaining the processes by which he made Dolores into visual art, or explaining how “The Book of Dolores” interacts with the Mexican novel, he is explaining, or mansplaining, life in general: “People often get crushed to pieces between the grindstones of conflicting realities, as did the Poles during the Nazi-Soviet Pact.” Vollman has a thing for autodidacts and big thinkers: his prose here refers to Herbert Marcuse and to Gandhi, to Thoreau, to Dostoyevsky, to photographers from Man Ray to Steven Livick, but not (unless I missed it) to anybody before him who has spent any time thinking about what it means to reject the gender in which you grew up.
The Dish 