En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera

Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies

by Corinne E. Blackmer (Editor), Patricia Juliana Smith (Editor)

Since the release of Wayne Koestenbaum's book, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, gender studies has begun to take an active interest in music. Opera, long viewed as strictly an establishment tradition, has in particular been given a second look by gender theorists. Can opera - an antiquated, Eurocentric bastion of high culture - in fact be subverting patriarchal authority in some fundamental way?

Genres: Music, LGBT, Gender and Sexuality, Theory, Nonfiction

381 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1995

Reviews

[Joan]

Confession: I adore mezzos! There are marvelous sopranos, and I'm a fool for Callas, but pressed to make choice, I'll pick a mezzo any day! This book was meant for me.

The flip side of The Queen's Throat, this is a collection of essays discussing the "trouser role", the transvestite mezzo who plays the role of a male in opera. Of course, nothing is quite as gender-bending as some of the earliest operas, with castrati singing male and female roles, mezzos as men, sopranos as either, etc. And if the female character had to wear male drag, or vice versa, so much the better!