Crossing the Line

Recently I visited the State Library with some other students to hear a talk by the Library's fashion curator Margot Riley on records the Library holds on cross dressing. It was filmed for ABC's Big Ideas program and should be avaliable online some time this week. She discussed a variety of examples and pulled out a wide range of image sources focusing on some of the different reasons people had chosen to cross dress. It was interesting to note the demise of women dressing as men in the twentieth century due to the shifting nature of fashion over this time, as more women adopted pants or clothing with more of a menswear influence where as women became more empowered the need to cross dress to be treated more equally became unnecessary. Margot explained that Jeanne Baré was one of the first documented female cross dressers and did so to earn a mans wage and while traveling as a botanists assisstant on board an expedition in the 1760's, something that would not have been possible as woman. Interestingly when the ship ported in Tahiti the locals recognised her as a woman, something the crew had failed to notice. The plate shown to us was an original, apologies for the lack of detail in this web image.


Although most of the examples from the twenthieth century were of male cross dressers there are some contemporary examples of women dressing as men that exist today. The Kingpins are a group of Australian female artists who dress as men in their video works.

The Kingpins play with the gaps in and between with an infinite series of transgressive drag acts. Coming out of Sydney’s drag scene, the female foursome utilize an aesthetics of remixing, with elements taken from mainstream media, pop culture and art history, to comment on issues of gender, sex, public space, consumerism and corporate branding. Their performances play with music, video and costume, and are presented as public interventions, sometimes in the form of ‘surprise’ actions, as well as gallery installations with posters, projections and soundtracks. Humorous, spectacular, grotesque and colourful, their work engages the audience in a subversive politics of pleasure.

Manray Hsu, 2006

Most video art is difficult to track down online as it is traded as a commodity. The work of theirs that I have seen belongs to the Museum of Contemporary Art, titled "Welcome to the Jingle" depicts the foursome invading different Starbucks as a comment on consumerism. This is shown inconjunction with another projection of the four in wild neon fringed garments shouting/singing(?) in a techno meatal death style with lyrics borrowed from films such as Gallipolli "How fast can you run, how fast can you run/ As fast as a leopard". It's not difficult then to see how the group progressed into the fashion realm, their label Birthday Suit is full of bold colours and shapes and they have collaborated with Think Positive to create some wild prints. Avaliable at Incu and Fat.