Crossdressing in the media

I was watching BBC's Let's Dance for Comic Relief, which aired fairly recently - I think the start of 2011? Notably, several of the participants elected to perform - quite literally - as the opposite gender. I do not mean performance as in drag shows, but they were dressed as the other gender, and they were obligated to dance in a manner that indicated that they were indeed that gender. So clearly, in that sense, this is an instance of gender performance.

There are, in Let's Dance, several preliminary episodes covering the initial rounds, culminating in a single episode that covers the events of the final round. In the second episode (again, this is part of the preliminary rounds of the competition), I believe there were a total of four (out of, like, eight) contestants who elected to cross-dress, two male and two female. The first woman, Lulu, performed a rap song; she is in her 50s, and overall the performances was basically considered "cute." Another woman performed as Freddie Mercury and received similar reactions. I'm wondering if that's a weird gendered thing; after all, it's more "shocking" to see a man playing a woman's role than vice versa.

So here's what interests me. In show 2, two men - Jarred Christmas and Noel Fielding - elected to cross-dress in order to dance to songs by Madonna and Kate Bush, respectively. Notably, they were dressed (accurately) as their selected singers. What I'm interested in is their motives in cross-dressing and in performing as women.

In the pre-dance interviews (if you've ever seen a competitive dancing show before, then you know how that works)/opening skits, Christmas's sketch revolved around getting his legs waxed (accompanied, of course, by all the gendered jokes that always go along with that sort of thing - namely, it's painful and guys can't handle it). He was aware that Fielding physically surpassed him in his ability to appear female, and perhaps as a result of this, Christmas's dance incorporated a fair amount of comedy. (In fairness, the man was in a hot pink leotard, blonde wig, and heels - hard not to be at least a little self-referential about that.)

By contrast, in Fielding's introductory skit (which I can confirm he wrote himself - I think the same is true of Christmas), he elected to focus not on the comedic difficulty of performing as "woman" but instead on the comedic difficulty of learning to dance. There were literally no jokes made about his outfit by Fielding himself. Interestingly, Fielding opted to modify Kate Bush's original costume from her music video by adding tights underneath the dress, thus precluding any jokes regarding waxing as a feminine beauty ritual and its strangeness when adopted by a man.

(Off topic, but still interesting to me - men who wax seem to be on shaky ground, and there are, of course, very specific areas which are "acceptable" for men to wax. The legs are not one of them; that is very specifically a female beauty ritual.)

Particularly interesting is that Fielding did indeed look like a woman (at least to some extent - he has very masculine facial features), and his dance was praised in terms of actual dancing ability rather than the fact that he did it in a dress. There was humor in Fielding's dance as well - both he and Christmas are, after all, comedians - but it was derived from the arrival and performance of backup dancers.

Also interesting is that Fielding's two backup dancers were women dressed identically to him, whereas Christmas's backup dancers were deliberately attractive men. His interactions with them were at least flirtatious, if not sexual, and this served both to create humor within the performance and to draw attention to Christmas's biological sex.

Another interesting thing: both men had sideburns. Fielding's were less noticeable; in fairness, it helped that the wig he wore was a similar color. Christmas, however, kept his prominent brunette sideburns, which were noticeable against his blonde wig. I'm wary of reading too much into this - it could very well be that the two men were simply unwilling to drastically alter their haircuts for a single performance. That said, the effect of Christmas's sideburns/wig combo was indeed somewhat funny. With Fielding, I was much more willing to ignore his sideburns entirely.

I think the crux of all this is that while Fielding was performing "woman," his performance itself (i.e. his dance) did not at all rely upon humor but instead upon technique. Christmas's dance was much more based in humor; that said, I don't want to disservice him by pointing that out, as he did perform well. I think the key difference is that Fielding's dance could genuinely be described as being beautiful; he was even likened to Kate Bush (and there's a great deal of interesting things I could be saying about her and her response to his performance, which I think I may later on).

Ultimately, Christmas did not receive enough votes from the viewers to go on to the finals, whereas Fielding continued on as a judge's choice - chosen over Lulu, the older woman who had cross-dressed as a man. But even then, I don't think that's something to read into; Fielding's dance was genuinely better, both from a technical standpoint... But again, the success of Lulu's dance hinged upon the humorous nature of an older woman dressing and performing as a young rapper.

More on this later; my brain's overflowing with ideas about this all at the moment, and I'd like to get some of it on my blog before I forget it all.