The Changing Room : Sex, Drag and Theatre (Gender in Performance) | 
| Author: Lauren Senelick
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $46.95
Buy New: $42.25
You Save: $4.70 (10%)
Rating:  2 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 560
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.7
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 7.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0415159865
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.0866
EAN: 9780415159869
ASIN: 0415159865
Publication Date: July 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The First Major history of cross-dressing in theatre
Whether it's Ziggie Stardust strutting the stage in a white satin gown or a troupe of Kabuki actors masquerading as women to a mesmerized male audience, the evocative transvestite performer offers a subliminal homoerotic fantasy and provides the lasting image of the show long after its closing night. Award-winning theater historian and critic Laurence Senelick synthesizes a vast array of material from archival research and a lifetime of theater-going to provide a monumental record of cross-dressing on the stage. Pantomimists, dame comedians, principal boys, glamour drag artistes, androgyne rock stars, and male impersonators are traced from their roots in tribal ritual and Christian pageantry to today's forms -- the dandyism of Little Richard, the queer sensibility of Sylvester and the Coquettes, the thrift-shop drag of Boy George -- capturing the allure and excitement of gender-bending performance: its rebellion, it's public spectacle, its amusements, its tragedies, its escapism. Senelick brilliantly elucidates the dynamic between the theater as both mainstream forum and anti-establishment haven for misfits, ravers, radical activists, and outcasts. With 100 rare photographs, The Changing Room offers a voyeuristic vision of a lifestyle watched by many, but lived by few, and a compulsively readable, authoritative account of the theater at its most sexual and effective.
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| Customer Reviews:
 It's Not a Drag! September 29, 2000
bob black (Beaumont, Texas)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Laurence Senelick's The Changing Room is an entertaining and well-written exploration of the "inherent sexuality of all performance, the ability of the live theatre to construct gender variants unencountered anywhere else, and an abiding 'queerness' in the most authentic types of theatre...."Scholars will mine the rich lode of material found in the text and the footnotes. Less exacting readers, including this reviewer, will find the book a curious admixture of fascinating, funny, and illuminating. I am still smiling at Senelick's description of the untimely passage of Bert Savoy, an entertainer with whom i was not familiar: "Rumour ran that he had exclaimed 'Mercy, ain't Miss God cutting up something awful!' just before he was struck by lightning. The book is illustrated by numerous photographs which are equally interesting. The Changing Room's greatest accomplishment is to synthesize many centuries of material in a manner which places our contemporary experience in perspective. I ordered the book to read about an entertainer who particularly intrigues me. I ended up spending the weekend reading the whole book. It is without any reservation that I heartily recommend The Changing Room to all readers.
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