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Victoria Flanagan. Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children's Literature and Film. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
There is a long and interesting history of cross-dressing in children's literature and film, ranging from "The Counterfeit Marquise" in seventeenthcentury France to the 1998 Disney film Mulan. Victoria Flanagan, in Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children's Literature and Film, tries to unpack both the contemporary concepts and discourses of cross-dressing as well as how these conversations are to be read in the realm of children's literature and film. Theoretically based in Judith Butler's ideas of gender behavior and subversion as well as Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, Flanagan explores both female-to-male and male-to-female cross-dressing in a variety of children's texts. Additionally, Flanagan reserves the final chapter of her book for the growing body of adolescent works that deal explicitly with transgender issues. The book examines a very intriguing topic that deserves this sort of full-length study, although there are weak moments in the text.
Flanagan is interested in exploring how the treatment of these issues in children's texts can challenge restrictive gender roles; she finds the most potential for challenge in texts that deal with female-to-male cross-dressing. She focuses the analysis in her initial chapters on Tamora Pierce's novel Alanna: The First Adventure and Disney's film Mulan. Flanagan argues that the title characters, Alanna and Mulan, both use cross-dressing as a means to an end rather than as a permanent statement about gender identity. In doing so, they work to undermine "natural" assumptions about masculinity and femininity that are culturally and discursively constructed. Flanagan notes these tales "equate cross-dressing with subjective agency, whereby gender transgression becomes a means through which a feminine subject can resist the interpellating discourses of traditional femininity" (43) and are therefore successfully disruptive in a way that aligns with Butler's claims from Gender Trouble. Flanagan offers an intriguing detailed analysis of the two characters, but she overlooks the heterogeneity to which both texts adhere. Both Alanna and Mulan end...