'Where's your man's heart now?': Male to female crossdressing in early modern literature

This dissertation examines male to female cross-dressing in early modern literature, including cheap print, poetry, prose romances, and drama. While there has been much scholarship about early modern female-to-male crossdressing and about boy actors' transvestism, very little work has been done around the question of men dressing as and passing for women. The gender performances of these men in dresses and the ways that their bodies and desires are deployed provide new perspectives to understand gender and desire in the broader context of early modern culture as a whole.;My first chapter uses examples of male to female crossdressers who are paired with their seeming opposites, female to male crossdressers. These examples reveal a "hydraulic model" for understanding gender in early modern works, which demands that every move towards femininity causes an equal but opposite move toward masculinity. Using evidence from early modern legal and medical ideologies, I show that clothing---and with it, a certain set amount of privilege---can be swapped "betwixt sex and sex." Chapter two explores the queered desire that female characters feel towards MTF crossdressers because, not despite, their gender presentation. What are we to make of the partners who are seduced by, or who seduce, crossdressers? By enjoying genderqueer love objects, these female characters upend traditional readings of crossdressing narratives to include possibilities for kinkiness and empowerment.;In chapter three, I consider violence as both a tool of control and a mechanism for resistance. Men dressed like women are double targets for violence, because they are perceived as female and as queer; they are also often represented as violent. This chapter shows the ways in which early modern gender was constructed and patrolled, while recognizing modes of resistance within a violent system.;Finally, chapter four takes on the question of MTF crossdressing in a gendered economy. Subverting the idea of "traffic in women," I use examples of men who dress as women in order to gain control of their inheritances and incomes to show that there may be some power in the position of the trafficked female after all.