Tag Archives: gender

Laughing at Male Anxieties–or Not

By Robin Bates | Published: March 19, 2010

Bringing Up Baby      Film Friday  This week I have been delivering a series of four lectures on “Women in Film” at the University of Ljubljana, where I was twice a visiting Fulbright lecturer.  Tuesday’s talk was originally to have been about Katharine Hepburn and screwball comedies, particularly Bringing Up Baby (1938).  Because people evinced an […]

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Crossing the Great Gender Divide

By Robin Bates | Published: March 15, 2010

In last Friday’s post on Twelfth Night, I talked about how Shakespeare uses cross-dressing to acknowledge that men and women have dimensions to them that are not acknowledged by the standard male and female categories.  I understood this about the play at an early age.  In a past post on Twelfth Night, I describe how […]

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The Temporary Transvestite Comedy

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2010

Brown and Lemmon    Film Friday Sometimes my different classes overlap in interesting ways.  I am currently teaching Twelfth Night in my British Literature survey class and Some Like It Hot in my senior-level film genre class.  Thanks to an article on the Billy Wilder classic by film scholar Chris Straayer, I can now label both […]

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Striving to Emulate Little Lord Fauntleroy

By Robin Bates | Published: June 24, 2009

Children, when they start developing a sense of self, discover that there is a preset gender program they are expected to conform to. For some this is not a problem, but others feel constrained by their assigned designation. It’s not always that girls want to be boys and boys girls. Sometimes they just want to […]

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Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressing Fantasies

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2009

When I was a child, I was fascinated by works containing characters of ambiguous gender. Specifically, I was drawn to images of boys who either looked like girls or who were, unbeknownst to them, actually girls. I was also drawn to images of girls (and women) who passed themselves off as guys. The prevailing culture […]

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