Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality

Masquerade is now a central topic in many disciplines. This volume explores and revisits the role of disguise in constructing, expressing, or representing marginalised identities. The contributors have a range of areas of expertise giving the book an interdisciplinary approach. This eclectic collection spans a range of cultures and narrative voices to offer discussions of: mask and carnival; the voice as mask; stigma of illegitimacy; fashion, fetish and fantasy; lesbian masks; cross-dressing in Jewish folk theatre; and the mask in 17th- and 18th-century London and 19th-century France. The book provides provocative and nuanced ways of thinking about masking and masquerade and shows that there is no such thing as a single or true identity.