Vested Interests Essay

Marjorie Garbor, the author of Vested Interests, argues that a cross-dresser enacts neither the man nor the woman, but a “mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. [The third sex] puts into question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge” (11). The third sex as explained by Garbor is crucial in understanding the work of Claude Cahun who identifies as neither a man or woman who explores all categories used by the majority who work on formulating an identity, including race and sexuality. As proposed by Gabor, cross-dressers as a third sex challenge the socio-historical gender concepts that Butler mentioned as found in culture and reappropriate by each individual. Yet, if looking back at the definition of the third sex as a separate entity …show more content…
The ambiguity that Cahun finds within hirself, supports Butler’s gender argument that the answer to what one’s gender does, it is not found within the self, it is developed through time within a given society. Another shared point between Cahun and Butler believe that language constitutes gender and not the other way around. This brief commentary that explains her difficulty to identify as a particular thing also reinforces Garbor’s notion of the third sex as a beholder of freedom and multiplicity, where the option of either or does not exist. Garbor concludes that “failure of definitional distinction…is itself put in question or under erasure in transvestism, and a transvestite figure, or a transvestite mode, will always function as a sign of overdetermination-- a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another” (16). Hence, Cahun’s concrete nonunderstanding of hirself due to the lack of vocabulary is a starting point of shaking the established culture by continuing to ask