Gender bender

It is filed here as an expression term, and the practice is closer to the centre of the word than the label is. Gender bending makes no claim about what a person's gender is, so a gender bender may be Cisgender, Transgender or Non-binary, and the word answers none of that.

How gender bending became a practice

Wikipedia traces the political root of the idea to the movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the principle that the personal is political. Christopher Lonc set the motive out plainly in his 1974 article Genderfuck and Its Delights: to mock the roles handed to women and to men, to show how far from normal he could be, and to ridicule what he called the whole cosmology of restrictive sex roles and sexual identification.

The method is exaggeration. Parody overstates a convention until it stops reading as nature, which is why gender bending so often works by overdoing femininity or masculinity and so rarely by avoiding both. Cross-dressing and deliberate androgyny both do it, and so does behaviour: Wikipedia gives the example of somebody female-bodied being pointedly assertive and undomestic in order to test the idea that femininity is essential. The underlying claim is that gender is a performance, which is what makes it available to be performed wrongly on purpose.

Clothing carries most of the weight because clothing is the most legible part of the performance. The sociologist Hawkes makes the argument that the very universality of dress codes is what leaves them open to subversion: a code everybody can read is a code everybody can see broken. That the codes are arbitrary does not make them mild. Deuteronomy sets a prohibition on wearing the garment of the other sex, and some Christian readings have treated crossing that line as a moral transgression.

Nor is the binary being bent a universal one. Wikipedia notes that plenty of societies count more than two genders, giving the Bugis of South Sulawesi as the example, whose five categories include the androgynous Bissu. Where the count is different, so is what counts as a departure.

What genderfuck added to the word

Bending the expected roles is also called genderfuck, a word long in gay vernacular that began to appear in print in the 1970s. The definition Sheidlower quotes comes from L. Humphreys' 1972 book Out of the Closets, where gender fuck is a form of extended guerilla theatre. Rolling Stone applied it to the glam rock look in August 1972, describing a curious satire of female impersonation in which dresses, pumps and full make-up were worn with beards, and naming three men in WAC uniforms and big moustaches as an instance of it.

That is a sharper word than gender bender, and it is the one the practice was named with first. No dictionary on file dates the phrase gender bender itself. Genderfuck also names a genre: Wikipedia records erotic writing built on the premise that whether a character is a man or a woman is beside the point.

Why the noun can land as an insult

Merriam-Webster marks the personal sense informal and sometimes disparaging or offensive, which is the difference between a description somebody claims and one applied from outside. The second sense carries no such warning, and the dictionary illustrates it with Lewis Beale on Victor/Victoria: Julie Andrews plays a cabaret singer playing a man playing a woman playing a man, which the reviewer calls a gender bender of a comedy. Used before another noun the phrase is usually hyphenated, as in gender-bender fashions or a gender-bender novel, and gender-bending serves as both adjective and noun.

Wiktionary's senses are built around dressing in the clothes of another sex or in clothes that make gender ambiguous, and it adds two more. One is an event at which people are encouraged to dress that way even if they ordinarily would not, which makes the word a name for an occasion as well as for a person. The other is drawn from fantasy writing, for a character able to change their physical sex, and belongs to a genre.

Where gender bending shows up now

Fashion institutions treat it as a subject. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts mounted an exhibition called Gender Bending Fashion, which set out women's garments recut for men and men's recut for women, designs made deliberately ambiguous, and agender pieces intended for anybody.

Drag is the most visible form, though not every drag performance is doing the same thing. A drag act may be no more than an actor playing a character of another gender, or it may be a parody of gender roles built out of exaggerated stereotypes, and the performers may be drag kings or drag queens. A faux queen, sometimes called a bio queen, is a cisgender woman performing as a drag queen, which is the same exaggeration turned back on the gender the performer already holds. Rupp and colleagues asked in 2010 how the personal gender and sexuality of drag performers shape, and are shaped by, what happens in the act.

Individual figures carry the word too. Wikipedia names Prince for an androgynous look and for wearing women's clothes, and notes that Eddie Izzard spoke openly about cross-dressing as early as 1992. The practice long predates the phrase for it: four of the five main female characters in Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Portia, Rosalind and Viola, appear as women who dress as men or boys, on a stage where the parts were played by men to begin with.

Why a word can bend gender too

The phrase has a second life in linguistics, where the gender bender is a word. Hugh Rawson used it that way in the Cambridge Dictionary blog in 2012 for words that have changed sex over time, and the pattern he describes runs one way: masculine words that acquire a bad meaning tend to be handed to women.

His examples are all shifts of the same kind, and the dates are his.

The oldest bend of all is in the word man, which once meant a human of either sex, with wer and wīf marking the difference. Wer survives only inside werewolf, wīf-mann became woman, and wīf narrowed to wife. Rawson notes the countervailing movement in his own time, feminine suffixes falling away as poetess, authoress, sculptress and aviatrix give way to the unmarked forms, and a flight stewardess becomes a flight attendant.