Female Crossdressing:
Unhistorical Queerness within The Roaring Girl
Ozge Canbul
1. Introduction and BackgroundThe gender-biased heteronormative social anxiety within the Renaissance culture requires an other, a queer other,to fully legitimize women’s hierarchal structure and subordination. The external misrepresentation and crossdressingof the character Moll Cutpurse, featured within Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s play The Roaring Girl,engages with this anxiety.
The ambiguities and queer implications surrounding her sexuality and gender-bias-resistant identity call for ananachronistic queer reading. Thus, the term lipstick lesbian will be applied in a slightly altered fashion befitting Moll
herself, and it will function as a bridge between historical and unhistorical approaches. Although the term acquired
different connotations over the years, lipstick lesbian, which dates back to the early 1980s, refers to a homosexual
female who retains gender-biased feminine appearances.1 It is similar to the archetype femme lesbian on the spectrumof self-presentation since they both support a normative feminine appearance, even though the lipstick lesbian may
use her feminine apparel to conceal her sexual identity under certain circumstances. Moll’s lipstick lesbian status is
amplified because of multi-layer discrepancies between internal and external self; thus, both the term and her queer
self throughout the play becomes inverted.
2. Analysis
The queerness provided by Mol’s presence and actions operates as a
mirror for the dynamics of gender struggle between the normative andunconventional female characters. As the play progresses, Moll’s queer
identity and her acts of crossdressing and masculine display evolve frombeing cases of misrepresentation and misidentification into apparatuses
which she utilizes to gain her own foothold within the gender-biased socialdynamics. The epigraph from the title page of The Roaring Girl’s original,
1611 edition features a depiction of Moll Cutpurse in men’s clothing andsmoking a pipe alongside the following phrase: “My case is alter’d, I must
worke for my living” (Dekker and Middleton 1). It is quite intriguing thatsuch a line adorns the title page as it has no exact corresponding line within
the play. Whether it was the result of an authorial agency or publisher’s
choice, adopting this line and the depiction as the frontispiece of the playcreate a build-up for the upcoming oddness or queerness and sets up thestage for the questioning of typical aspects of a comedy with a promise ofheteronormative reproductive future at the end.
3. Conclusion
Queerness within the play operates on various interchangeable layers and leads the way to her acceptance, aslong as she accepts her role as the queer female who is not part of the predetermined heteronormative gender-biased
social categories. Her queerness is amplified because of multi-layer discrepancies between internal and external self;thus, both the term and her queer self throughout the play becomes inverted. The resolution only comes when Moll
is fully integrated both internally and externally into the society, as an honest woman in both male and female clothing.
In the end, what is left for Moll and possibly for all the queers is to adopt, adapt, and utilize the queer identity andpush through the restrictions caused by the heteronormativity and find a place of belonging and acceptance.

1

Other meanings including, but no limited to, “conventionally attractive and sexually insatiable women who
desire one another but only insofar as their desire is a performance for male onlookers or a precursor to sex with men” Jodi O’Brien, Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Volume 1. (London: Sage Publications, 2009), 492.

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