Reina Lewis provides a startling analysis of Grace Ellison’s memoir on Ottoman harems. As a British feminist and Turkophile, Ellison gives various accounts of her delights on cross-dressing in Ottoman Turkey, including her wearing of the veil and her (successful) attempts at fooling some of her surroundings into thinking that she was an actual native Ottoman lady. Many writers are of the opinion that cross-cultural dressing is an activity which “blurs boundaries and creates new indeterminate categories” (p. 537). Lewis, however, challenges this position and argues that cross-cultural dressing “crosses boundaries, but does not dissolve them” (ibid). In other words, as dress acts as an element of ‘gender and ethnic performance’, cross-dressing therefore reasserts and reinforces boundaries and power relations between the West and the Orient.
To demonstrate her point, Lewis makes reference to Gail Low’s treatment of representation and colonialism. On the politics of clothes, Low argues that they are important in the ‘fantasy’ of cross-dressing as they are ‘superficial’ and “can always be removed when one needs to revert to type, to reassert one’s racial or cultural superiority” (p. 528). In the specific case of Ellison, the delight of cross-cultural dressing is “predicated on an implicit reinvestment in the very boundaries” that she crosses (p. 528). Clothes, therefore, “operate as visible gate-keepers of those divisions and, even when worn against the grain, serve always to re-emphasize the existence of the dividing line” (ibid).
But then how do power relations come into play? Aren’t power relations inversed in cross-dressing? If so, won’t that blur distinctions nevertheless by creating new or at least hybrid categories of identity? Lewis implies in her article that power relations are in fact exacerbated instead of reversed. She writes that cross-cultural dressing is associated with ‘fantasies’ of power and surveillance. In other words, the “undercover cross-culturally dressed agent embodies a mode of power based on a ‘fantasy of invisibility’ which imagines for an imperial gaze a state of omnipotence and omnipresence that is secret and voyeuristic rather than visible, as in the [Foucaultian] panoptical model” (p. 530). As such, the racial privilege that “underpins” Ellison’s authority (p. 531) is always kept intact during this cultural transgression (along with the pleasures that it produces) and thus serves to merely expose boundary divisions and relations of power.
How then does the cross-dressing native (i.e. the Ottoman lady) in Ellison’s account fit into this paradigm? Here Lewis incorporates Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry where the cross-dressing native “risks becoming Bhabha’s mimic man – an uncanny imitation of the real thing, doomed to inauthenticity” (p. 535). More specifically, the cross-dressing ‘mimic man’, by the sheer fact of his or her reality of inauthenticity, pays homage (consciously or unconsciously) to colonial and even neo-colonial power relations.
Ultimately, all activities, even seemingly trivial ones such as cross-dressing, stand in power relations. I say ‘all activities’ as there is no space that exists outside these relations given that they exist as a web (as analogized by Foucault) that permeates the human condition and is the quintessence of modernity. Clothes, far from being trivial, have played an overarching role in the colonization of the Orient. Indeed, one of the markers of the colonial project was to transform natives into carbon-copies of those that stood at the hierarchy of power. As such, the colonial tenue vestimentaire stood as the prime symbol of the success of imperialist control. Strictly speaking, adopting the patron’s clothes became a testament and indeed verification of the transformational end-product of this process in the colonialist framework as well as within the context of (contemporary) neo-colonial power relations.
Reina Lewis. "On Veiling, Vision and Voyage: Cross-Cultural Dressing and Narratives of Identity" in Feminist Postcolonial Theory ed. Reina Lewis & Sara Mills, (Routledge: New York, 2003).
