COMEDY

GENDER AND SEXUALITY 71his routines that are not so much surreal, the usual epithet he attracts, asa cut and paste of the found objects of the media age. Izzard often wearswomen’s clothes on stage, but his representation of sexuality followsmuch the same principle of choice and assemblage as his act, creating agender role that does not conform to pre-existing definitions. Izzardsays, ‘People say, “Why don’t you change your clothes at half-time?”Why? Do footballers do this? I’m not a drag act. This is not about theclothes, it’s about the comedy and I just do whatever I want’ (Izzardet al., 1998:61).MARRIAGEWhile a notion of femininity is the principal allusion at the heart ofcross-dressing and drag, ‘real’ women are excluded from this importantcomic motif. A commonly held objection, as formulated by LucyFischer, is that transvestite comedy ‘privileges the male and claims hisdominance even when woman is apparently there’, noting also theabsence of central women in both comic cinema and in theoreticaldiscussions of the genre, which is ‘particularly bizarre given the originsof the mode in female fertility rites’ (Fischer, 1991:62, 63).Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (412 BC) is the earliest extant play to givesignificant speaking roles to women, and possibly the first in Westernliterature. Its plot involves a group of Athenian women who occupy theAcropolis and go on a sex-strike in order to force their husbands intopeace negotiations with Sparta. Lysistrata and her group are politicallymotivated and outspoken women who ransom the state into seeingsense. However, this is not an argument for their emancipation. AsLauren K.Taaffe tells us, the central conceit of Lysistrata, a role-reversalthat places women in masculine positions (and vice versa), only servesto draw out the subordination of women:The integrity of male identity is kept whole, while the absurdityof women in public life is played up. The play confirms andcelebrates an ordered sense of gender identity in which male isstable and female is unstable, in need of control through marriage.Finally, the convention of male actors in female roles ensures thatmasculinity is always present on stage, even when all the charactersare female.(Taaffe, 1993:51)