Cross-Dressing Scholars and Mummies in Drag: Egyptology and Queer Identity (original) (raw)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Egyptian-themed narratives depicted all kinds of behaviour deemed transgressive by contemporary standards. As Bradley Deane observes, for instance, mummy fictions "dissolve many of the oppositions that typically structure British identity: science/magic, Christianity/paganism, rationality/superstition, modernity/antiquity, colonizer/ colonized, and, at times, masculinity/femininity". 1 Interrogating this latter binary, recent scholarship has further sought to scrutinise the range of sexual complexities present in depictions of ancient Egypt in the modern world, especially those that verge away from the heteronormative; "many constructions of Egypt", as Lynn Meskell rightly states, "have been queered". 2 Angie Blumberg has, for instance, demonstrated the existence of queer archaeological motifs in literature of the late nineteenth century, focusing specifically on the works of Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee, a corpus that might be read as a forerunner to the emergence of "queer archaeology" in the 1980s. 3 Blumberg pays particular attention to Wilde's poem "The Sphinx" (1894), demonstrating how Egyptian mythology and imagery are alluded to in order to catalogue "illicit activit[ies] and desire[s]" that drive "all manner of unconventional relationships", which include same-sex couplings as well as problematic bestial and necrophilic encounters. 4 This essay complements Blumberg's analysis by focusing upon a single facet of queer archaeologies as defined by her, Meskell and others. Cross-dressing has a range of connotations, from the playful and comedic, to the sexual and the symbolic. It can be deeply personal, performative, public or private. Through unpicking some of the connotations of cross-dressing across the examples in Wearing the sword of her male lover while he slumbers in her own female attire, Cleopatra adopts a symbolic phallus, the precursor to the asp with which she 5