The Sexual and Textual Politics of Dress: Rosa Bonheur and Her Cross-Dressing Permits

The great painter and staunch feminist Rosa Bonheur was one of the rare nineteenth-century French women to obtain official police-permission to wear men's clothes in public. After sketching out a history of cross-dressing permits, the author studies Rosa Bonheur's desire for trousers in the various contexts of her private and professional lives. This study concludes that the artist's cross-dressing – not to be confused with transvestism – is a pragmatic gesture of emancipatory subversion that aims to redefine the female self through the rhetoric of costume. (GvS)