CHAPTER SEVEN EONIST SPIES. CROSS-DRESSING AND THE IDEA OF SARTORIAL CAMOUFLAGE ANNA MALINOWSKA Cross-dressing or transvestitism, a term broadly explored since the emergence of gender and queer studies, stands for a practice of a transsexual exchange of garments, defined as “the deliberate and conscious wearing of clothes which, in particular society, are perceived as the domain of the opposite sex, usually to knowingly create an image of the self as a person of the opposite sex.” 1 Stemming from a specific theoretical-critical ambience, it has been predominantly understood – especially as approached from the postmodern perspective – as a form of negotiating the social visibility of a homosexual subject who struggles with his/her sexualities via vestural preferences into the main current of cultural organization. Serving as an umbrella term for non-normative cross-sexual phenomena such as: gynemimesis or andromimesis, gender dysphoria, female or male impersonation, transgenderism, femmiphilia, androphilia, femme mimic, fetishism, crossing, transsexuality, 2 it is customarily associated with the assimilative processes of coming out and forms of social activism or movements, 3 in which gay/queer people disclose, i.e. publicly manifest, their homosexual selves. 1 Charlotte Suthrell, Unzipping Gender. Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture (Oxford: BERG, 2004), p. 17. 2 See: Vern L. Bullough, Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. vii. 3 It is worth reminding that the sartorial / behavioural campaign for ensuring gay people social visibility and presence, the beginning of which is usually associated with the Stonewall Riots, dates back to the second half of the 19th century and was advocated for by the first theorist of homosexuality Karl Heinrich Urlichs, who was also the first to define the emancipatory potential of self-disclosure and marking the existence of “the third sex.”