https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=2947 This essay discusses the development of an undergraduate course on cross-dressing in early modern drama in which students are encouraged to relate current discourse and debates about gender identity and expression to gender performance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama. I address Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning (1990) as a work that opens up avenues for exploring cross-dressing on the early modern stage. I contrast the embrace of drag as a creative, empowering experience in Paris is Burning to the depiction of cross-dressed performance in the film Stage Beauty (2004), which features a protagonist loosely based on the historical Edward Kynaston, a renowned actor, who specialized in female roles during the first few years of the Restoration period (1660-1661). Where Stage Beauty’s Kynaston is depicted as traumatized and damaged by cross-dressed performance, the drag performers in Paris is Burning are empowered and validated. I argue that Paris is Burning serves as a powerful counter example to the Hollywood fantasies of early modern cross-dressing presented in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Stage Beauty. Shakespeare en devenir N°17 — 2023 fr dim., 21 janv. 2024 19:46:35 +0100 sam., 28 févr. 2026 12:05:27 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=2947 0