As She Likes It is the first attempt to tackle the enduring question of how to perform those unruly women at the centre of Shakespeare's comedies. Unique among both Shakespearan and feminist studies, As She Likes It asks how gender politics affects the production of the comedies, and how gender is represented, both in the text and on the stage.

This work traces the origins and variations of theatrical cross-dressing through the ages and across cultures. It examines: tribal rituals and shamanic practices in the Balkans and Chinese-Tibet; the gender-bending elements of Greek and early Christian religion; the sodomitic appeal of the boy actor on the traditional stage of China, Japan and England; and the origins of the dame comedian, the principal boy, the glamour drag artiste and the male impersonator.

This book offers an account of an unprecedented North American study of contemporary female and male strip shows. It particularly focuses on the contradictory sex roles, cultural positions, and performance practices of 'straight' strip shows during their second heyday in the early 1990s.
Katherine Liepe-Levinson's research took her to over seventy different strip bars, clubs, theatres and sex emporiums ranging from elaborate lap-dancing and couch-dancing 'gentlemen's' clubs in New York, Houston, and San Francisco; to Peoria's onetime duplex cabaret where women strip for men downstairs, and...