“When seeing a man cross-dress we may read the construction of 'woman'. When we see a woman cross-dress as a man, the 'real' in our culture, what do we see? We may read power. But if we read (a construction of) a man, that which is supposedly not constructed, faith in the real may begin to break down.” Elizabeth Drorbaugh / Since the development of a discourse of sexual identity in western culture, a great deal of academic attention has focused upon cross-dressing on stage; less than half of it, however, has been upon the actress who dresses and performs a masculine role. And yet, as Drorbaugh and others have suggested, the woman's act in dressing up as a man may be far more transgressive, challenging and disturbing than the opposite transformation. Butler formulates it as 'a monstrous ascent into phallicism'. It cannot be read, like male cross-dressing, simply as defining and playing with the womanly other; it challenges not only the way we read the hierarchy, but also the ontology, of the male. There are further ways in which the two acts of cross-dressing are deeply dissimilar. It is at least arguable that male cross-dressing has always contributed in similar ways over many centuries to the philosophical and ritual underpinning of the patriarchal societies; but the material culture goes its own way, and the enactment of the male by women seems to me to be always specific to the immediate, historical negotiations of interpersonal power through gender. Women, in other words, perform on stage in male clothes, or parts or versions of male clothing, for various reasons and with extremely different effects at different points in the history of the actress.