Cross-dressing: Destabilizing Ideology A Query on Cross-dressing with an emphasis on “Azerbaijani Tales” Recollected by Samad Behrangi

This article is an attempt to depict how cross-dressing, as a theatrical affairm is able to challenge signs which are stabilized by Ideology. For this goal cross-dressing has been understudied in Azerbaijani oral literature. Firstly, in order to use a relevant method and a basic theory, Althusser’s concept of Ideology and the process of Naturalization have been adopted as useful guides. The writers have shown that Ideology, Subject, Myth, Power and semiotic orders grow in a non-hierarchical relation and try to signify each other. Althusser’s idea of happening reactions against Ideology has been traced in oral literature and cross-dressing, as one of these reactions, has been analyzed in Azerbaijani tales. Actually, cross-dressing, by creating a category crisis, reveals new structures that are denied by Ideology for Power’s sake. It must be noticed that in this collection of tales, cross-dressing happens in three different genres which are: gender cross-dressing, Bald-dressing and Dervish-dressing and by each of them a category crisis- in Marjorie Garber’s terms- is created. Gender cross-dressing is tacitly correlated to the understanding of sex and gender. When the attributed clothes to a sex can be changed, then the naturalized meaning of gender can be brought under question. In this state Judith Butler’s arguments of sex and gender can be the key to a way out and Marjorie Garber’s studies of cross-dressing depict that category crisis shows how human-made are natural-being-thought structures. Bald-dressing, i.e. wearing a sheep’s or goat’s bowl, is a repeatedly used act in Persian and other ethnic-related tales. The point is that we are rarely face with characters in tales, and binary types such as Good-forever and Bad-forever has been usually exposure. But in the other hand, Bald is a mélange of antagonistic characteristics’ like being clever and being lazy. And not only the Bald-dressed person acquires these characteristics such as being cunning and penetrates to his/her goal, but also almost always the Bald-dressed person is a girl in these tales. For this reason Bald-dressing besides being a mean to create new narrative forms, can be a special type of gender cross-dressing. In a same way, Dervish-dressing happens when a king decides to enter the public by wearing Dervish’s clothes who is a socially popular person. This type of cross-dressing in juxtaposition with having a category crisis in social castes brings to mind the wishes of that class of the society that oral literature is created and continuously repeated by them, the wish of having the king beside themselves and dressed by their own cloths. However, the king always goes back to his palace and the total order of society remains stable. Finally, it must be noted that cross-dressing isn’t going to destroy old structures but is an attempt to present new structures and this question can be brought forward that does a cross-dresser turns into a new sign or by remaining the previous sign acquires a new signified? What does the process of indication?