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A cartoon by W. Miller shows a simply dressed, nondescript man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with: “I wear this/Therefore I am” (Lurie, 1983). This idea, that clothing and dress construct the person, is at the heart of Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests. It is not to be confused with the more psychoanalytic understanding that clothing and dress express complex and often unconscious personal meanings, nor with sociological theories about the meanings of clothing in culture. Garber does confuse these three viewpoints throughout her book, although she seems theoretically committed to the first idea, which she attempts to develop in Lacanian terms.
Garber's basic thesis is that cross-dressing challenges our notion of “binarity” by introducing a “third sex.” It is the ground of meaning, inasmuch as it represents the Lacanian “third dimension” of the “Symbolic.” Cross-dressing thus creates culture, as well as being itself a creation of culture. The most striking example of the power of cross-dressing is in the theater, to which Garber devotes much of her book. Garber discerns and elaborates themes of gender confusion in a variety of theatrical settings, ranging from Japanese Kabuki to the Broadway play M. Butterfly, but most extensively in Shakespeare.
The section on cross-dressing in Shakespeare is the most valuable in this book, for Garber has a wide knowledge of that literature and the associated body of literary criticism. She temporarily