Gender Identity In Wendy Doniger's Clothing

A woman dresses as a man who is pretending to be a woman. She is a flamboyant drag queen one day and a staunch feminist the next, an admired trendsetter and a shunned deviant. Her behavior varies with those she interacts with—if they admire intellectualism, she speaks of Monet, quantum mechanics, and Ulysses; if they appreciate a raunchy sense of humor, she mirrors their uncouth gregariousness. She has multiple identities of both gender and personality. They are all authentically hers—some were bequeathed to her and others she chose. She perpetually swaps these identities, plucking the one she wants as if it is clothing on a rack and she is dressing for the occasion. Her life is a haphazard collage of selves, or “masks”: a web of lies and truths.

No. According to Wendy Doniger, she is ordinary, and you are just like her. Doniger claims that we all have multiple “masks,” yet we vow that only one removable mask exists. We are trained to believe in the battle between self and mask—the lifelong skirmish from which the brave and confident cast off their mask to reveal an authentic self, an exposed nucleus. We think of masks as impersonations: habits we acquire, personality traits we show, and people we try in vain to become. Yet Doniger asserts that “masks” are not what we use to cover up who we truly are, because we possess no genuine or default self, no “monolithic core”. “Masks” are not cover-up impersonations but instead self-impersonations, for our “self” is comprised of these masks. In other words, a mask is not a consistently weathering veneer that may be scraped off to expose an invariable interior. It is a veneer that covers a body of veneers, so that one mask is no more constant or genuine than

But no matter what our masks are, how they relate, or how they came to fruition, they form an “enduring network of selves inside us”. We are always “imprisoned” in this network, even though we may experiment with multiple masks and rewind along our continuum of personalities to visit previous selves. We are limited to our past, present, and future masks. Hardly a restriction indeed, but we are nonetheless limited because we can never morph into someone else. We may only mimic that other person so that we adopt the mimicry as our own mask, and consequently our own self. As we adopt masks, we feel out the borders of our individual self, of our “prison.” This idea of imprisonment conjures the image of an asylum, hinting by association that only the insane possess multiple selves. But Doniger shows that the sane, too, exhibit multiplicity. This description of sanity is contentious; it makes sense in Doniger’s world but seems crazy in ours. To help us reconcile our definition of “sane” with hers, Doniger circumscribes insanity with a blurry yet tightly bound border. Doniger explains: “It is notoriously difficult to draw an objective line between healthy (rather than merely culturally accepted) and pathological fantasies”. She begins to draw this line by observing that pathological selves elicit the feeling of “unheimlich”. “Unheimlich,” a term