SOURCE: Garber, Marjorie. “The Occidental Tourist: M. Butterfly and the Scandal of Transvestism.” In Nationalisms and Sexualities, edited by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, pp. 121-46. New York: Routledge, 1992.

In the following essay, Garber examines the role of cross-dressing in Hwang's M. Butterfly as a deconstruction of dominant categories of gender.

A former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer have been sentenced to six years in jail for spying for China after a two-day trial that traced a story of clandestine love and mistaken sexual identity. … M. Boursicot was accused of passing information to China after he fell in love with Mr. Shi, whom he believed for twenty years to be a woman.

—New York Times, May 11, 1986

This story, which scandalized and titillated Western journalists and readers, was—perhaps predictably—received slightly differently in different parts of the West. The British press treated...