Around 1800 there was an explosion of cross-dressing in German-language literature. This dissertation examines how German-speaking women writers employed the cross-dresser in literature as a vehicle to participate in the debate on the "Women Question." At a time when both egalitarian and complementarity discourses on women coexisted and gender was not yet naturalized, socio-cultural gender boundaries were still in flux. With the liminal figure of the cross-dresser, these authors sought to expand the boundaries of the gendered private sphere by redefining exclusively masculine notions such as honor, friendship, and Bildung.

Chapter 1 is concerned with poems by Philippine Gatterer Engelhard (1779), Sophie Albrecht (1781), and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1841), whose poetic voices fantasize about becoming men for the purpose of accessing a notion of Bildung contingent on participation in the public sphere. In face of the impossibility of becoming men, they seek alternative means of self-actualization, spaces which escape restrictive gendered categories. Chapter 2 investigates Benedikte Naubert's difficulty in balancing successful passing with gender stability in the novel Heerfort und Klärchen (1779), including moments when cross-dressed Klär/chen/et severs the connection between biological sex, gender, and desire.

Chapter 3 examines Eleonore Thon's Adelheit von Rastenberg (1788), a tragedy that uses the cross-dressed hermit to construct a notion of female honor detached from violence and the public sphere. Similarly, in Chapter 4 I contend that in Florentin (1801), Dorothea Veit Schlegel uses the cross-dresser's failure to argue for paths towards female self-actualization that are not contingent on participation in the public sphere, in the process creating a model of friendship that is disconnected from a male version defined by heroic action.

In contrast to current theories of gender bending, the female-to-male cross-dresser around 1800 did not act to sever gender and biology; on the contrary, most of the authors went to great lengths to maintain the stability of gender despite the dependence of successful passing on the instability of the terms.