En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera

Since the release of Wayne Koestenbaums book, The Queens Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, gender studies has begun to take an active interest in music. Opera, long viewed as strictly an establishment tradition, has in particular been given a second look by gender theorists. Can opera an antiquated, Eurocentric bastion of high culture in fact be subverting patriarchal authority in some fundamental way?