by Robert A. Rushing

Following Laura Horak’s recent work (Girls Will Be Boys) on cross-dressing in early American film, this article examines, in some detail, three Italian silent films that make use of female-to-male cross-dressing: Histoire d’un Pierrot (1914), Filibus (1915), and Justitia (1919). Such films might be celebrated as subversive moments in the past in which more rigid gender norms were contested,