Writing out (or in) Material Culture from the Past: Crossdressing and the Myth of the Frontier
In America’s “frontier” history, crossdressing is rarely the focus of analysis. As a place that was yet to be conquered and “modernized,” it was affiliated with heterosexual, white manliness. In Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, however, he specifically focuses on the acts of crossdressing in the form of female-to-male, male-to-female, and even more abstractly, non-Anglo-to-Anglo. In looking at primary sources such as newspapers and memoirs, Boag reconstructs the way crossdressing was viewed in the public and the many ways it became aligned with heteronormativity. This does not mean that these acts of crossdressing did not challenge …show more content…
However, sources from the day claim that one reason for the men to wear women’s garb was because of an imbalanced male-to-female ratio. Because of the difficulty of frontier life for women, “some men volunteered to become “women” so that couples dancing might take place” (64). Even as gender and sexual identity became blurred in the story of Bert Martin, newspapers and authorities tries desperately to “pin down Martin’s precise sex” (87) because it was unbelievable that a person could be both, further demonstrating that the frontier was indeed a place of heteronormativity. Nevertheless, Boag sees male-to-female crossdressers as having challenged sexuality more and more in the West than their female counterparts, but many of their stories are lost precisely because of this very reason (90). However, what are not lost are the stories and reports of racialized male-to-female crossdressing, where writers focused on the Mexicans, Native Americans and Chinese, instead of on the Anglo-male. Treated as savage outsiders with laws preventing them from owning land or becoming citizens (147), they were also on the peripheries of heteronormative culture in the frontier. Mexicans were described as “treacherous and deceitful,” dressing themselves as women before they raided towns (144). From the very beginning, crossdressing was thought to be part of Native …show more content…
Whether such cases were meant to challenge American understandings of sexuality and sexual inversion is unknown because we are only left with sources that merely speculated on the lives of these individuals. As for the sources in Boag’s book, they range from newspaper articles to dime novels to medical publications to personal memoirs. It is also important to note that these primary sources heavily rely on personal memories and opinions, and as published materials, tend to show a lot of bias. To Boag, the newspaper, in regards to female-to-male crossdressing, “depoliticized, trivialized, and marginalized these women’s aspirations “‘for political equality, economic autonomy, and alternative domesticities’” (41). In the stories that were later published about Joe Monahan’s life, Boag notices that “the fabricated western stories of real crossdressers” indeed became a literary style of dime novels (107). Medical journals ultimately provided scientific reasoning that reinforced heteronormativity by showing that homosexuality and sexual inversion was a “disease of the brain” (6), and were also used when racializing the crossdressers, as newspapers “remained largely mute on the phenomenon among Native Americans” (150). More or less, Boag sticks to
In America’s “frontier” history, crossdressing is rarely the focus of analysis. As a place that was yet to be conquered and “modernized,” it was affiliated with heterosexual, white manliness. In Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, however, he specifically focuses on the acts of crossdressing in the form of female-to-male, male-to-female, and even more abstractly, non-Anglo-to-Anglo. In looking at primary sources such as newspapers and memoirs, Boag reconstructs the way crossdressing was viewed in the public and the many ways it became aligned with heteronormativity. This does not mean that these acts of crossdressing did not challenge …show more content…
However, sources from the day claim that one reason for the men to wear women’s garb was because of an imbalanced male-to-female ratio. Because of the difficulty of frontier life for women, “some men volunteered to become “women” so that couples dancing might take place” (64). Even as gender and sexual identity became blurred in the story of Bert Martin, newspapers and authorities tries desperately to “pin down Martin’s precise sex” (87) because it was unbelievable that a person could be both, further demonstrating that the frontier was indeed a place of heteronormativity. Nevertheless, Boag sees male-to-female crossdressers as having challenged sexuality more and more in the West than their female counterparts, but many of their stories are lost precisely because of this very reason (90). However, what are not lost are the stories and reports of racialized male-to-female crossdressing, where writers focused on the Mexicans, Native Americans and Chinese, instead of on the Anglo-male. Treated as savage outsiders with laws preventing them from owning land or becoming citizens (147), they were also on the peripheries of heteronormative culture in the frontier. Mexicans were described as “treacherous and deceitful,” dressing themselves as women before they raided towns (144). From the very beginning, crossdressing was thought to be part of Native …show more content…
Whether such cases were meant to challenge American understandings of sexuality and sexual inversion is unknown because we are only left with sources that merely speculated on the lives of these individuals. As for the sources in Boag’s book, they range from newspaper articles to dime novels to medical publications to personal memoirs. It is also important to note that these primary sources heavily rely on personal memories and opinions, and as published materials, tend to show a lot of bias. To Boag, the newspaper, in regards to female-to-male crossdressing, “depoliticized, trivialized, and marginalized these women’s aspirations “‘for political equality, economic autonomy, and alternative domesticities’” (41). In the stories that were later published about Joe Monahan’s life, Boag notices that “the fabricated western stories of real crossdressers” indeed became a literary style of dime novels (107). Medical journals ultimately provided scientific reasoning that reinforced heteronormativity by showing that homosexuality and sexual inversion was a “disease of the brain” (6), and were also used when racializing the crossdressers, as newspapers “remained largely mute on the phenomenon among Native Americans” (150). More or less, Boag sticks to