How to Erase Queerness in the Myth of the Wild West
History must not only be studied, but continually re-studied and re-surfaced. We have all seen how easy it is for something "obvious" to become memory-holed even in as short a time as the last five years. How much easier when the primary sources were shaky to begin with and the myth-makers have a social and political agenda that they may not be entirely conscious of themselves. How easy it is to re-write history "as it should have been" (a phrase that has always grated on me in the context of the Society for Creative Anachronism, regardless of the direction of one's "should").
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #480d Boag 2011 Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past Chapter 3 About LHMP Full citation:Boag, Peter. 2011. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6
Part Two – “The Story of the Perverted Life is Not Attractive”: Making the American West and the Frontier Heteronormative -- Chapter 3 – “And Love is a Vision and Life is a Lie”: The Daughters of Calamity Jane
This section of the book examines how the reality of cross-dressing in the West was erased from the historic record. As usual, the chapter begins with a detailed biography.
Joe Monahan died of a sudden illness in rural Idaho in 1903. The friends who prepared him for burial were surprised that he had a female body and buried him quietly. But another local felt that Monahan had been done a disservice and brought the matter to the attention of a newspaper, extoling his ordinary, virtuous life. Few facts were known about him at that time and only a few more can be found in the archives. He was born around 1850, probably in New York, and had been living in Idaho since at least 1870. He was spotty about picking up his mail—but he did receive mail—and had voted in 1880. (Women did not have the vote in Idaho at that time.) An acquaintance noted that the letters he received were possibly from a sister in Buffalo New York, to whom he wrote occasionally. This friend wrote to an official in Buffalo hoping to locate his family (in part, to deal with his estate). This turned up a foster mother and foster sister, who confirmed that “Johanna Monahan” had gone West around age 14 and had corresponded regularly. Their letters were later found in Monahan’s cabin.
But searching the archives in Buffalo for a Johanna Monahan only added some further confusion about her birth family and identity. In any event, the foster mother reported that Monahan’s mother had dressed her in boy’s clothes and had her earn a living with jobs typically performed by boys. When her foster mother took Monahan in, he was sent to school. In her version, Monahan left in 1869 first to California, then to Idaho.
As the story made its way into the Idaho media, other people began adding details to Monahan’s history, including that many had suspected he was a woman but no one made a fuss about it. People in that region were aware of many cross-dressing women, for various reasons. Even in correspondence discussing this issue, Monahan’s associates used male pronouns for him.
All of this is backstory for how Monahan’s story was picked up in popular media. In the 1950s, Monahan’s story was revived in newspapers, theater, and eventually movies with the 1993 film The Ballad of Little Jo, all of which include a large amount of invention and no hint of queerness. Monahan is made fully heterosexual and “man troubles” are offered as the motivation for her transformation.
This framing was begun in 1904 when uneasiness about the sexual implications of cross-dressing led newspapers to “reclaim” Monahan as essentially feminine, including fake images in a hoopskirt and an invented romantic betrayal by a man. (The fiction is embellished by many details with no connection to Monahan’s actual history, including the addition of an illegitimate child.)
The chapter moves on to provide more examples of how the actual biographies of cross-dressing women were re-written in the late 19th and early 20th century to disarm concerns about gender and sexuality.
Existing fictional genres were adapted, such as the seduction motif in which the woman both flees and cross-dresses to escape her shame. Such a fiction was assigned to Charley Parkhurst when a post-mortem not only identified his bodily sex but indicated a previous pregnancy. (Motherhood was a strong motif for feminizing the subject.)
Dime novels of the 1870s were fond of using heterosexual relationships as the motivation for cross-dressing, as with fictionalizations of the life of Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane). The real life Canary rarely cross-dressed and identified as female, but her fictional twin is more cagey, implying either inversion or non-binary identity, and cross-dressing regularly in order to hunt down the man who betrayed her.
Several other fictional examples of “betrayal and escape” or “betrayal and revenge” are listed. Such stories solidly establish the heterosexual credentials of their heroines. Such overt inventions then sometimes were resurrected as “true” news stories.
Fictional cross-dressing narratives sometimes re-normalized their protagonists with marriage and a return to female presentation. Often this includes a return to the urban East, symbolically localizing cross-dressing to the peculiar logistics and needs of Western life.
Another subgenre involves a woman cross-dressing to join a male lover in criminal activities—a genre that has roots in a number of actual biographies. (Note: these are all cited from newspaper accounts, and it’s unclear whether the author considers them wholly fictional or simply sensationalized and “straightened.”)
Even as the fictional genre of cross-dressing women came to popularity, the acceptance of real-life cross-dressing women waned, with women in San Francisco and other locations facing arrest for cross-dressing by the early 20th century.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of whether cross-dressing destabilized gender or enforces it by aligning activities and characteristics rigidly with gender presentation. I.e., women could participate in the “Wild West” but only as men. This alignment must then be undermined by re-feminizing the participants once they were separated (by time, space, or reality) from the actual frontier.
Time period: 19th c20th cPlace: USAMisc tags: cross-dressingcross-gender roles/behaviorgender disguise f>mgender disguise m>ftransgender identityfemale husbandEvent / person: Joe Monahan (Josephine?) View comments (0)
