A Related Publication from Boag
It's common to discover that my publication database includes preliminary versions of research that are later incorporated in a book. I often cover these out of order. (To the extent that I have any order at all.) But in this case, the present article discusses some of the background considerations for Boag's book and adds to understanding it, rather than being redundant. (I have a few articles coming up that ended up being redundant and I've largely simply cross-referenced them to the more complete versions.)
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #481 Boag 2011a The Trouble with Cross-Dressers About LHMP Full citation:Boag, Peter. 2011. “The Trouble with Cross-Dressers: Researching and Writing the History of Sexual and Gender Transgressiveness in the Nineteenth-Century American West” in Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 3: 322-339
This article came out almost concurrently with Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, and serves to some extent as an expanded discussion of what led him to write the book, and some of the issues he had to consider during the research and analysis.
The general topic is “women who dressed and lived as men and men who lived and dressed as women in the nineteenth-century American West.” One of the central questions he wanted to address was why, given the number of such cross-dressers, the popular imagination does not include them in its understanding of the West, beyond superficial images such as fictionalized versions of Calamity Jane. Even as historians have begun looking under the surface of Western myths, they have largely been silent on this topic.
One of the issues Boag addresses is his search for appropriate terminology, given that some—but not all—cross-dressers would likely be classified as transgender today. But given changing conceptions of sex and gender, applying modern terminology is not only anachronistic, but can be as inaccurate as using terms like “sexual inversion” that were actually in use at the time. The classification of certain behaviors, emotions, and social presentation as uniquely “masculine” or “feminine” led sexologists to create theories that assumed the presence of one gendered attribute necessarily presupposed other gendered attributes. Hence the blanket term “inversion” to cover a wide range of situations that today would be distinguished as separate identities. Just as social theories had gradually shifted from viewing cross-dressing or same-sex desire as isolated moral failings to viewing them as personality traits, so in the 20th century, there was a gradual shift from viewing same-sex desire as being caused by an “inverted” gender identity, to distinguishing between gender identity and orientation of desire. Boag explains why he settled on “cross-dress(er)” as the most neutral term for the phenomenon he was studying, as well as clarifying his approach to pronoun usage in the book.
While there has been increasing interest in collecting archival data on gender and sexuality, it is focused primarily on the 20th century. Research in the 19th century faces many hurdles, especially in terms of identifying the records of interest in the first place. Arrest records (which unfortunately are some of the most prevalent for the purpose) will sometimes blur the nature of the concern, as when a record that originally cites “sodomy” is visibly changed to “indecent exposure.” Prejudices that result in higher arrest rates for marginalized people skew the apparent incidence of queer behaviors. For various reasons, women’s same-sex encounters rarely came under official scrutiny unless at least one of the women was also transgressing gender presentation, again skewing the understanding of the topic.
Newspapers are another rich source of data about queer history, with caveats. And increasing digitalization is making more sources easily available—as well as side-stepping the gate-keeping of manual indexers (as well as the bias toward indexing only major papers, while smaller local papers were more likely to have queer “human interest” stories). This shifts the research expertise to figuring what keywords to search for.
Historical writing, even while increasing the focus on women’s and gender history, has not kept pace on the examination of gender identity and sexual orientation among cross-dressing women in the West. Anthropologists have analyzed cross-gender systems in Native American populations, but rarely connect this with similar phenomena in the white population.
Overall, the collective memory-erasure of the presence of cross-dressing in the history of the West connects (per Boag) to two phenomena around the end of the 19th century: the perception that the “frontier” no longer existed, and the development of sexological theories of gender and sexuality. Boag’s book focuses closely on how these forces worked together to re-categorize and explain away cross-dressers such that they were no longer part of the central myth-making of the American frontier.
Time period: 19th c20th cPlace: USAMisc tags: cross-dressing View comments (0)
