Description
Book SynopsisIn this original and unusual work, Lucy Chesser explores the persistent recurrence of cross-dressing and gender inversion within Australian cultural life. Examples of cross-dressing are to be found in almost every area of Australian historical enquiry, including Aboriginal-European relations and conflict, convict societies, the goldrushes, bushranging, the 1890s and its nationalist fiction, and World War One. The book compares and contrasts sustained life-long impersonations whereby women lived, worked and sometimes married as men, with other forms of cross-dressing such as public masquerades, cross-dressing on the stage, and the prosecution of men who sought sexual encounters while disguised as women.
Trade Review'I was often struck by her respect for the basic integrity of the stories that she tells - yet always confident that I was in the presence of a historian in control of her material and with the wit and imagination not to miss opportunities for interpretation. There is a lightness of touch about the prose combined with a subtlety in the historical explanation that made every page a pleasure.' -- Frank Bongiorno -- Journal of Australian Colonial History
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Part 1 1. 'Extraordinary case of concealment of sex': Edward de Lacy Evans and the management of disruptive knowledge 2. 'If he's a woman he's a fine ploughman': public regulation, private tolerance and 'passing women' in colonial Australia 3. Mary Rutledge's mad freak: masquerade, disguise, theatrical impersonation and cross-dressing 4. 'Mere bundles of clothes': cross-dressing and inversion in colonial cultural expression 5. 'She won't be happy till she wears 'em': cross-dressing and sexual politics in the contested 1890s Part 2 6. 'I felt no difference between him and other women': sexual (mis)representation and cultural anxiety in the 1863 prosecution of John Wilson 7. Abominable crimes and strange manias: cross-dressing and homosexual transgression, 1863-1900 8. 'Woman in a suit-of-male': working women in male 'disguise', 1890-1920 9. 'When two loving hearts beat as one': same-sex marriage, subjectivity and self-representation in the case of Marion-Bill-Edwards, 1906-1916 10. Brazen beauties and erotic males: cross-dressing, sensationalism, sexology and the law, 1902-1920 Conclusion Index
