11 research outputs found

    Review of \u3ci\u3eRe-Dressing America’s Frontier Past\u3c/i\u3e. By Peter Boag.

    Get PDF
    Long-established notions about life on the frontier are upended in this well-researched and finely written study of gender presentation, as the author maintains that cross-dressing was “very much a part of daily life on the frontier West.” Peter Boag recognizes the diversity and complexity of this issue, and one of the book’s strengths is that he seeks no simple answer to questions of why some women dressed as men, and some men dressed as women. Most readers will be familiar with the “progress narrative”—the story of women who passed as men in order to seek gainful employment, to serve their country in the military, or simply to travel unmolested—but Boag also includes women who continued to present themselves as men long after the need to crossdress would seem to have passed. As a parallel, he explores the gender implications of men who took the less understandable course of abandoning masculine privilege in order to embrace the more difficult frontier life of a person perceived to be a woman

    Review of \u3ci\u3eRe-Dressing America’s Frontier Past\u3c/i\u3e. By Peter Boag.

    Get PDF
    Long-established notions about life on the frontier are upended in this well-researched and finely written study of gender presentation, as the author maintains that cross-dressing was “very much a part of daily life on the frontier West.” Peter Boag recognizes the diversity and complexity of this issue, and one of the book’s strengths is that he seeks no simple answer to questions of why some women dressed as men, and some men dressed as women. Most readers will be familiar with the “progress narrative”—the story of women who passed as men in order to seek gainful employment, to serve their country in the military, or simply to travel unmolested—but Boag also includes women who continued to present themselves as men long after the need to crossdress would seem to have passed. As a parallel, he explores the gender implications of men who took the less understandable course of abandoning masculine privilege in order to embrace the more difficult frontier life of a person perceived to be a woman

    “There was something very peculiar about Doc…”: Deciphering Queer Intimacy in Representations of Doc Holliday

    Get PDF
    This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in American Nineteenth-Century History on 8-12-14, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2014.971481This essay discusses representations of male intimacy in life-writing about consumptive gunfighter John Henry “Doc” Holliday (1851-1887). I argue that twentieth-century commentators rarely appreciated the historical specificity of Holliday’s friendships in a frontier culture that not only normalized but actively celebrated same-sex intimacy. Indeed, Holliday lived on the frayed edges of known nineteenth-century socio-sexual norms, and his interactions with other men were further complicated by his vicious reputation and his disability. His short life and eventful afterlife exposes the gaps in available evidence – and the flaws in our ability to interpret it. Yet something may still be gleaned from the early newspaper accounts of Holliday. Having argued that there is insufficient evidence to justify positioning him within modern categories of hetero/homosexuality, I analyze the language used in pre-1900 descriptions of first-hand encounters with Holliday to illuminate the consumptive gunfighter’s experience of intimacy, if not its meaning

    My Friend and Companion: The Intimate Journal of Lewis and Clark

    No full text
    corecore