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Arresting dress : cross-dressing, law, and fascination in nineteenth-century San Francisco / Clare Sears.
Van Pelt Library HQ77.2.U6 S43 2015
Available
LIBRA HQ77.2.U6 S43 2015
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Sears, Clare, 1970- author.
- Series:
- Perverse modernities
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Cross-dressing--California--San Francisco--History--19th century.
- Cross-dressing.
- Cross-dressers--Legal status, laws, etc--California--San Francisco--History--19th century.
- Cross-dressers.
- Cross-dressers--Legal status, laws, etc.
- History.
- San Francisco (Calif.)--Social life and customs--19th century.
- San Francisco (Calif.).
- Manners and customs.
- California--San Francisco.
- Genre:
- History.
- Physical Description:
- x, 202 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- Durham : Duke University Press, 2015.
- Summary:
- In 1863, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized a person's appearing in public in "a dress not belonging to Ms or her sex." Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century's end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial "slumming tours." It shows that the laws did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- Instant and peculiar
- Against good morals
- Problem bodies, public space
- A sight well worth gazing upon
- Indecent exhibitions
- Problem bodies, nation-state.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 125 -159) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780822357544
- 0822357542
- 9780822357582
- 0822357585
- OCLC:
- 881560484
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