Girls Will Be Boys : Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 / Laura Horak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Horak, Laura, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex role in motion pictures.

Lesbianism in motion pictures.

Lesbians in motion pictures.

Male impersonators in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--United States--History--20th century.

Motion pictures.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Long listed for the 2017 Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men. Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity. Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed-from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Cross-Dressed Women as American Ideals (1908-1921)

1. Moving Picture Uplift and the Female

2. Cowboy Girls, Girl Spies, and the Homoerotic Frontier

Intermezzo: Codes of Deviance (1892-1914)

3. Cultural Hierarchy and the Detection of Sexual Deviance in A Florida Enchantment

Part II: The Emergence of Lesbian Legibility (1921-1934)

4. Enter the Lesbian: Cosmopolitanism, Trousers, and Lesbians in the 1920s

5. The Lesbian Vogue and Backlash against Cross-Dressed Women in the 1930s

Conclusion

Appendix: U.S. Films Featuring Cross-Dressed Women, 1904-1934

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 04. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

0-8135-7485-4

OCLC:

934433920