violsva | Entries tagged with being any gender is a drag

So on Tumblr there was a Tiktok video going around, about Pride and whether gay people face discrimination anymore, which I don't want to hunt down the link for. But the video was a response by one queer man to another video by a much younger gay man, and it got me thinking about differences in campus queer communities in the past fifteen years.

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We are going to a talk on local drag queen history at the library, and my hold on West Coast Avengers has come in!

Lots and lots of interesting case studies, not the best prose style.

From a letter to the editor of the Portland News, 1912: "This old story about more wages because she wears men's clothes is not the main part of the drama at all. There is many a good man who would marry such a woman as Nell Pickerell [aka Harry Allen], but she will not have it that way." (p 30) Would there actually be that many men happy to marry a woman who had served multiple prison sentences and given birth to an illegitimate child? I mean, maybe, there was a heavy gender imbalance in the American west.

"A quick search through this newspaper [the Idaho Statesman] reveals no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing appearing between 1890 and [1908]." (p 205 n33)

"Often western women sex-workers wore men's clothing as by custom it provided an indication to others of the wearer's occupation. Among such women were the nine prostitutes of the Williams Creek district of western Canada's Cariboo gold rush who, according to an 1862 news item, put on "great airs" when they would "dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and look like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended them to be."" (p 35) [emphasis mine] Note how class and gender are conflated here--the suggestion is not just that they should dress like women but that all women are naturally the innocent middle-class angel in the house.

M, an MTF case study in "Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex" by Bernard S. Talmey: "When "so dressed [as a woman], I can always think more logically, feel less encumbered, solve difficult problems in a manner next to impossible under any other conditions."" (p 61)

"By the turn of the twentieth century Americans had gained an international reputation for, as the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, blaming "one or the other ethnic group for homosexuality."" (p 147) This is in the course of a discussion of how the Chinese Exclusion Act and various laws prohibiting interracial marriage prevented Chinese-American men from forming heterosexual families. (Canada was doing the exact same thing, incidentally.)

Chapter 5 spends a lot of time talking about "the apparent spread of prostitution, public indecency, and other transgressive sexual activities as the nineteenth century advanced" (p 168). Which, I assume, had a lot to do with the spread of literacy, urbanization, and the popular press, and makes an interesting comparison to how mass media, social media, and population growth now is making it look like the world is getting worse and worse, whatever your definition of "worse" is.

Also, wow, you don't realize how quickly Lamarckism was wrapped up into evolutionary theory to help out eugenics.
... In other words, we have reached the "fucking assholes" part of any history of sexuality. I may not have much to say about the rest of this book except swearing.

That said, "Viraginity and Effemination" should be the name of a queer bookstore. Or a zine.

This is a post I found in my tumblr drafts from last September.

Extremely fragmentary thoughts on Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668 - 1801

Donoghue mentions that the decrease of references to “female husband” cases in newspapers at the end of the 18th century is taken by some scholars as evidence that the practice died out. She doubts this very much, and indeed Alison Oram’s “Her Husband was a Woman!”, published about a decade after this book, focuses on similar cases reported in British newspapers in the early twentieth century, so I think it highly unlikely that there were no examples whatsoever in the century in between.

“On 14 December 1728 the Universal Spectator commented that every culture differentiated the sexes by dress for the sake of ‘decency’, and specifically ‘in order to prevent Multitudes of Irregularities, which otherwise would continually be occasion’d’.” (p. 90)

This seems to indicate a view that in the same clothes it would be impossible to differentiate the sexes - I am reminded of someone (but can’t remember who) pointing out that in Early Modern society the body was much less knowable than it is considered today, with even the poorest wearing at least two layers of clothes at all times, and shaping garments being normal, and clothes that hid or highlighted or enhanced certain features being usual for men as well as women.

“The radical sects formed in the seventeenth century, in particular, often allowed women to pull their friendships with each other to the centre of their lives. Quaker women such as Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers left husbands and children to travel and be imprisoned together.” (p. 151) (I don’t have anything to say here, just! Historic Quaker lesbians! Yay!)

“Nor is a study of erotica thankless work” (p. 183) – I’m just going to leave that sentence fragment there.

I have updated my header post. That was actually all I was going to say, but in the process I discovered that a Tumblr post of mine (regarding the Watson & Holmes comic) has been quoted in someone's MA thesis! This is not my first time being mentioned in an academic paper, but omg it makes me so happy when it happens.

(If you know me and that's your MA thesis, do feel free to private message me if you want; I will not out you.)

And then

consultingpiskies came in to show me Billy Porter's Oscars outfit, and man, some things need to be reblogged regardless of my general avoidance of Tumblr.

(At some point I will also try to sort out how to fit the widest number of potential applications into 15 icons, but now is not that time.)

So I’m reading Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801 by Emma Donoghue. The first chapter is on hermaphrodites (that being the in-period technical term, sorry), and I suddenly realized a possible explanation for some of the reports that I have never seen mentioned in any scholarly account.

The idea is that a woman, usually living normally but perhaps having intimate relationships with other women, would suddenly be revealed to have abnormally large genitalia (which was occasionally capable of impregnation). The period explanation was, at first, that she was a hermaphrodite, or later that it was an overgrown clitoris (which might or might not differentiate her from a “true” hermaphrodite–lots of contemporary confusion on this point). Modern authors point out that we can’t know anything about the reality of these people, but also suggest that the reports were exaggerated by the authors. Some of them probably were. Some of these people probably had what would now be called intersex conditions.

Probably because these narratives focus on the hermaphrodites’ femininity or lack thereof, (edit: and also because of what is perceived as more threatening to ideologies and gender hierarchy) I have never seen anyone suggest that perhaps a “man” had decided to live as a woman, and if discovered gave the explanation that she had been born as a woman with abnormal genitalia (which would, incidentally, be far less likely to result in criminal charges than calling oneself a man). In this case the “overgrown clitoris” that gave contemporary medical writers so much trouble and which modern scholars dismiss would simply be a normal (or small, or hypospadias, or whatever) penis. Discussions of historical transfemininity, as far as I have seen, focus primarily on queer male drag cultures and prostitution. And there does seem to be a general assumption that (unlike AFAB people dressing as men) it is simply impossible that AMAB people dressing as women would be able to pass for very long, despite numerous examples.

Obviously, it is in fact impossible to know the precise anatomy or self-understanding of anyone who lived three hundred years ago, and I am not claiming that this is the full explanation for reports of hermaphrodites. But if anyone has seen relevant scholarship on transfemininity, please tell me.

queerwatson:
trying to read a book by a straight man that discusses how holmes and watson might have been queer, more like a discussion of how ‘feminine’ watson apparently is (???) and overuse of the word homosexual

queerwatson:
also blatant misogyny around every corner
my fave!!!!!

I have actually been having Thoughts about this recently, and they may not be very coherent thoughts, but oh well.

Watson actually does a lot of things that are traditionally coded as feminine, and especially so for Victorians. He’s giving huge amounts of his time to support Holmes, both by assisting in his investigations but more importantly by writing stories and therefore publicizing Holmes and giving him clients. And this is completely in line with the Victorian wife, who might seem passive but was absolutely supposed to be supporting her husband’s work in her own, social arena. See An Ideal Husband. Agatha Christie (born 1890) writes in her autobiography about how much of a woman’s life was completely determined by her future husband’s career, and this is certainly the case for Watson. (because he chooses for it to be the case.)
And a lot of what Watson does as Holmes’ doctor looking after his welfare would be completely appropriate for a wife as well. Watson accepting Holmes’ quirks but insisting that he take care of himself and rushing to his side when he’s ill. And in fic of course there’s even more of this, and also of Watson being Holmes’ moral compass, which was absolutely a wife’s duty.

But Watson does all of this as an absolutely proper English gentleman who fulfills all the roles of a proper English gentleman as well. When Holmes says there’s no one better than Watson to be a jury (ABBE), he means that Watson is worth twelve other men. And also that he is moral and wonderful and has good judgement. And of course Watson is a doctor and a soldier and these were both heavily masculine roles.

…I should have a conclusion here, but basically, John Watson! Man who is totally comfortable taking a “feminine” role in relationships without worrying about his masculinity!

Oh wait, yes, I did have a conclusion. This is why people underestimate Watson. Because his contributions are stereotypically feminine and therefore ignored. Taking care of people and supporting them cannot possibly be important even though they are the most important. So it’s assumed that Holmes doesn’t need him or that he’s incapable because he doesn’t do flashy things. But Watson isn’t flashy, that’s the point. Except when he’s shooting things for Holmes, but I suppose those authors ignore those moments?

So - yes these are coded feminine, but obviously they aren’t inherently so, and also devaluing them sucks and is still sexist.

Also! he’s doing all this for someone who is in every other way coded as more feminine than he is! Which is neat!