Overview

In 1863, San Francisco s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in a dress not belonging to his 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 anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial slumming tours. It shows that the law 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.

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9781322451985

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Reviews

Don't let the subtitle of Clare Sears's important new book fool you into thinking this is a narrow investigation of an obscure law in a small city a long time ago. It's filled with big ideas about bodies and spaces and norms, about the generative as well as disciplinary function of the law, and about the historical transience of gender categories as well as the persistence of transgendering practices. Sears's powerful analytical framework allows her to connect the exclusion of gender nonconformers from the public sphere with similar exclusions of raced and disabled bodies, while her crystal-clear prose and compelling archival stories never let the reader get lost in the weeds of excessive theorization. A great book for undergraduates and specialists alike. --Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History

Author Information

Clare Sears is Associate Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.

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