True Sex. Emily Skidmore
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Название: True Sex

Автор: Emily Skidmore

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9781479897995

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СКАЧАТЬ between individuals assigned female at birth; it was within coverage of Dubois that many of the last utterances of the term “female husband” appeared in metropolitan newspapers such as the New York Times.84 Although the phenomenon of women posing as husbands did not disappear, the label of “female husband” did. This shift was likely caused by growing anxiety (palpable in the editorials discussed above) about the term itself. Indeed, the term “female husband” could serve dual purposes. At once, it registered the absurdity of the notion of women serving as “husband,” as women in the late nineteenth century were constructed as being the opposite of that which is implied by the term. On the other hand, however, the term “female husband” could also provide same-sex relationships with a certain amount of legitimacy. Husbands in the nineteenth century carried a great deal of legal and social authority; male privilege was enshrined in large part through coverture laws that conferred authority to “husbands” in unique and important ways. As such, the term rendered respect such that the phrase “female husband” was jarring—too jarring, it seems, for newspaper writers to employ after 1890.

      In the 1870s and 1880s, however, newspapers were willing to discuss “female husbands,” and what’s more, they were willing to make vague references to same-sex desire. Indeed, even in Victorian-era America, there appeared to be an understanding of biological women as sexual entities. In the coverage of both Joseph Lobdell and Frank Dubois, newspapers consistently made open-ended statements about their “mysterious” relationships with women, leaving readers to imagine the possibilities of same-sex intimacies. Furthermore, the relationships themselves were not portrayed as inherently deviant. Instead, Lobdell’s failure to live up to the expectations of a “husband” (i.e., his inability to provide a stable home for Mary Perry) rendered him a nuisance—not his queer embodiment. Similarly, Frank Dubois was seen as strange because he abandoned a normative household where he was a wife and mother in order to serve as a husband to another biological woman. Such behavior was considered strange, but not in and of itself dangerous. Even as sexological writing began to infiltrate popular discussions of gender and sexuality, it was not immediately embraced as gospel. Newspaper editors, particularly those who wrote for the community wherein a trans man was “discovered,” continued to do what they did in the Dubois case: they looked to sexology to provide one possible explanation, but they also sought out local experts—people who knew the individuals personally and could attest to their character and their standing in the community. It continued to be the case that the opinions of neighbors, coworkers, and wives mattered much more on the local level when it came to determining the reaction to trans men than did the “expert” opinion of sexologists.

      On the national level, however, sexologists did come to have greater explanatory power after the 1890s. The sexological model of the “female sexual invert”—a dangerous and pathological individual who threatened to seduce “normal” white women—became an increasingly familiar figure in the national press broadly, and the sensational press in particular. Sensational journalism, referred to at the time as “yellow journalism,” gained influence in the 1890s under the auspices of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Although Pulitzer and Hearst were critiqued by their competitors for exploiting violence, sex, and crime in order to appeal to mass audiences, the genre caught on. This growing popularity was helped in part, no doubt, by Pulitzer and Hearst’s increasing roles as media moguls, which they used to exert influence beyond New York City by the purchasing of newspapers and, in Hearst’s case, creating wire services, each of which bore the mark of sensationalism.85

      In this marketplace—wherein journalists were expected to exploit difference in order to create morality tales in which “good” and “dangerous” were easily identifiable from each other—there was no room for ambiguous terms like “female husbands,” as they left too much space for reader interpretation. As the genre of sensationalism increasingly marked metropolitan newspapers, trans men were figured as deviant in nationalizing discourse, and therefore little room was left for a term that conveyed some level of legitimacy to those figures whom sensational journalists sought to portray as freaks. Previous scholars have noted this identifiable shift in national representations of gender and sexuality, and the 1890s have been heralded as a period in which understandings of gender and sexuality underwent substantial change.86 However, once you scratch beneath the surface and interrogate the dissonance between local and national discussions of trans men, tremendous continuity can be seen between the 1870s and the twentieth century.

      2

      Beyond Community

      Rural Lives of Trans Men

      In his recent work, Colin Johnson writes, “It still feels safe to many people to assume that rural Americans simply didn’t talk about same-sex sexual behavior or gender nonconformity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Or, if they did, what they had to say about these matters was probably more similar than not to what comparably situated people would say today.” Johnson goes on to refute this truism—which he refers to as the “rural repressive hypothesis”—because it “assumes incorrectly that nothing ever changes in rural America.”1 This chapter picks up Johnson’s insights and considers their applicability to the lives of trans men at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, this chapter follows a spate of recent work comprising the “rural turn” in queer studies—Johnson’s as well as that of John Howard, Peter Boag, Brock Thompson, Rachel Hope Cleves, and Nayan Shah—taking a fresh look at non-metropolitan areas and challenging much of what scholars (and society more broadly) have long assumed about queer history in rural spaces. Looking beyond the coastal cities that once dominated the field of LGBT history, this chapter takes an in-depth look at the lives of trans men who chose to live in rural (or at least non-metropolitan) areas in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter questions why, in a period when the nation as a whole was undergoing rapid urbanization and queer subcultures were beginning to emerge in the nation’s cities, many trans men chose to remain in (or relocate to) small towns and rural spaces in the nation’s interior.

      While finding comprehensive statistical data on gender transgressors in this period is impossible, the available evidence suggests that many trans men chose to live in small towns. Between 1876 and 1936, newspapers discussed sixty-five unique cases of individuals who were assigned female at birth but who lived as men.2 Of those sixty-five cases, twenty-two (or close to 35 percent) lived in non-metropolitan areas. Many others lived in small cities not commonly associated with large queer communities, such as Omaha, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Lincoln, and Bangor. In fact, at a time when the nation’s cities were growing at a breakneck pace, a majority of the documented cases of trans men lived outside of large cities. In this way, the stories of Joseph Lobdell and Frank Dubois discussed in the previous chapter do not represent a prehistory to the urban migration of trans men that the 1890s would usher in; rather, they suggest patterns that gender-transgressive individuals would continue to express well into the twentieth century.

      Whereas the metronormative logic that has guided much of queer history to this point suggests that individuals need to move to large cities in order to lead queer lives, this chapter suggests otherwise. What makes the fact that so many trans men lived in rural areas and small towns so remarkable is that it appears as though this was their choice. Like most individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trans men in this book were fairly transient, moving several times in their adult lives. Beginning in the 1890s, for example, a trans man named Ellis Glenn repeatedly chose to live in towns with populations under five thousand, such as Lapeer, Michigan; Hillsboro, Illinois; and Williamstown, West Virginia. And, as court testimony bore out, he was able to lead an active social (and romantic) life in each of these locales.3 This movement (from small town to small town, not small town to large city) paints a very different trajectory for queer lives than queer history has traditionally presented. This chapter will ruminate on such movement: Why did trans men like Ellis Glenn choose to live in small towns? What did these spaces offer that larger cities might not? How might these deliberate choices shift the way we think about queer history? In answering these questions, this chapter will СКАЧАТЬ