LHMP #480e Boag 2011 Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past Chapter 4

This chapter looks at one way in which male cross-dressers were sidelined in histories of the West—specifically, by focusing on racialized histories of cross-dressers, and so assigning the practice to non-white populations.

The biography that kicks off the chapter follows Mrs. Nash, a woman of Mexican origin. An army captain had hired Nash as a laundress in New Mexico and then recognized her some years later in 1868 in Kansas when she was presenting as a man, which she explained she had done out of economic necessity to get work driving ox teams across the plains. The captain once again hired her to do laundry for his troop, enabling her to return to female dress. In addition to having a great reputation for her laundry skills, she was in demand as a cook, specializing in tamales and baked goods. She also did sewing and dressmaking, making all her own clothing.

Nash spoke of having had two children back in Mexico who had died, but did not much like sharing quarters with children, though she also turned her hand to midwifery. With all these side hustles, she brought in a significant income, which had the unfortunate side-effect of attracting mercenary men who married her then absconded with her money. (This happened twice, once with the man who gave her the married surname of Nash.) Her third marriage was more successful. But after 4 or 5 years of marriage, Nash fell ill with appendicitis while her husband was away. Knowing the end was near, Nash asked for a priest and requested that she be buried quickly in whatever clothes she was wearing at the time. But after her death, her co-workers wanted to honor her better. When they were preparing the body for burial, they discovered that Nash had male anatomy, much to the astonishment of the witnesses. The army surgeon confirmed this observation. When her husband returned from patrol, he was questioned about his wife but indicated that he knew her to be a woman. He implied that they had a sexual relationship. But he was mocked and teased so relentlessly about his marriage that a month after Nash’s death he committed suicide.

After that, stories began being invented to explain Nash’s cross-dressing, including the assertion that it was a disguise to escape consequences for a mass murder. News accounts asked the question that confronts the “progress narrative:” what practical benefit would there be for a man to masquerade as a woman, losing male privilege and economic opportunity?

Notable in the news accounts is how Nash’s ethnicity (Mexican) was emphasized and highlighted. Along with this, she was assigned negative stereotypes that should have been contradicted by the regard her associates actually had for her.

This was a common pattern in accounts of male cross-dressing: if the person was not white, their race was emphasized; if white, it was not mentioned. (In one exception, the cross-dresser was noted as being white in the context that he regularly associated with Black men.)

After her death, accounts of Nash claimed that there had been suspicion about her sex, referencing unusual facial hair (and her habit of wearing a veil across her face), a large build, and a low voice. But these later claims are at odds with the genuine surprise felt during her laying out.

One racialized motif that was particularly prevalent was the “Mexican bandit” who cross-dressed to evade the law, invoking a stereotype of Mexican men as simultaneously criminal, deceitful, and unmanly. “Indian blood” was another motif that was invoked, drawing from genuine Native traditions of cross-gender social roles.

The Mexican motif also worked in the opposite direction, depicting Mexican men as unmanly because they were prone to cross-dressing.

Non-whites, in general, were “de-masculinized” by denying them the rights accorded to white men in American society, such as the right to own property and to vote.

A strong example of this was the feminizing of Chinese men. Due to migration patterns and motivations, the male-to-female ratio among Chinese immigrants was enormous, even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 froze immigration. Combined with anti-miscegenation laws, this meant that Chinese immigrant communities were largely all-male. Other factors that contributed to the feminization of Chinese men was a tendency to sparse facial hair, the long, braided hairstyle (but see the political history of the Chinese queue), and loose, non-European clothing styles. The exclusion from land-owning and many white-coded occupations, combined with the general scarcity of women in the West, forced many Chinese men into female-coded occupations such as cooking, laundry, and domestic service.

There was also a sexual element to the framing of racialized cross-dressers, as they were sometimes (whether accurately or not) accused of cross-dressing for the purpose of prostitution. Once again, this intertwined with white reactions to Native “berdache” traditions. (Although Native American alternate gender traditions also included women taking on a male social role, this does not appear to have become part of the official “story” about cross-dressed women.)

Another side of the fictionalization of Western masculinity was how it became a stand-in for what was perceived as an erosion of older models of masculinity. Becoming a “pseudo-cowboy” via reading and re-enacting Western literature created new models of manliness that were coded white. [Note: compare also the erasure of non-white “cowboys” from popular media.]

Overall, the narrative was: the West was “won” by virile (straight) white men. Non-whites were marginalized as villains, criminals, deviants, and effeminates, and queer men were subsumed to one or more of these. Thus “men” were all straight because anyone who wasn’t straight could be reclassified as “not a man.” Ideals of masculinity were equated with the “men of the West” which influenced even those not on the frontier to support and maintain these mythic archetypes as a historic reality that they could adopt as an image. [Note: see, for example, the “Marlboro man” which one could become by smoking the right brand of cigarettes.]

Touching back on the story of Mrs. Nash and her husband from the beginning of the chapter, the (white) husband’s sexuality was never questioned in the press, only his supposed gullibility (he didn’t know) or greed (he only cared about her income and cooking). He was normalized as a “regular man,” just as those who cross-dressed for dances or entertainment in all-male communities were normalized (regardless of their individual motivations).

There is a discussion of how the “progress narrative” (i.e., cross-dressing is done for social practicality) is gendered and breaks down when applied to men.