Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (review)

Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco is a compelling new work which explores the criminalization of this form of gendered expression. Clare Sears is an Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Her research specializations include critical criminology theory, sexuality and gender studies (especially queer theory and transgender studies), and the history of California.

Arresting Dress is the first detailed investigation of late-nineteenth-century cross-dressing law in a single American city. While San Francisco was only one of the thirty-four cities to enact such laws between 1848 and 1900, it constitutes a particularly productive site for "the production and policing of normative gender in relation to broader societal trends." Sears uses these laws to understand how normative definitions of gender, race, and ability were shaped by societal changes relating to manifest destiny and territorial expansion, chattel slavery and race, immigration and the nation, as well as emerging issues of morality, difference, and citizenship (4-5).

Methodologically, this work is shaped by queer and transgender studies, gender history, and urban studies, as well as critical legal and critical race studies. In focusing on the "historical production and subsequent operations of the boundary between normative and nonnormative gender," Sears emphasizes the scholarly utility of bringing together "a range of cross-gender phenomena" historically marked as both transgressive and acceptable. Sears suggests a new framework—trans-ing analysis—for examining the "political significance of attempts to produce and police normative gender boundaries through cross-dressing laws." In the process, Sears seeks to draw attention away from the figure of the cross-dresser and toward practices of cross-dressing (7-8).

Charting the 15 years prior to the criminalization of cross-dressing in San Francisco, Chapter One ponders its meaning on the Californian frontier. During the social upheaval and changing demographics of the Mexican-American War and the gold rush, cross-dressing recreations flourished amongst miners. But these practices were not necessarily transgressive, Sears suggests, for they supported a "temporary fantasy of binary gender" which facilitated racialized heteronormativity (31). Following this period of lax governance, new municipal laws sought to regulate a number of practices earlier tolerated. Chapter Two examines how shifting attitudes toward what constituted indecency came to be enacted in law. Cross-dressing and prostitution were connected conceptually and materially—"as two sides of the same gender-transgressive coin," but also in midcentury sex workers' symbolic self-presentation (43). In 1863, to address these new public anxieties, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors criminalized cross-dressing by prohibiting "a person from appearing in public in 'a dress not belonging to his or her sex'" (42).

But was cross-dressing law ever enforced? As Chapter Three demonstrates, San Francisco police made 100 arrests before the turn of the twentieth century (62). The "problem bodies" which contravened expectations about sexuality, race, disability, and public space were targeted, whereas charges against women who could prove their wealth and respectability were routinely dropped. Chapter Four describes the voyeuristic surveillance needed to maintain binary gender at the level of clothing, interrogating the invasiveness of police photography and the spectacle of the court trial. However, in "framing white cross-dressing subjects as criminal nuisances and queer freaks" while ignoring the offences of racial minorities, Sears argues, the law "established the production of normative gender as the prerogative of whites and drained gender variance from Chinese and Mexican communities" (81, 93). In light of this conclusion, it is surprising that the case of mestiz@ Elvira Mugarrieta/Babe Bean/Jack Garland is mentioned only in passing (110).

Chapter Five considers the paradox of the late-nineteenth-century popular entertainments which featured cross-dressing. From vaudevillian theatre and dime museum sideshows to commercial tours of San Francisco's "underworld," these entertainments celebrated gender transformation. This existed in direct contrast with the legal construction of cross-dressers as criminal nuisances (97). Chapter Six interrogates how racialized gender normativity became...