Landscape, Vitality, and Desire: Cross-Dressed Frontier Girls in Transitional-Era American Cinema

Cross-dressed frontier women allowed moving pictures to capitalize on cherished American frontier mythologies while offering new, uniquely cinematic attractions. These figures provided the spectacle of a triumphant white body navigating the American landscape, while fixing both the neurasthenic middle-class family and the sexual dilemma of the gender-imbalanced frontier.