Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 by Laura Horak, and: Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space ed. by Jennifer M. Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak (review)

Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 and Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space both testify to something that the publishing landscape has made abundantly clear in recent years: that there’s an increasing interest in excavating the previously neglected histories of women’s roles both behind and in front of the camera during the silent era. These two books mark pivotal forays into uncovering two very different, equally crucial, aspects of those histories.

While most film viewers might assume that cross-dressing came into its own in the 1930s, with some of the international names who still have tremendous star power—Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn—Laura Horak’s Girls Will Be Boys unearths a rich history of cinematic gender swapping reaching further back than even many early film aficionados would assume. Traversing archives across the US and Europe, Horak spent almost a decade uncovering the lesser-known history of girls “who will be boys,” as she excavated the earliest roots of cross-dressing in American silent cinema, going back as early as 1908 and continuing until 1934, when the stricter enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code also created increased backlash against cross-dressing and “mannish” women. Horak explains her rationale for choosing this specific period: it allowed her to begin when cross-dressing women began to surface in a sizeable number and to consider one of the main goals of her project: to contemplate how the most famous cross-dressing performances of the 1930s stemmed from these earlier ones. Horak opens her analysis with a startling claim: “Where previous accounts have identified only thirty-seven silent American films featuring cross-dressed women, I have discovered more than four hundred” (2). And that claim may also be one of the book’s greatest selling points. In her meticulous searching, Horak uncovered 476 titles featuring cross-dressed women, ultimately viewing two hundred extant films. As such, her thoroughly researched book represents a crucial marker in the archival study of lesbian cultural history, collecting as it does such a vast array of material about queer bodies during film’s earliest years.

Still, one of the remarkable things about Horak’s argument is the revelation that these female subjects were not always cross-dressing to transgress sexual boundaries; instead, she claims, they were often enacting or expressing athleticism, character, style, or strength. Horak wants to assert how cross-dressing women from the period did not represent a monolithic type, a seemingly unlikely argument in an age when drag and cross-dressing are almost always linked to sexuality. She explains that, especially in the early half of the period under examination, cross-dressing was not perceived as particularly transgressive or threatening and was not necessarily linked to sexuality. This attitude stemmed perhaps from early film taking many of its cues from theatre, where cross-dressing had been normalized and had long been an accepted casting choice disconnected from transgressive sexuality. As such, Horak uses her early chapters to introduce her readers to period-specific categories of cross-dressing women, such as the “female boy,” the “cowboy girls,” and “girl spies,” before moving on to the second half of her book, an analysis of lesbian representation in American cinema and culture to 1934.

In another excellent example of the still-fertile ground of scholarship on early film, Jennifer M. Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak’s Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space provides a cross-cultural set of critical case studies that present a complex and fascinating history of media and narrative cinema from the 1910s to the 1930s. Setting the lofty goal of respecting what Bean calls...