My Proposal

                 Judith Butler, Michael Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick have all used performativity to understand how cross-dressing functions by either breaking down or reifying traditional gender roles. The explosion of gender and queer studies since the publications of The History of Sexuality and Gender Trouble has let to examining portrayals of hermaphrodites, homosexuals, transsexuals in literature. Along this thread Lisa Logan, Daniel Cohen, Gail Hawkes, and other theorists have researched women cross-dressing in 18^th and 19^th century American texts to better understand genre biographical female narratives. Performativity compels individuals into normative gender categories by the myriad of hegemonic influences, but those same tools can be used to ‘break character’. As discussed in Gail Hawkes in’ “Dressing-up—Cross Dressing and Sexual Dissonance,” and Butler, in both Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, cross-dressing can either expose gender as performance, unnatural, and flawed or be codified by the various influences, in this case the publishers of The Female Marine, to support traditional gender roles.

            The Female Marine’s popularity can be explained by it alieviating Boston’s collective guilt following the war of 1812 by serving as a piece of generic propaganda. As a piece of propaganda serving to idealize the state’s critical beliefs on how women children and men should live, the text fails to subvert either normative gender or give authentic female voice. The appearance of autobiography is completely false, meaning the level of textual cross-dressing Lisa Logan discusses in her article “Columbia’s Daughters in Drag; or, Cross-Dressing, Collaboration, and Authorship in Early American Novels,” never occurs. As propaganda she is able to represent the ideals of both genders in a way a physical body could not, other stories of women passing as male soldiers during the revolutionary war and war of 1812 reveal flaws in the women’s performance of men, and the women’s beliefs from their abnormal experiences are not supportive of patriarchy often. Since Lucy Brewer mimics the masculine ideal of a soldier perfectly and follows the feminine role both as a failed and redeemed woman to a letter, cross-dressing does nothing to expose how her passing as male was entirely based on gender being performable. Bulter and Hawke are both quick to point out subversive performances of the male/female binary can be easily categorized as marginalized, unnatural, or wrong. Lucy Brewer’s cross-dressing does not expose the flaws of femininity and despite the limited agency for women which forced Brewer to become male in the first place she returns willingly to the life of submissive privilege because it is natural for her as a woman, all the while espousing the virtues of true womanhood.