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. 

Research Article Write-up

Hawkes, Gail L. "Dressing-Up—Cross-Dressing and Sexual Dissonance." Journal of Gender        Studies 4.3 (1995): 261-70. Academic Search Premier. Web. 15 October. 2010.

 

             Gail Hawkes’ article examines the role of cross-dressing within a society by building on the discourse of gender theory, particularly relying on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and to a lesser extent Foucault’s The History of Sexuality concepts of gender as cultural performance not biologically based. The article’s theorizes cross-dressing occurs for three reasons: as escape, expression of identity, and performance. Despite revealing gender as performance drag can be made to reinforce traditional gender roles. The article places itself within the discourse of gender studies, performativity at the center of the theoretical framework, but offers cross-dressing as a path that could lead away from the gender binary leaving room for appearance wholly expressive of an individual’s identity. It utilizes the genre conventions of humanities articles although in a somewhat confusing way mixing theoretic, literary, and historic evidence indiscriminately and moves from the renaissance to the modern period without taking enough time to consider the noteworthy contextual differences in drag.

            Cross-dressing utilizes how everything from clothes, diet, hygiene, business, family, and of course sex all are bought believed or acted out along gendered roles, and by taking on these characteristics a person become the opposite sex. Dress is one of the major signifiers of gender rigidly maintained within a culture—though vary depending on the culture—along a male/female binary which, according to the article, became more defined from the development of bourgeoisie out of the aristocracy during the birth of modernization: a characteristic of modernism being categorization. Cross-dressing subverts the universal gender constructions of the masculine/feminine binary and reveals other sexual identities by being something other than a man or woman as traditionally defined, however they are limited by being defined with heterosexual terminology.

            Cross-dressing is more commonly performed as drag where the audience knows the performer’s ‘real’ gender is known, and has broad range of motivations from stage acts to social commentary. Passing, where the cross-dressers ‘real’ gender is not known, and given the more secretive nature of the performance the reasons become less clear. In the premodern age women passed as men routinely to get work in order to support themselves, own property, have more freedoms like traveling alone, and even marry women. Men’s stricter dress code makes their gender easier to mimic for women, and women passing as men was far more common than men passing. The fact that women and men can pass as each other though reveals the whole concept of gender as fictional or at the very least not natural, innate, or unbreakable in any sense. Hawkes wants the causal relationships between gender, appearance, and sexuality to be disrupted and cross-dressing works to do so in a limited way. Drag unlike the passing is intentionally portrayed as off or incomplete portrayal of gender, it is meant to be recognized as a performance acknowledging gender is all performance. Every estimation of gender by those performing them, which is to say everyone, is an approximation—there is no core gender and therefore the binary between masculine and feminine falls apart.

            I chose this article because it speaks directly to the unruly actions by the female protagonist in The Female Marine, namely Lucy Brewer’s passing as a male, serving as a marine, only to move again between male and female gender roles. The political implications for Brewer’s cross-dressing are particularly fascinating as it is readily codified. The Female Marine is meant to be patriotic, widely available as a cheap piece of propaganda, and therefore supportive of the state.  The central character routinely acts in ways that the state would not support a proper woman doing (disobeying parents and prostitution specifically) and yet she is an extremely successful masculine figure and performs each gender role perfectly even as a failed woman, so she reinforces the idealized cultural gender constructions rather than what Hawkes would like to see. The solution while appealing does not come off as particularly plausible nor is much offered in terms of how this new appearance could be reached. There’s the simple practical purpose behind Brewer’s wildly interpretable actions Hawkes acknowledges: being a male leads to a better life with more rights and freedoms. Brewer’s passing as male entails new meaning in different political, sexual, and performative contexts within The Female Marine. The claim of Hawkes that male dress is completely nonsexual and women dressing as men avoid becoming sexualized is a compelling one for arguing the cross-dressing’s justification as overtly political—it is a sort of trial in homage to the state. The article will also be perfect for explaining how rigid dress of a soldier makes Brewer ability to pass for male lot easier since there are very rigid clothes and behaviors allowed in the military. The protagonist is sexualized by her early life as a prostitute however, but if her cross-dressing is not asexual it could explain how she earns a repurified femininity after her gender-bending. Lucy Brewer’s gaining more freedoms as a male in drag, defending a woman from a man, and later marrying will be analyzed using approaches in Hawke’s article. This is a text I can rely on as my backbone for discussing how her cross-dressing and passing as a male is much more palpable culturally as propaganda. The next area to take this research is to find articles which examine if are there unruly aspects of Lucy Brewer’s cross-dressing in The Female Marine, and explore the relationship between cross-dressing, femininity, and patriotism in early America. While these women’s actions are subversive just by their unruly behavior, rather than propose a new kind of woman or femininity, or at least question its validity,  they hold onto traditional gender roles which places masculinity onto the pedestal of the ideal.

Preliminary Works Cited

Preliminary Works Cited

            My focus on methodology has been to focus on the performative aspect of Lucy Brewer’s cross-dressing when dressing as a soldier in The Female Marine. From my research so far I’ve managed to garner the text mimics other female autobiographies published at the time, so understanding my work within the history of American literature will be particularly important and I’ve managed to find several articles discussing women’s role in early American literature. Deborah Sampson, a (real) woman who passed as a male soldier during the revolutionary war, is directly referenced in the text as the source for how Brewer learns to pass so knowing that story becomes pretty crucial.  I also need to read further on the historically and place her cross-dressing within queer theory that engages with the performative description of gender roles as expressed by Butler and Foucault, from which there is almost a limitless poor of resource. I would like to try and get at my own explanation as to why Brewer’s gender-bending did not hurt the texts popularity and seemed so acceptable.

Key Search Terms:

True Womanhood

Deborah Sampson

Judith Butler

The Female Marine

Cross-dressing

Performativity

Daniel A. Cohen

Lisa Logan

American Manuscripts

Early American Novel

Brewster, Claire. “Women and the Spanish-American Wars of Independence: An Overview” Feminist Review 79 (2005) 20-35. Jstor. Web. 24 Sept. 2010.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

---. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Cohen, Daniel A. "'The Female Marine' in an Era of Good Feelings: Cross-Dressing and the 'Genius' of        Nathaniel Coverly, Jr." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society: A Journal of American History and Culture Through 1876 103.2 (1993): 359-395. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 24 Sept. 2010.

Cohen, Daniel A. The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and         Urban Vice in America’s Early Republic. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1997. Print. 

Cohen, Daniel A. “Heroic Women Found: Transgressive Feminism, Popular Biography, and the ‘Tragical Deaths of Beautiful Females’.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society: A Journal of American History and Culture Through 1876 109.1 (1999): 51-97. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.

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Eldred, Janet C, and Peter Mortensen. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Print.

Foucault, Michael. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Garber, Marjorie B. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge,   1992. Print.

Hawkes, Gail L. "Dressing-up--cross-dressing and sexual dissonance." Journal of Gender Studies 4.3 (1995): 261-70. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Sept. 2010.

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Leduc, Guyonne. "The Adventure of Cross-Dressing: Hannah Snell (1723-1792), a Woman Soldier." Adventure: An Eighteenth-Century Idiom: Essays on the Daring and the Bold as a Pre-Modern Medium. 145-167. New York, NY: AMS, 2009. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 3 Dec. 2010.

Logan, Lisa M. “Columbia’s Daughters in Drag; or, Cross-Dressing, Collaboration, and Authorship in Early American Novels.” Feminist Inverventions in Early American Studies. Ed. Mary C. Carruth. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. 240-52. Print. 

Mann, Herman. The Female Review: Life of Deborah Sampson: The Female Soldier in the War of Revolution. American women: images and realities. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Print.

Mayer, Marianna, and Julek Heller. Women Warriors: Myths and Legends of Heroic Women.New York: Morrow Junior Books, 1999. Print.

Medlicott Jr., Alexander. “The Legend of Lucy Brewer: An Early American Novel.” The New England Quarterly. 39.4 (1966): 461-473. Web.          

Mulford, Carla. “Writing Women in early American Studies: On Canons, Feminist Critique, and the Work of Writing Women into History.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 26.1 (2007): 107-18. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.

Perry, Elizabeth M. and Rosemary A. Joyce, “Past Performance: The Archeology of Gender as Influenced by the Work of Judith Butler.”. Butler Matters: Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. Ed. Breen, Margaret S, and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2005. Print.

Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print.

Smith, Merril D. Women's Roles in Eighteenth-Century America. Santa Barbara, Calif: Greenwood, 2010. Print. 

Vietto, Angela. Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005. Print

Weyler, Karen A. “An Actor in the Drama of Revolution: Deborah Sampson, Print, and Performance in the Creation of Celebrity.” Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. 183-93. Print.