... This chapter shows how cross-dressing law increased the visibility of cross-dressing practices under the sign of criminality. The law consisted of a legal text that formally prohibited public cross-dressing practices and a set of legal and cultural procedures that brought them into view...

... This chapter explores the relationships between cross-dressing law and three entertainment venues that placed cross-dressing performers on display: vaudevillian theater, dime museum freak shows, and commercial slumming tours. These city entertainments commercialized the law’s penchant...

... This chapter examines multiple points of convergence between cross-dressing law and the federal immigration controls that developed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Immigration law did not target cross-dressing as a specific practice, but supporters produced political...

... cross-dressing law transgender studies queer studies critical cultural legal studies San Francisco history ...

... This chapter previews the book’s main arguments, situating them in relation to transgender and queer studies as well as critical cultural studies of law. It also provides a historical overview of cross-dressing laws in the United States, documenting their frequent passage in mid-nineteenth...

... This chapter revisits the book’s main arguments and considers the strategies of resistance employed by people who fell afoul of cross-dressing law. Collective opposition was difficult, but individual protests arose, as people resisted arrest, argued in court, and insisted upon alternative forms...

... This chapter explores cross-dressing law’s legal operations and effects as it developed as a flexible tool for policing multiple gender offenses, including those of feminist dress reformers, female impersonators, fast young women who dressed as men for nights out on the town, and people whose...

... This chapter examines the emergence of San Francisco’s cross-dressing law at the crossroads of three forces: defining cross-dressing and prostitution as indecency, framing indecency as a societal problem in need of intervention, and identifying local law as the solution. The classification...

... nineteenth-century San Francisco cross-dressing resistance ...

... gold rush California nineteenth-century San Francisco cross-dressing ...

... freak shows slumming tours vaudeville nineteenth-century San Francisco cross-dressing ...

... immigration control political cartoons Chinese immigration nineteenth-century San Francisco cross-dressing ...