Parting with my Sex: Cross-Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life

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Lucy Chesser

Parting with my Sex

Name: Parting with my Sex
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ISBN: 9781920898311

Cross-Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life

Lucy Chesser

$39.95

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English

Sydney University Press
23 September 2008

Popular culture; Alternative lifestyles

In this original and unusual work, Lucy Chesser explores the persistent recurrence of cross-dressing and gender inversion within Australian cultural life. Examples of cross-dressing are to be found in almost every area of Australian historical enquiry, including Aboriginal-European relations and conflict, convict societies, the goldrushes, bushranging, the 1890s and its nationalist fiction, and World War One. The book compares and contrasts sustained life-long impersonations whereby women lived, worked and sometimes married as men, with other forms of cross-dressing such as public masquerades, cross-dressing on the stage, and the prosecution of men who sought sexual encounters while disguised as women.

By: Lucy Chesser
Imprint: Sydney University Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 148mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 480g
ISBN: 9781920898311
ISBN 10: 192089831X
Pages: 340
Publication Date: 23 September 2008
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1 1. ‘Extraordinary case of concealment of sex’: Edward de Lacy Evans and the management of disruptive knowledge 2. ‘If he’s a woman he’s a fine ploughman’: public regulation, private tolerance and ‘passing women’ in colonial Australia 3. Mary Rutledge’s mad freak: masquerade, disguise, theatrical impersonation and cross-dressing 4. ‘Mere bundles of clothes’: cross-dressing and inversion in colonial cultural expression 5. ‘She won’t be happy till she wears ‘em’: cross-dressing and sexual politics in the contested 1890s Part 2 6. ‘I felt no difference between him and other women’: sexual (mis)representation and cultural anxiety in the 1863 prosecution of John Wilson 7. Abominable crimes and strange manias: cross-dressing and homosexual transgression, 1863–1900 8. ‘Woman in a suit-of-male’: working women in male ‘disguise’, 1890–1920 9. ‘When two loving hearts beat as one’: same-sex marriage, subjectivity and self-representation in the case of Marion-Bill-Edwards, 1906–1916 10. Brazen beauties and erotic males: cross-dressing, sensationalism, sexology and the law, 1902–1920 Conclusion Index

Lucy Chesser wrote her PhD on cross-dressing in Australian history at La Trobe University, where she then became an honorary research associate in history.

Reviews for Parting with my Sex: Cross-Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life

'I was often struck by her respect for the basic integrity of the stories that she tells — yet always confident that I was in the presence of a historian in control of her material and with the wit and imagination not to miss opportunities for interpretation. There is a lightness of touch about the prose combined with a subtlety in the historical explanation that made every page a pleasure.' -- Frank Bongiorno * Journal of Australian Colonial History *