This essay will review Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (2011). This book highlights the missing histories of cross-dressers all across the American frontier, and gives readers a look into the lives of such individuals and how they were regarded and treated in society. Consequently, this paper will discuss the geographic and chronological scope of the book, and analyze the extent of the history of cross dressing practices and how they challenged heteronormative culture and myths about the Western frontier. Lastly, this essay will critically assess the effectiveness of sources used by the author and how they contribute to his arguments. The geographic and chronological scope of the book focuses on the era between 1850 to 1920, …show more content…
As a result, through the use of broad social projects, various cross-dressers were re-imagined as heterosexual and their legacies were vastly transformed. More specifically, the legacies of female-to-male cross-dressers experienced a transformation which made them into respectably feminine heterosexual women. Through dime novels, female-to-male cross-dressers of the frontier and the West held “fictionalized and idealized sexual and gender biographies” (6). These novels romanticized female-to-male cross-dressers, signifying the need to dress like a man to prove one’s own strength and power. It reasoned that women needed such a disguise in order to survive life in the West. For example, the lives of individuals such as, “Joe Monahan, Charley Parkhurst, the Mountain Charleys, and the many other daughters of Calamity Jane, whose fabricated heterosexualized stories have been told and retold” (129) through various mediums, illustrate the need to produce, “a heterosexualized and gender normalized regional history and a heterosexualized and gender normalized version of the birth of the modern American nation” (104-105). Cross-dressing defied the perceptions about women in society, and thus needed to be re-imagined in order to fit the norms and ideals of the …show more content…
Boag, addresses the credibility of his sources and effectively utilizes them in an effort to enhance the reader’s understanding and to convince them of his arguments. Through the use of these sources, Boag is able to, “recover the lives of cross-dressers in western and frontier history” (8). He is able to examine, “the reality of cross-dressers’ lives, explore how they understood their own gender and sexual identities, consider the ways in which their societies and communities viewed them, and analyze how they both affirmed and challenged the gender and sexual categories of their society” (8). Throughout the his book, Boag effectively illustrates how and why these histories disappeared and why it is important we recover them, and understand their significance in