With the example of A Florida Enchantment and its different iterations as a novel."So that's when I got on this kick and ended up writing my undergrad thesis on F-to-M cross-dressing. Looking to historicize cross-dressing during the early days of American cinema, Girls Will Be Boys is organized chronologically, with an "Intermezzo" about the changing "codes of deviance" in the 1920s popular culture between Parts I and II, which examine the "first wave" (1908-1921) and then the "second" (1922-1928) and "third" (1929-1934) "waves" of cross-dressed films respectively. Through the analysis of a multitude of extant and non-extant films including Westerns, Civil War dramas, adventure films, and comedies, and through detailed readings of many extra-filmic sources, such as reviews, advertising material, novels, plays, and health and sexuality treatises, Girls Will Be Boys also reveals how American cinema constructed not only gender and sexuality but also whiteness and Americanness through cross-dressing on and off screen, how ideas of masculinity shaped American womanhood, and how women participated in cinema's construction of American white masculinity. Cross-dressing in film, Horak tells us, has a rich and complex history, one that has been ignored or misinterpreted and is now restored in her groundbreaking study.īased on extensive archival research, Horak's Girls Will Be Boys demonstrates how crucial cross-dressing was to the establishment of American cinema as a wholesome form of entertainment in the early years, before the practice became associated with sexual deviance in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Far from being rare, always transgressive, and the only code for lesbianism in American cinema, cross-dressed women before Dietrich, Garbo, and Hepburn were in fact given "multiple, contradictory meaning" (2) in American films from 1908 through 1934. For Laura Horak in Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934, the status of these women in film history as early and unique representations of cross-dressing and lesbian desire tells us about common, false assumptions. If Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), and Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1936) are the cross-dressed women we know best in Hollywood cinema, they were certainly not the first. Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934.
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