ARRESTING DRESS: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

Traces the career of cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial "slumming tours." It shows that the laws did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. Illus.