Note: Professor Laura Horak will host a screening and book party for Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema 1908-1934, at SAW Video Media Art Centre on April 8th.
Film Studies Professor Laura Horak begins her new book ‘Girls Will Be Boys’ with a richly detailed description of a scene from Morocco (1930), in which actress Marlene Dietrich takes the stage wearing a bowtie, top hat and tailcoat, then kisses a woman from the audience square on the mouth.
This iconic cinematic moment, alongside other bold performances by Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, are what many have understood to be the earliest markers of cross-dressed women expressing desire for other women in American cinema.
According to Horak, our collective understanding of cross-dressed female performances pegs them as both ‘transgressive’ and a ‘challenge to the patriarchy and gender binary.’ But that only tells part of the story. By uncovering hundreds of performances by cross-dressed women onscreen from 1908 to the late 1920s, Horak not only shifts this history back to a much earlier date, but also points out that these performances began as wholesome representations of American ideals.
Horak’s research on the subject began over ten years ago, as an undergraduate student at Yale.
“I came across an incredible website called Jay Kaye’s Transgender Movie Site that listed thousands of films with transgender content. I was shocked by how many of them were made before 1950. Like many people, I had assumed that movies had only gotten more progressive, with more and more room for different kinds of gender expression. I was amazed at how modern a lot of the old movies were,” she says.
After a spring break spent at the Library of Congress tracking down and viewing hard-to-find America films, Horak says she was hooked. She had only just scratched the surface. To date, she has uncovered over 400 examples of films featuring cross-dressed women – a list which continues to grow.
“One of the things I wanted to show in my book is that a wide variety of female masculinities have been really important to American filmmaking in its earliest decades. This offers a kind of genealogy that might be politically, personally, and artistically useful to gender non-conforming people today, even if the female masculinities of the past were understood in very different terms than they are today.”
In Girls Will Be Boys, Horak is effectively the first to acknowledge that public perception of the earliest cross-dressed performances by women were reflective of pre-cinema trends in both theatre and folklore, and the ideal of genteel boyhood. For example, rather than casting a boy to play a boy, the innocence, beauty and vulnerability of a girl represented – ironically – a “better” boy.
(Actress Marie Doro as Oliver on the left and as “herself” on the right, from “Marie Doro as Oliver Twist,” Motion Picture Magazine, February 1917)
Horak asserts that previous scholars tend to read cross-dressed performances as ‘mirrors of their own concerns and identities,’ be they feminist, lesbian, queer or post-modern. Conversely, she aims to focus in on how these films were perceived in their time, and offers up multiple, contradictory meanings mapped on to them over the years.
“It’s much more revealing to explore the meanings that various terms and gender styles had at the time and reconstruct that logic than to try to impose our own categories on them,” she says.
Often the only silent films people have seen are of the slapstick comedy variety. Celebrated performances by Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle might come to mind. Films featuring cross-dressed women, on the other hand, typically aren’t slapstick comedies. Even though many of the actresses are well-known to this day (like Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson), their cross-dressing films aren’t in circulation, and are hard to find.
Prof. Laura Horak
“I hope that by listing all 476 American films featuring cross-dressed women between 1904 and 1934 in my appendix (including where to find the films that survive), I will spur further research on these forgotten works. I also hope that people start programming these films at film festivals, showing them in classes, and releasing them on DVD or via streaming sites,” says Horak. She also notes that there is much to be done on an international scale, not just with American films.
Part two of Horak’s book deals with the emergence of ‘lesbian legibility,’ wherein lesbian identities were introduced into mainstream American culture via cinema, beginning in the 1920s. While this caused some backlash against female masculinity and cross-dressing in film, there was also a positive aspect to this shift.
“It created new opportunities for community and identity formation for women who now had the option of identifying as lesbian. Although there are important differences, I think something similar has happened in the last ten years around the transgender community,” she says.
The horizon is bright for Horak in 2016. Among a book release for Girls Will Be Boys on April 8 at SAW Video, Horak has also co-organized an event for February 26 titled “Sexuality, Aesthetics, and Embodied Resistance: A Screening of Four Short Films,” one of which navigates the relationship between an Orthodox Jewish mother and her transgender son.
“Today, happily, more transgender and gender non-conforming people are able to tell their own stories and represent their experiences in everything from feature films to TV shows, experimental films, and YouTube videos. This is a welcome development and it’s wonderful that the long-burning transgender movement is finally bursting into mainstream consciousness,” she says.
Horak, cross-appointed with the Pauline Jewett Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, teaches courses on film theory and historiography, passing and masquerade in cinema, sexuality in American cinema, women directors, queer Hollywood, and the body and visual technology.
Her next project- a book tentatively titled Cinema’s Oscar Wilde: Mauritz Stiller and the Production of Modern Sexuality is about Finnish-Swedish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, who is most famous today for discovering Greta Garbo and going to Hollywood with her. However, he also directed almost 40 films, and was fairly well-known in Sweden for being both gay and Jewish. According to Horak, this book will investigate Stiller’s role in the enormous social changes around sexuality and gender in Northern Europe in the early twentieth century.
“In some sense, I’m asking similar questions about the relationship between cinema, popular culture, gender, and sexuality as I did in Girls Will Be Boys, but asking them about a different set of films in a different geopolitical context.”
The April 8th Screening and Book Party (7:00 pm at the SAW Video Media Art Centre, 67 Nicholas Street, Ottawa) celebrating Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema 1908-1934, will feature Silent films with live musical accompaniment!
Including:
- Darling of the C.S.A. (1912) – Newly restored!
- The House with Closed Shutters (1910)
- The Two Roses (1910) – Starring the “Thanhouser Kid” (on book cover)
- A Lively Affair (1914)
- What’s the World Coming To? (1926) – Newly restored!
Books for sale at 30% off!
Presented with support from SAW Video Media Art Centre and Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture (SSAC) and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS).
Wheelchair accessible entrance located at 2 Daly Avenue before the taxi stand.
Check out the event on Facebook!
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