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

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

'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 *

Author Bio

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.