Just One of the Boys

Gillian M. Rodger's new book is a welcome addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century performance culture and the history of gender and sexuality more broadly. As with her previous study, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima (2010), Rodger employs cultural materialist methods to explore the dynamics of U.S. variety theater. Whereas her earlier work considered a range of performance styles, Rodger focuses here on a single genre, tracing the careers of three generations of female-to-male cross-dressers from the late 1860s through World War I. By demonstrating that the variety stage was a testing ground for new expressions of gender and sexuality, she builds meaningfully on earlier studies of nineteenth-century cross-dressing, which have tended to focus on cross-dressed performances of William Shakespeare. Just One of the Boys is organized chronologically and follows performers across oceans and along touring circuits through trade newspapers such as the New York Clipper and the London Era. Rodger is particularly attentive to developments in performers' repertoires, which she sees as indices of shifting audience tastes and industry needs. She notes, for example, that stylistic similarities between English music hall and American variety in the 1860s and 1870s facilitated the frequent movement of performers between the two circuits but that later reform efforts and adjustments to managerial business models made transatlantic movement more difficult. When the economic downturn of the 1870s led U.S. managers to privilege sexualized content, cross-dressed performers responded with raunchy songs that appealed to male, working-class audiences. When the economy recovered in the 1880s, some managers continued to prefer acts with sexualized content, while others focused on attracting women and children or new immigrant audiences. Amid these changes, performers had to choose where and how they would specialize, sometimes with less-than-ideal results. The tremendously talented Ella Wesner was unable to make the move into vaudeville in 1880s because she refused to adjust her repertoire to play female as well as male roles, “which limited her ability to move into narrative comic works” (p. 138). Moreover, since she had spent most of her career performing in New York City, she had not developed relationships outside the city, which meant that when audience preferences changed, “she lacked the connections to independent and small-time vaudeville circuits” that would have prolonged her career (p. 139

Human sexuality · Materialism · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Privilege (computing · Scholarship · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Gender Studies · Law · Theater, Performance, and Music History

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