After what seems like entirely too long a period of covering a single book, we come to the end. Female Husbands: A Trans History has some interesting strengths and weaknesses as a historic study. The greatest strength (and my favorite aspect, given that I like the puzzle-solving parts of historic research) is Manion's willingness to dig through obscure public records to fill in the details of these people's lives. The original publicity around the story of James Howe/Mary East and their wife never mentioned the wife's name. (Which is entirely in keeping with historic misogyny and the erasure of women's identities and--from one angle--could be seen as validation of Howe's masculinity. Since Howe was considered worthy of having a name of their own to be identified by.) But Manion succeeded in finding Howe's marriage record, which provided the name Mary Snapes. In various other cases, Manion has dug deeply to connect the dots and answer the question of "what happened to these people after the spotlight of notoriety moved on?"
But I think the most obvious weakness of the book is the attempt to organize it by chronological themes, when no such chronology existed in the biographical data. Individual biogrpahies are shoehorned into the chapter theme and sometimes tied to it by the most tenuous of connections. I could see how a book that was simply a catalog of biographies might be less readable. But the result of this approach--as well as the occasional digressions on social issues and movements of the times--makes the organization feel a bit patchy and haphazard.
Returning to strengths, I am always grateful to a book that gives me the tools to think about gender/sexuality in new and different ways, and Manion has added a significant tool to my box. In discussing "transing gender" as an action, rather than a state, it becomes easier to view female masculinity (to use Halberstam's phrase) not only as a continuum, but as a continual rather than a continuuous process. That is, transing gender is something one can do a little or a lot, periodically or all the time, permanently or temporarily. This approach makes it easier (for me, at least) to let go a little of the notion that cis and trans are distinct binary states. When considering people in history, it isn't simply that "we can never know for certain" (in that annoyingly prevalent phrasing), but that their placement on a cis-trans continuum depends not only on their motivations, experiences, and performance, but on where one chooses to draw the dividing line.
Female Husbands is a book that speaks equally strongly to several aspects of queer and gender history. For anyone who wants more aspects of the topic within the setting of western Anglophone society (which is a definite limitation of scope), I highly recommend it.
Comments