Trans-ing California's Gold Rush Migrations PDF

All That Glitters Trans-ing California’s Gold Rush Migrations Clare Sears Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September...

All That Glitters Trans-ing California’s Gold Rush Migrations Clare Sears Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 In early 1848, on the eve of the California gold rush, San Francisco was a small, coastal settlement with approximately eight hundred residents, including Californios, Native Americans, and Euro-American settlers. Within two years, the town’s population had boomed to thirty-five thousand; within ten years, it had surpassed fifty-five thousand, as the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills brought thousands of migrants to the port of San Francisco.1 Over 95 percent of these migrants were young men, and over half traveled from outside the United States, arriving first from Mexico, Chile, and Peru, and later from Hawaii, France, Australia, China, Britain, Ireland, and Germany. The vast preponderance of men among these migrants transformed gender relations in the region, as thousands of young men struggled to organize their social, sexual, and domestic lives in the virtual absence of women. In this context, a wide range of cross-gender practices emerged, most often visibly manifesting in cross-dressing. These cross-dressing practices, however, were joined by another cross- gender phenomenon that became a central fixture of the nineteenth-century politi- cal landscape — the political and popular discourses that represented Chinese men as feminine and Chinese gender as illegible or indistinct. Emerging in gold rush California, these discourses legitimized discriminatory laws and violence, and mobilized support for federal immigration policies that culminated in the Chi- nese Exclusion Act of 1882. In this article, I analyze these racializing and femi- nizing discourses alongside cross-dressing practices to explore the multilayered relationship between cross-gender phenomena and migration politics in gold rush California. This article is grounded in my analysis of the writings of Euro-American migrant men, as recorded in gold rush diaries, newspaper columns, and political monographs. In focusing on these writings, I do not intend to reproduce white male GLQ 14:2  – 3 DOI 10.1215/10642684-2007-038 © 2008 by Duke University Press 384  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES dominance, but to analyze how these men navigated and deployed cross-gender practices and discourses in their quest for regional and national power. In par- ticular, I explore two key questions. First, how did the predominantly male, multi- national gold rush migrations affect gender relations in California, especially the documented cross-gender practices among Euro-American migrants? Second, how did these cross-gender practices dovetail with anti-immigrant politics, specifically Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 the racializing, feminizing discourses that targeted Chinese residents for exclusion from the nation? In exploring these questions, I draw from a growing body of literature that brings a queer studies perspective to histories of migration. 2 I seek to expand the analytic framework used to “queer” migration studies, by proposing an approach for “trans-ing” histories that incorporates insights from the burgeoning field of transgender studies.3 This trans-­ing approach centers on the historical production and subsequent operations of the boundary between normative and nonnorma- tive gender. As such, it brings together a range of cross-gender phenomena rarely considered alongside one another — not only people and practices that challenge gender normativity but also cross-gender practices that do not provoke censure, and trans-ing discourses that represent men as feminine, women as masculine, and gender difference as impossible to read. Developing this approach in the context of California’s gold rush migra- tions, this article focuses on three main issues. First, I analyze the impact of these multinational, predominantly male migrations on spaces of possibility for cross- gender practices, focusing on how some Euro-American male-bodied migrants dressed as women and some female-bodied migrants dressed and lived as men. Second, I explore how some of these cross-gender practices did not pose a chal- lenge to normative gender boundaries but somewhat paradoxically participated in producing heteronormative, white “American” masculinity. Finally, I analyze how trans-ing discourses were deployed in racialization and the politics of exclusion, with particular focus on the figure of the feminized Chinese man. Throughout the article, I argue that the politics of gender normativity were inseparable from con- current processes of migration, racialization, and nation formation. Instant and Peculiar When thousands of young migrant men streamed through the port of San Fran- cisco on their way to the gold mines, they transformed the small, sleepy settlement into “an instant city” almost overnight.4 They also transformed the region’s gender demographics, producing an instant city that was “instantly male,” with women  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 385 constituting only 2 percent of the population in 1849 and 15 percent in 1852.5 This gender imbalance featured prominently in gold rush participants’ diaries, letters, and memoirs, frequently as a “peculiarity” to be remarked on. One San Francisco chronicler, for example, observed that “the most striking peculiarity observable in this city is the plentiful lack of women,” while others claimed that the preponderance of young men “naturally tended to give a peculiar character to Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 the aspects of the place and habits of the people.”6 Perhaps unsurprisingly, some migrants viewed this “peculiarity” with dismay, claiming that “one great cause of a loose state of morals in San Francisco is the absence of female society and female influence.”7 Indeed, the imagined link between unrestrained bachelor men and rampant immorality led some religious leaders to develop schemes for import- ing “respectable” women to become dutiful wives — or, as one newspaper editor described it, to “bring a few spare-ribs to this market.”8 Assessments of California’s gender imbalance provide a window onto some of the ways that women were perceived during this period, most frequently as a “humanizing influence” or “civilizing force.” However, the gender ratio “problem” in gold rush California also provides a window onto colonial relations, particularly between Euro-American men, indigenous women, and Mexican women. Percep- tions of a gender imbalance had existed in California long before the gold rush, since the Spanish conquest in 1769 instituted colonial ideologies that literally did not count indigenous women as women when calculating gender ratios. 9 More- over, the political and economic “value” of indigenous and Mexican women had fallen since the early days of conquest, as European colonizers no longer relied on marriage to gain access to land, military alliances, and political and economic resources.10 The problem of “too few women” in gold rush California, then, was more accurately a problem of “too few women acceptable for marriage to Euro- American men,” and it had several causes that predated midcentury mass migra- tions. These included an ideological sphere that now condemned sexual relations between Euro-American men and indigenous or Mexican women, except for rape and prostitution, and long-standing practices of land appropriation, violence, and “Indian Removal” policies that had forcibly driven indigenous people from the area. Moreover, some miners were acutely aware (if not critically so) of the impact of these changes on gender relations. In his work on sex and gender in Old Califor- nia, for example, Albert Hurtado quotes a Yuba County miner writing to his cousin of his plan “to go back to Michigan to get a Wife.” This was not because there were no women in Yuba County, but because — in his derogatory and dehuman- izing words — “Squaw time is over in California.”11 Consequently, when gold rush migrations brought thousands of men, and far fewer women, into mid-nineteenth- 386  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES century California, they produced a gender imbalance that extended and modi- fied a preexisting phenomenon, shaped by colonial practices, rather than create something new. Far from being distant history, these colonial legacies continued to inform social relations in the region, manifesting in the ways this gender imbal- ance was perceived, as well as the sexual and gender order created in response. When migrants arrived in California, they stepped not only into a social Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 world shaped by a long history of Spanish colonization but also into a world reel- ing from the recent Mexican War and the United States’ annexation of Califor- nia, formally ratified in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo just weeks after the discovery of gold. In the following months, as thousands of migrants crossed national borders to reach gold rush California, national borders crossed resident Californios, who ceased to be nationals of Mexico and became foreigners in U.S. territory, without traveling an inch. U.S. rule produced dire consequences for Cal- ifornios, despite treaty reassurances to the contrary, as legal maneuvering robbed them of land rights and accompanying status, lifestyle, and political power.12 The U.S. conquest of Mexican California also shaped the ideological form of the gold rush, particularly for migrants from the eastern states, fueling beliefs in manifest destiny and infusing travel to California with nation-making, as well as wealth- making, meanings. Indeed, some of the first Euro-American men to arrive in San Francisco were soldiers from East Coast regiments who had crossed the conti- nent for battle, but arrived too late to fight in the Mexican War. The territory that these migrants arrived in, however, was not only a new U.S. possession but also a new home to thousands of other migrants, from multiple nations, who were staking claims to the land and the riches it promised. Undoubtedly, the region’s sudden national diversity was a variation on its earlier cultural diversity, rather than a completely new phenomenon.13 Nonetheless, this national diversity combined with the region’s gender demographics to produce a social world in which complex and intersecting claims about identity, difference, and morality were made. Mid-nineteenth-century San Francisco was thus located at the crossroads of two transnational events: the multinational, predominantly male, mass migra- tions of the gold rush and the conquest of Mexican California by a U.S. govern- ment hungry for land and continental domination. At this crossroads, national and racial identities were in flux, as were sexual and gender identities and the social relations they informed. This state of flux was temporary and was gradually replaced with a social and legal order that protectively consolidated the interests of a Euro-American propertied elite.14 These changes, however, occurred slowly and unevenly, and throughout the first half of the 1850s, the gold rush migra- tions prompted a reorganization of sexual and gender relations under conditions  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 387 of national heterogeneity and gender homogeneity, characterized by male pre- dominance. This reorganization did not equalize gender relations between men and women, but it did allow some reconfiguration of the connections between sex, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, Euro-American cultural demands for a strict coherence between bodily sex and cultural gender loosened their grip, in some circumstances, providing space for some male-bodied people to experiment with Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 femininity in dress and labor and some female-bodied people to perform mas- culinity in predominantly male social worlds. Gold rush migrations thus created spaces of possibility for male femininities and female masculinities that most vis- ibly manifested in cross-dressing practices.15 However, these spaces of possibility were intimately shaped by the region’s colonial experiences — first with Spain and then the United States. Spaces of Possibility Life in the predominantly male, racially segregated gold mining camps was char- acterized by hard labor, heavy drinking, disease, and violence. For many Euro- American diarists who recorded these events, it was also characterized by cross- dressing recreations, as they used items of clothing to gender the homosocial spaces of their men-only dances. Although these dances received only a footnote mention in Herbert Howe Bancroft’s multivolume history of midcentury Califor- nia (“The place of women at dances would be taken by men”), other observers provided more generous details.16 After attending such a dance at Angel’s Camp, in the southern mines of Calaveras County, for example, a Scottish artist named J. D. Borthwick explained how several men became women for the night, wearing a sackcloth patch to indicate their new gender: The absence of ladies was a difficulty which was very easily overcome, by a simple arrangement whereby it was understood that every gentleman who had a patch on a certain part of his inexpressibles should be considered a lady for the time being. These patches were rather fashionable, and were usually large squares of canvass, showing brightly on a dark ground, so that the “ladies” of the party were as conspicuous as if they had been sur- rounded by the usual quantity of white muslin. Music at such dances was usually provided by an amateur fiddler, who encour- aged cross-gender dancing by directing the miners to “Lady’s chain” and “Set to your partner.” According to Borthwick, when the fiddler instructed the dancers 388  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES to “Promenade to the bar, and treat your partners,” cross-gender practices would continue, as “the ‘ladies’... tossed off their cocktails and lighted their pipes just as in more polished circles they eat ice-creams and sip lemonade.”17 At similar dances in the northern mines, handkerchiefs were used to tem- porarily transform men into women, as at a Nevada City dance in 1850, where numerous men compensated for the gender imbalance of twelve women to three Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 hundred men by tying handkerchiefs around their arms and assuming the wom- an’s part. According to Luzena Stanley Wilson, one of the dozen women present, the men “airily assumed the character of ball-room belles. Every lady was over- whelmed with attentions, and there was probably more enjoyment that night, on the rough pine floor... than one finds in our society drawing-rooms.”18 Women’s clothing was also sometimes worn to indicate a man’s temporary new gender, as when several women attending a ball at Marysville, in Yuba County, persuaded a minister’s son from Boston to supplement their number by wearing a woman’s gown, shawl, and fan.19 Similarly, on a six-month sea journey to California, George Dornin, a future California politician, described attending a ship’s dance, where “the lack of lady dance partners... [was] made up by the substitution of the younger, and smoother-faced gentlemen, in calico gowns.” Dornin participated in the festivities himself: “Thanks to Mrs. Longley, I was made presentable as a young lady, and though I could not dance I could manage to walk through the figures and was, in consequence, in active demand.”20 In post-conquest, gold rush California, Euro-American gender boundaries were tested not only by men who danced and dressed as “ladies” but also by the necessities of performing domestic labor, for themselves and others. For example, Eliza W. Farnham, one of the region’s few female migrants, wrote that in Cali- fornia “it is no more extraordinary for a woman to plough, dig and hoe with her hands... than for men to do all their household labor for months, never seeing the face nor hearing the voice of [a] woman during that time.”21 Similarly, Susan Johnson, in her recent work on the social world of the gold rush, cites a letter by Lucius Fairchild, a future governor of Wisconsin, who wrote to his family about his seemingly unusual job waiting tables in a hotel: “Now in the states you would think that a person... was broke if you saw him acting the part of hired Girl... but here it is nothing, for all kinds of men do all kinds of work.... I can bob around the table, saying ‘tea or coffee Sir’ about as fast as most hombres.”22 As Johnson notes of this letter, Fairchild attempted to distinguish between “acting” in a woman’s role and being an authentic man, although his attempt was betrayed by his reliance on the Spanish “hombres,” rather than the English “men,” to shore up his masculine identity. In a world where gender divisions of labor were thus  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 389 disrupted, even the supposedly masculine labor of mining could be feminized, as California newspapers occasionally pointed out to their readers. Some men, for example, used women’s sidesaddles when riding their horses through the mines, to help them work longer hours when digging from side canyons — according to the Alta, this was easier than “sitting woman-like on a man’s saddle.”23 Even the min- ers’ stock-in-trade equipment — a heavy-duty frying pan — was a household item. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 One newspaper editor, for example, compared dispirited, pan-clutching miners to “good housewives... hurrying to some grand clam bake, to which all the world except his wife had been invited.”24 Another set of cross-gender practices flourished among the men participat- ing in the gold rush who were female-bodied. Of course, these men came to public attention only when they were “discovered” to be female. In early 1850, for exam- ple, a San Francisco newspaper reported the arrival of “an individual whose sex would certainly never have been satisfactorily ascertained from outward appear- ances.” The passenger, named Charley, had lived as a man during the voyage from Panama, but the newspaper editor claimed that he was actually a “lady” who had accomplished a “Metamorphose Extraordinary.”25 Another person, also named Charley, lived as a man for a much longer period of time: Charley Parkhurst drove the Wells Fargo stagecoach across mid-California during the 1850s and lived as a man for thirty years, until he died of cancer, aged sixty-seven, and was discov- ered to have a female body. 26 Indeed, according to the gold rush migrant Albert D. Richardson, female-bodied men were so common in gold rush California that when a newspaper photographer advertised for a “lad” to help him, he was com- pelled to specify that “no young women in disguise need apply.” For Richardson, this “caution... was needful in a mining country,” because he had “encountered in the diggings several women dressed in masculine apparel, and each telling some romantic story of her past life.”27 The degree of gender confusion caused by cross-dressing women and female-bodied men who migrated and worked in mining camps is indicated by the complex career of a popular daguerreotype image that circulated widely dur- ing the gold rush era. The picture was allegedly of a “girl miner” and featured a full-length image of a young miner dressed in men’s pants, shirt, and tie, with a large hat pulled down over shoulder-length hair. According to the artist who took the picture, the young woman had adopted men’s clothing to work in the mines, after her parents died crossing the plains in 1849. Having made her fortune, she left the mines and had her picture taken as she passed through San Francisco in 1850. The artist sold hundreds of copies of this picture to men in the area, until one of his customers — a young man named John Colton — recognized the image 390  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES as a picture of him. Confronting the artist, Colton allegedly demanded his share of the profits: “Why, that’s my picture you are selling to these miners, and I want you to divide the profits, as you have evidently made a pretty good clean up from the enterprise.”28 Whether the artist yielded to Colton’s demand and whether he continued to sell the picture following this confrontation is unknown. However, for the following 150 years, historians continued to interpret the picture as evidence Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 of cross-dressing women miners, until the curator of photographs at the Hunting- ton Library recently uncovered Colton’s story.29 While Colton’s claim that he was purposefully misidentified and marketed as a woman suggests that the “girl miner” picture lacks historical value as evi- dence of cross-dressing practices, the photograph’s career more than confirms the cultural currency of such indeterminate gender images. First, in featuring the likeness of a man identified as a woman who is then identified as a man, the pho- tograph highlights the slipperiness of gender identifications and the ways in which dress makes gender difficult to read. Moreover, even before Colton claimed to be the picture’s subject, its popularity among gold rush men points to the complexity of gender relations in a predominantly male migrant world. The picture’s popular- ity not only highlights the intensified commodification of women that occurred in predominantly male California, with men flocking to purchase even a picture of a “genuine” woman, but also reveals that, under these conditions, men would cherish a picture that resembled their male workmates, perhaps with the hope that one of these workmates would also turn out to be a “girl.” Female masculinity and male femininity thus converge in this image to highlight the spaces of possibility, as well as the difficulties of interpretation, that characterized the operations of gold rush gender. The complex relationships between female masculinities and sexual desires are further illustrated by the dress practices of sex workers in San Fran- cisco, who wore men’s clothing to advertise their availability for commercial sex. Mid-nineteenth-century journalists Frank Soulé, John Gihon, and James Nisbet, for example, wrote of San Francisco in 1849: “Occasionally... the crowd would make way for the passage of a richly dressed woman, sweeping along, apparently proud of being recognized as one of frail character, or several together of the same class, mounted on spirited horses, and dashing furiously by, dressed in long rid- ing skirts, or what was quite as common, in male attire.”30 The term frail was a popular euphemism for Euro-American sex workers in midcentury San Francisco, and Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet explicitly described the cross-dressing practices of women who sold sex.31 Similarly, three decades later, Bancroft recalled gold rush San Francisco as a place where “loose characters flaunted costly attire in elegant  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 391 equipages, or appeared walking or riding in male attire.”32 Such cross-dressing practices raise complex questions about the operations of commercial sex and sex- ual desire during this period, similar to those raised by the “girl miner” picture. Specifically, men’s clothing did not appear to render Euro-American women inac- cessible as objects of male desire, but to confirm their potential sexual availabil- ity, perhaps by indicating a transgressive sexuality that distinguished them from Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 “respectable” ladies but also perhaps by likening them to “one-of-the-boys.”33 Masquerades and Mockery As these instances of cross-gender practices illustrate, the mass migrations and population boom of the gold rush era led to a reorganization of gender relations for Euro-Americans, providing spaces to experiment with different gender per- formances in daily — and nightly — lives. Some of these practices posed a clear threat to normative gender and sexual relations, leading the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to criminalize cross-dressing in 1863, as one of the city’s first “offenses against good morals and decency.”34 However, gold rush cross-dressing practices had multiple meanings and performed different, even contradictory, types of cultural work. Consequently, not all of these practices were as transgres- sive as they might at first appear. At gold rush dances, in particular, cross-dressing practices provided the temporary fantasy of gender diversity, which facilitated — if somewhat ironically — the appearance of heteronormative relations. Moreover, these cross-gender dress and dance practices provided some Euro-American men with not only a way to negotiate the region’s gender imbalance but also the means to produce and police new racial boundaries actively in the postwar context. After all, the gender imbal- ance these men negotiated was a racialized phenomenon, as acknowledged by a derisive “California Correspondent” to an East Coast newspaper, who explained that gold rush dances were “pretty much of the stag order” because “we are short of pettycots [sic] — except the squaws [sic], which indeed wear no pettycots [sic], but only a light wrapper.”35 At these gold rush dances, Euro-American men chose to dance with each other, wearing dresses, while refusing to acknowledge, and humanize, indigenous women. Cross-dressing dance practices were also joined by racial mockery at some gold rush dances, particularly at San Francisco’s masquerade balls. In 1851, for example, a Mexican War veteran and leading city merchant attended a masked ball at the city’s Cairo Coffee House, wearing “blackface, petticoats and a woman’s dress.”36 Such dress practices drew from the racial parodies and cross-dressing 392  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES mimicry popularized by minstrel performances, which worked to consolidate white working-class masculinity and to reinforce prevailing ideologies of separate male and female spheres.37 City masquerade balls also sometimes placed “exotic” peo- ples on display, foreshadowing the racialized exhibition practices of freak shows and world’s fairs, which grew in popularity as the century progressed. In 1850, for example, Joseph Heco, a shipwrecked Japanese sailor whose crew had been Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 rescued off the California coast, attended a masquerade ball on Kearny Street, accompanied by a group of U.S. sailors. Backstage, he saw masqueraders “paint their faces and put on masks. We saw some females put on men’s clothes, while some men arrayed themselves in women’s garments.” However, Heco quickly dis- covered that his hosts had invited him to be part of the entertainment, not part of the audience, when he was forced on stage, in “native” costume, before the mas- querade ball began. 38 Such episodes clearly complicate the meanings of cross- dressing practices, underscoring the racialized context and parodic form of at least some gold rush entertainments. Certainly, as California grew in wealth and power, the homosocial, cross- gendered spaces of these dances did not become an embarrassing secret from the region’s past but a celebrated symbol of its early years under U.S. rule. For exam- ple, in 1887, when the artist W. P. Bennett produced an illustrated version of James Hutchings’s best-selling letter-sheet The Miners’ Ten Commandments, originally published in 1853, the image of a presumably male miner, dancing in a skirt, appeared alongside scenes of mining, gambling, and crossing the plains, as illus- trations of gold rush life.39 Even more striking, when San Francisco held its Inau- gural Ball in 1895, the commemorative edition of a local newspaper ran a full-page cartoon of the city’s white male elite, dancing together, half of whom wore women’s clothing (see fig. 1).40 In the late nineteenth century, then, at least some cross- dressing practices were fondly remembered as part of “official” history, as their potential threat to normative gender relations was counterbalanced, at least par- tially, by their support of racialized, heteronormative “American” masculinity.41 Spaces of Foreclosure In post-conquest gold rush California, Euro-American men not only participated in their own cross-gender recreations but also produced political narratives of feminized men and gender illegibility that centered on Chinese migrants. These narratives took several different forms, but worked together to link Chinese migra- tion to multiple cross-gender threats, against which gender-normative white mas- culinity could be defined. Furthermore, these narratives operated to naturalize  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 393 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 Figure 1. Cartoon commemorating the city’s 1895 Inaugural Ball, San Francisco Examiner, Inaugural Ball Supplement, January 29, 1895, back cover the effects of discriminatory laws and violence, and to mobilize support for exclu- sionary immigration policies. Consequently, for Euro-American men, the bound- ary between normative and nonnormative gender became a key rhetorical device for producing and policing the racialized borders of the nation-state, while anti- Chinese politics became central to reformulating dominant gender norms. When Chinese men began working in domestic and service occupations, 394  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES instead of in the mines, Euro-American observers frequently deemed them to have a natural, feminine propensity for women’s work. Albert Richardson, for example, described San Francisco’s Chinese residents as excellent house servants: Perfect in imitation, where female labor is scarce he proves unrivaled at nursing, cooking, washing and ironing. Babies intrusted [sic] to him he Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 dandles with so much caution and tenderness, that all the maternal instinct must lurk somewhere: under his long pig-tail, in his yellow face, or moony eyes. My friend had a masculine domestic named Afoy, who scrubbed floors, washed dishes and cooked dinners with grave and deliberate fidelity.42 In Richardson’s account, Chinese men’s domestic skills did not derive from an ability “to bob around the table... as fast as most hombres,” but from a femi- nine maternal instinct located in a racially distinct male body. Such an account overlooked the intersecting legal, economic, and social factors that prompted Chi- nese men’s concentration in service work. These included the reinstatement of the foreign miner’s tax in 1852, an increasing level of nativist harassment and vio- lence, and the growing racialization of California’s emerging economic structure.43 Instead, Chinese men were posited as a natural stand-in for white women, in the sphere of domestic labor, obscuring and legitimizing the operation of discrimina- tory laws. As anti-Chinese politics reached fever pitch in 1870s California, efforts to exclude and remove Chinese immigrants from the nation honed in on the ste- reotypical figure of the feminized Chinese male domestic. For example, the anti- capitalist, anti-Chinese Workingman’s Party of California (WPC) argued that the Chinese male servant had a competitive edge in the domestic labor market as a direct result of his lack of masculinity: You cannot discern that he is a man.... He has no tell-tale blush for indelicate sights or sounds. He cleanses the baby with the same indiffer- ence that he washes the dishes. He can lace Madam’s corsets, or arrange the girls’ petticoats, smooth their pillows, or tuck in their feet as calmly as he can set the table for breakfast. In an emergency he is called into the bedroom, or the bathroom without a thought. Why, bless you, he is not a man! Against this emasculated Chinese servant, argued the WPC, white domestic laborers were destined to fail, “because they have sex, and shame, and sense of  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 395 propriety.”44 Political cartoons similarly featured caricatures of Chinese men that centered on ostensibly feminine appearance, through visual cues such as exagger- atedly long hair, rich, billowing gowns, and ornate fans. When violence broke out against Chinese laborers in Wyoming in 1885, for example, a political cartoon in Harper’s Weekly depicted two feminized Chinese men watching the brutal scene, simpering behind ornate fans and declaring “What a Pretty Mess!”45 Even more Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 starkly, in 1887, the national magazine the Wasp published a cartoon that featured Chinese men wearing women’s clothing and clutching baby dolls, passing through immigration control into the United States (see fig. 2).46 This cartoon commented on provisions in federal Alien Contract Acts that banned employers from paying to import laborers, but exempted several categories of workers, including domestic servants. In depicting men in feminine apparel, such cartoons not only framed Chinese immigrants as deceptive interlopers, sneaking into the country in dis- guise, but also as effeminate, deviant men, unable to perform normative masculin- ity and hence unworthy of inclusion in the nation.47 Although the interplay of anti-Chinese politics and trans-ing discourses primarily focused on the figure of the feminized Chinese man, other cross-gender figures were discursively produced. Some critics, for example, focused on the gen- der presentation of Chinese women alongside Chinese men. One local newspa- per thus reported that “in China the men wear skirts and the women trousers,” while another observer insisted: “You would be puzzled to distinguish the women from the men, so inconsiderable are the differences in dress and figure.”48 Such accounts did not fully masculinize Chinese women, but nonetheless denied them normative femininity within a framework of gender indeterminacy that was inex- tricably linked to racial distinctiveness.49 Anti-Chinese politics and trans-ing discourses also worked together through the figure of the besieged white male laborer, threatened with emasculation by Chinese immigration. The American Federation of Labor, for example, presented its call for Chinese exclusion in gen- dered high-stakes terms — “American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?” — while the San Francisco Board of Health represented Chinese immigrants as a three-pronged threat to the “morals, the manhood and the health of our people.”50 Given these ostensible threats to white masculinity, it is perhaps unsurprising that white men who failed to support anti-Chinese measures were sometimes represented in feminized forms. For example, in 1882, the Wasp pub- lished a political cartoon featuring President Chester Arthur, who had just refused to sign the first version of the Chinese Exclusion Act. 51 This cartoon depicts Arthur in women’s clothing, perhaps as a domestic servant, entertaining a white child (identified as the Pacific states) as a literally monstrous Chinese character 396  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 Figure 2. Political cartoon, Wasp 18 (January – June 1887), back cover. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 397 moves in closer. As this cartoon suggests, the figure of the feminized Chinese man was embedded in a broader trans-ing discourse that framed Chinese immigra- tion in terms of multiple cross-gender threats and called for a specifically gender- normative white masculinity to “protect” the nation through Chinese exclusion. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 Trans-ing Gold Rush Migrations In this article, I have documented how cross-gender practices proliferated in gold rush California, as a wide range of male femininities and female masculinities complicated and enriched everyday life. Many of these practices illustrate the symbolic power of clothing to trouble gender legibility and highlight the spaces of possibility created by the era’s predominantly male migrations. Certainly, many Euro-American migrants took advantage of these opportunities, with some perhaps enjoying the thrill of temporary costuming and others taking more gender-specific pleasures from the transformations triggered by cross-gender dress. At the same time, however, at least some of these practices provided a way for Euro-American men to assert heteronormative white masculinity, as cross-gender mimicry dove- tailed with racial mockery at gold rush dances. Alongside their cross-dressing practices, Euro-American men produced trans-ing discourses that naturalized the effects of structural discrimination against Chinese migrants and justified exclusionary immigration laws. These trans-ing discourses also provided a way for Euro-American men to shore up their own fragile sense of masculinity, as they deployed complex taxonomies of nor- mative and nonnormative gender within a predominantly male world. By mark- ing Chinese men as feminine, for example, Euro-American masculinity found its required opposite, and by positioning Chinese gender as utterly illegible, Euro- American gender distinctions came into sharper view. In a social world where Euro-American men dressed in women’s clothing, danced with other men, cooked and cleaned, fantasized about boyish “girl miners,” and purchased sexual services from women in men’s clothing, the interplay of racial, sexual, and trans-ing dis- courses allowed gender trouble to be contained in the body of a racialized other. Consequently, to paraphrase Norma Alarcón’s influential formulation of gender formation, Euro-American migrants in gold rush California “became men” not only in relation to women but also in relation to other men.52 In focusing on the practices and discourses of Euro-American men, this article does not explore the cross-dressing practices of men of color, or the ways that these men navigated the gender politics of post-conquest gold rush Califor- nia, as new formations of white supremacy undercut their claims to full mascu- 398  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES linity. Additionally, it does not consider how gender-normative womanhood was constructed during this period, in relation to migration, racialization, and nation formation. Further research is needed to explore these areas and to expand, elabo- rate, or revise the arguments presented here. Although developed to study the mass migrations of California’s gold rush, this article presents a valuable framework for trans-ing migration histories that will Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 be useful for analyzing the gender, sexual, and racial politics of other migratory movements and border disputes. Specifically, this analytic approach highlights relationships between gender normativity, racialization, and cross-border move- ments that may otherwise be obscured. First, trans-ing analysis illuminates how migratory movements can disrupt gender relations, creating spaces of possibility for male femininities and female masculinities in dress, labor, and recreations. These cross-gender phenomena clearly trouble the boundary between men and women, but just as important, they pressure the boundary between normative and nonnormative gender, questioning the range of practices that can be assimilated into normative masculinity and femininity — and those that cannot. Second, by bringing together a wide range of cross-gender practices, trans-ing analysis high- lights their disparate cultural meanings and contradictory effects. Consequently, it underscores the need to distinguish carefully between cross-gender practices that challenge racialized gender normativity and those that shore it up. Finally, trans- ing analysis illustrates how the boundary between normative and nonnormative gender can be deployed to legitimize and naturalize new racial and national for- mations. As such, it points to the need to analyze the interplay of anti-immigration politics and discursive strategies that feminize men, masculinize women, and ren- der gender difference difficult to read. Consequently, this article calls for further analyses of migrant practices, representations, and regulations, using a trans-ing framework that complements and extends current work on queer migrations. Notes 1. William Issel and Robert W. Cherney, San Francisco, 1865 – 1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 2. See Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú Jr., eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Erica Rand, The Ellis Island Snow Globe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 399 2005). For works on gender, sexuality, and migration specific to nineteenth-century California, see Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000); and Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidem- ics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 3. See Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader (New Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 York: Routledge, 2006); and Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ 10 (2004): 212 – 15. In identifying trans-ing as a distinct process, I am indebted to conversations with Stryker and to a paper delivered by Joanne Meyero­ witz, “A New History of Gender” (presented at “Trans/forming Knowledges: The Implications of Transgender Studies for Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and Sexu- ality Studies,” Center for Gender Studies, University of Chicago Symposium, Chicago, February 17, 2006). 4. Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco, 1846 – 1856: From Hamlet to City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 5. Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850 – 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 6. George Kent, diary entry, 1849, quoted in Julia Cooley Altrocchi, The Spectacular San Franciscans (New York: Dutton, 1949), 45; Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (1855; rpt. Palo Alto, CA: Osborne, 1966), 244. 7. William McCollum (1850), quoted in Curt Gentry, The Madams of San Francisco: A Highly Irreverent History of the City by the Golden Gate (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 29. 8. Alta, May 24, 1849; see also William Taylor, California Life Illustrated (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1858), 205 – 10. 9. Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). 10. Antonia Casteñada, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth Century Stereotypes of Californianas,” in Between Borders: Essays in Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Ade- laida R. Del Castillo (Los Angeles: Floricanto, 1990), 213 – 36. 11. William Bullard to “Dear Cousin,” April 1, 1859, quoted in Hurtado, Intimate Fron- tiers, 97. 12. Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 1995). 13. Antonia Casteñada, “Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History: The Dis- course, Politics, and Decolonization of History,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1992): 501 – 33. 14. See Tomás Almaguer, Racial Faultlines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 400  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES 15. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). For studies of female masculinities, male femininities, and transgender sub- jectivities during the nineteenth-century, see Rand, Ellis Island Snow Globe; Peter Boag, “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History,” Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2005): 477 – 97; Don Romsberg, “Don’t Fence Me In: Transgendering Western History” (unpublished Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 manuscript, 2000). 16. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California: 1848 – 1859 (1888; rpt. Santa Barbara, CA: Hebberd, 1970), 6:232n33. 17. J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (Oakland, CA: Biobooks, 1948), 262 – 63. 18. Luzena Stanley Wilson, “Luzena Stanley Wilson, 49er,” in My Checkered Life: Luzena Stanley Wilson in Early California, ed. Fern L. Henry (1937; rpt. Nevada City: Mautz, 2003), 80. 19. Elisabeth Margo, Taming the Forty-Niner (New York: Rinehart, 1955), 151. 20. George D. Dornin, Thirty Years Ago: Gold Rush Memories of a Daguerreotype Artist (1873; rpt. Nevada City, CA: Mautz, 1995), 20 – 21. 21. Eliza W. Farnham, California Indoors and Out, or How We Farm, Mine, and Live in the Golden State (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1856), 28. 22. Lucius Fairchild, California Letters of Lucius Fairchild (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931). Cited in Johnson, Roaring Camp, 119. 23. “Side-Saddles,” Alta, July 2, 1849. 24. “Latest from the Mines—Stanislaus Diggings, Jamestown,” Alta, June 21, 1849. 25. “Metamorphose Extraordinary,” Alta, January 21, 1850. 26. “Stranger Than Fiction,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 1880. 27. Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi (1867; rpt. Hartford, CT: American, 1968), 200. 28. Lorenzo Dow Stephens, Life Sketches of a Jayhawker of ’49 (San Jose, CA: Nolta Brothers, 1916), 65. 29. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 175; Jennifer Watts, “From the Photo Archive: ‘That’s No Woman... ,’ ” The Huntington Library, Arts Collection, and Botanical Gardens Cal- endar, July – August 1998. 30. Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 259. 31. Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849 – 1900 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986). 32. Bancroft, History of California, 232n35. 33. These descriptions correspond with accounts of female prostitutes in New Orleans who sometimes adopted men’s names when they advertised in the city’s Blue Book guide to commercial sex services. See Mack Friedman, Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture (Los Angeles: Alyson, 2003).  TRANS-ING CALIFORNIA’S GOLD RUSH 401 34. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Revised Orders of the City and County of San Francisco (San Francisco, 1863). For analysis of San Francisco’s cross-dressing law, see Clare Sears, A Dress Not Belonging to His or Her Sex: Cross-Dressing Law in San Francisco, 1860 – 1900 (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2005). 35. “California Correspondence,” Alta, July 19, 1849. 36. John Boessenecker, Against the Vigilantes: The Recollections of Dutch Charley Duane Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 18. 37. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Black Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 38. Joseph Heco, The Narrative of a Japanese: What He Has Seen and the People He Has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1895), 93. 39. W. P. Bennett, The Miners’ Pioneer Ten Commandments of 1849 (Chicago: Kurz and Allison’s Art Gallery, 1887). 40. San Francisco Examiner, Inaugural Ball Supplement, January 29, 1895. 41. For a similar argument about the cross-dressing practices of elite white men, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1993), 59 – 66. 42. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi, 390. 43. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Bos- ton: Little, Brown, 1989). 44. Workingman’s Party of California, The Chinese Must Go: The Labor Agitators; or, the Battle for Bread (San Francisco: Greene, 1879), 25. 45. “What a Pretty Mess!” Harper’s Weekly, September 19, 1885, 623. 46. “Another Bar Down,” Wasp 18 (January – June 1887). 47. For a similar argument on the gender politics of Chinese exclusion, see Karen J. Leong, “ ‘A Distinct and Antagonistic Race’: Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869 – 1878,” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Man- hood in the American West, ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131 – 48. 48. Call, February 24, 1895; Hinton Rowan Helper, Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (Baltimore: Taylor, 1855), 89. 49. Similar claims about gender indeterminacy were frequently made in mining districts and on migration journeys, focusing on the ostensible difficulty of distinguishing indigenous men and women. See Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi, 229; William Perkins, William Perkins’ Journal of Life at Sonora, 1849 – 1852 (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1964), 145; Etienne Derbec, A French Journalist in the Cali- fornia Gold Rush: The Letters of Etienne Derbec (Georgetown, CA: Talisman, 1964), 154 – 55. 50. American Federation of Labor, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism; Which Shall Survive? (Washington, 402  GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN and GAY STUDIES DC: American Federation of Labor, 1901), 8; San Francisco Board of Health, China- town Declared a Nuisance (San Francisco: City Printing Office, 1880), 12. 51. “Amusing the Child,” Wasp 8 (January – June 1882). 52. Alarcón emphasizes the racialized process of identifying as a woman, arguing that when “asymmetric race and class relations are a central organizing principle of society one may ‘become a woman’ in opposition to other women.” See Norma Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/14/2-3/383/414276/GLQ142-3_10_Sears.pdf by [email protected] on 14 September 2023 Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo- American Feminism,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990), 360.