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Reviews: Print
"Arresting Dress is an outstanding archivally based and theoretically potent intervention in transgender history. Clare Sears offers fresh insight into how individuals targeted by cross-dressing law manipulated gender boundary logics to make public claims or evade unwelcome scrutiny. Clearly written, vividly documented, and vigorously argued, this book explores how policing gender conformity had far-reaching impacts." — Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West
"Don't let the subtitle of Clare Sears's important new book fool you into thinking this is a narrow investigation of an obscure law in a small city a long time ago. It's filled with big ideas about bodies and spaces and norms, about the generative as well as disciplinary function of the law, and about the historical transience of gender categories as well as the persistence of transgendering practices. Sears's powerful analytical framework allows her to connect the exclusion of gender nonconformers from the public sphere with similar exclusions of raced and disabled bodies, while her crystal-clear prose and compelling archival stories never let the reader get lost in the weeds of excessive theorization. A great book for undergraduates and specialists alike." — Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History
“[A]s the first in-depth examination of cross-dressing laws in an American city, the book is a valuable contribution to gender studies. It demonstrates convincingly that societal discomfort with difference in gender-expression was historically tied to societal discomfort with other sorts of difference. Both led to the marginalization of “problem bodies.”” — Lillian Faderman, Women's Review of Books
"Highly recommended, both for the conclusions it draws and for the further thinking and research it encourages." — Peter Boag, GLQ
"An impressive work of history, based in deep archival research, written in engaging prose, woven with smart analysis, and complete with wonderful images from primary sources... Never over-theoretical, the work is both approachable for undergraduates as well as useful for specialists. As such, it deserves to be read and assigned widely." — Emily Skidmore, Journal of American History
"A coherent and well-organized study tracing the processes of racialization and gender reconfiguration that led to production of new definitions of gender normality and abnormality that continue to haunt us today.”— Robert T. Cserni, Journal of Homosexuality
"Sears’s book is important because it historicizes cross-dressing and cross-gender behavior in ways in which it never has been before. Indeed, it is the sort of interdisciplinary study that is often attempted but rarely executed with such interpretive precision.... A stimulating read for undergraduates, specialists, and general readers." — Adam Q. Stauffer, Journal of American Studies
“A nuanced, sensitive and intelligent reading of a little-known law and its vast consequences for the culture of the city and the nation." — Ariel Beaujot, Social History
“A a valuable book about belonging, othering, bodies and dressed appearance, not just historically but with relevance today." — Shaun Cole, International Journal of Fashion Studies
“A thoughtful, sophisticated exploration of people who challenged, rejected, and played with gender in a wide range of circumstances to varied ends." — Jen Manion, Journal of the History of Sexuality'
"A well-researched, well-written, succinct little book that is amply illustrated with examples and historical context." — Michael Ferguson, Journal of Homosexuality