ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the production of public space in nineteenth-century San Francisco. She juxtaposes the criminalization of cross-dressing in the streets with the spectacularization of gender-crossing on stage in commercial freak shows. The author then points out that San Francisco’s 1863 anti-cross-dressing ordinance was just one of many in a wave of similar statues that swept the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. She also argues that these laws were part of a broader regulatory apparatus that targeted gender-variant, Chinese, and disabled people for having “problem bodies” that did not comply with social norms based on whiteness, able-bodiedness, and binary gender. Such bodies were spatially segregated through ghettoization, institutionalization, and incarceration, which resulted in a public sphere in which citizens unmarked by those practices of segregation could consider themselves both normal and free. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors did not initially criminalize cross-dressing as a distinct offense, but as one manifestation of the broader offense of indecency.
