Fifteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
Friday, June 10, 2011

Report by Chad Heap

I had the pleasure of commenting on the session, “Race, Sexuality, Gender and the Body in Early-Twentieth-Century American Culture.” Matthew Guterl (Indiana University, Bloomington) chaired the session. Kathleen B. Casey (University of Rochester) presented a paper, entitled, “‘She Is What She Ain’t’: Lillyn Brown and the Meaning of Black Male Impersonation”; and Cookie Woolner (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) delivered a paper on “Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey’s ‘Prove It on Me Blues’ and the Dialectics of Queer Popular Culture.” The session’s third scheduled panelist, Fiona I. B. Ngô (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), withdrew from the conference in advance and did not present her paper, “Queer Modernities.”

Building on the rich body of scholarship on African American blues women that emerged during the 1980s and early 1990s, the papers delivered by Casey and Woolner set out to complicate our understanding both of black women entertainers and of the political and cultural impact of their recordings and live performances. Since earlier scholars had already established that blues women played a pivotal role in the development and cultural dissemination of black working-class feminism and lesbian cultural politics, Casey and Woolner were able to focus, instead, on the ways in which these entertainers manipulated shifting racial, sexual and gender ideologies, as well as the extent to which these exemplars of black working-class feminism were enabled—or even shaped—by a white-male-controlled culture industry.

Focusing on the long-overlooked male impersonator Lillyn Brown, Casey’s paper explored what she called “Americans’ love/hate relationship with racial and gender ambiguity.” She showed how Brown’s shifting repertoire of performances—from “Indian Princess” to African American blues woman and singing black male dandy—exploited her mixed racial heritage (Iroquois and African American) to call into question both the fixity of race and the inevitability of gender. According to Casey, Brown’s complex racial and gender performances “provide historians with a missing link between the gender impersonators…who attracted slumming tourists to cabarets, drag balls and speakeasies, the cross-dressers and ethnic impersonators of the vaudeville stage, and the innovative and unapologetically sensual black ‘mothers of the blues.’”

While Casey’s paper expanded the pantheon of 1920s black women performers to include a forgotten male impersonator, Woolner’s paper challenged us to reexamine the now-canonical figure of Ma Rainey and to question the transgressiveness of her equally canonical recording, “Prove It on Me Blues.” In particular, Woolner reminded us that Rainey was a seasoned vaudeville entertainer, who likely performed the lyrics of her songs, much as she performed comedic skits. “Prove It on Me Blues” may well have constituted “a proud declaration of lesbianism,” Woolner argued, but the lesbianism in question may not have been Rainey’s own but that of a character she created for the purposes of the song. Moreover, Woolner cautioned us to think more carefully about dialectical production and dissemination of Rainey’s song, asking what it might mean that “one of the first examples of what we might call a queer popular cultural production made by an African American woman…could not be disseminated to the masses without the white male controlled culture industry putting its stamp of disapproval on the product itself,” in the form of an advertisement that appeared to depict a white policeman attempting to break up the interactions of a mannishly attired woman and her female companions on the street.