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ABSTRACT This essay examines public response to Madame Josephine Clofullia, the United States' first famed "bearded lady," who toured the country in the 1850s. It argues that, though most contemporaries found Clofullia's appearance unusual, few found it transgressive. With the exception of America's cultural and medical elite, few believed that Clofullia's beard compromised her claims to womanhood or confounded the categories of man and woman. What explains this response? Considering the public's reaction to Clofullia in light of scholarship on intersex bodies, I contend that Americans-especially nonelites-continued to give priority to behavior over sexual characteristics in determining the gender of persons with ambiguously formed bodies. The essay concludes by emphasizing the plasticity of gender norms, arguing that even the most "natural" biological markers of sex have an unpredictable, historically constructed relationship to gender.
Twenty-first-century conventional wisdom holds that women should not have beards-a point made unmistakably clear by Mara Altman's 2012 memoir, Bearded Lady. In one memorable scene, Altman discovers a few dark mustache hairs, which prompt an episode of panic. "I'd noticed these little hairs on my upper lip before," she writes, "but I'd ignored them-they were little blonde wispy nothings. But now they were getting a little darker and a bit longer. If I caught myself in the right light... I could see a vague resemblance to Tom Selleck." The sight is apparently unsettling. "How in the fucking shit ball mother fucking hell did I get a mustache?" she screams. "Only males had mustaches. I was not a male. Or was If' Terrified by what she finds in the mirror, Altman goes on an obsessive, fifteen-year hair-removing tear. She lasers her face, tweezes her nipples, threads her legs, and waxes her "happy trail." In the process, she endures "so much pain . . . that if I experienced it all at once, it would likely be lethal."1
Though Altman's memoir concludes with the author's acceptance, if not embrace, of her insurgent hair, her creeping fears of boundary crossing reflect anxiety about the coherence of gender: a sense that her body was constantly transgressing the borders of convincing womanhood. Her compulsive dépilation thus becomes an imposition of order on chaos, a shoring up of boundaries between man and woman-the kind of coerced...