Arresting Dress


Book Description

In 1863, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century’s end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial “slumming tours.” It shows that the law did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities.




Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past


Book Description

Americans have long cherished romantic images of the frontier and its colorful cast of characters, where the cowboys are always rugged and the ladies always fragile. But in this book, Peter Boag opens an extraordinary window onto the real Old West. Delving into countless primary sources and surveying sexological and literary sources, Boag paints a vivid picture of a West where cross-dressing—for both men and women—was pervasive, and where easterners as well as Mexicans and even Indians could redefine their gender and sexual identities. Boag asks, why has this history been forgotten and erased? Citing a cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century—when the frontier ended, the United States entered the modern era, and homosexuality was created as a category—Boag shows how the American people, and thus the American nation, were bequeathed an unambiguous heterosexual identity.




Arrest-Proof Yourself


Book Description

"Arrest-Proof Yourself will teach you everything you need to know about dirty cops, racial profiling, probable cause, search and seizure laws, your right to remain silent, and much more. This how-not-to guide will keep you safe and sound all year long." --Zink magazine What do you say if a cop pulls you over and asks to search your car? What if he gets up in your face and uses a racial slur? What if there's a roach in the ashtray? And what if your hot-headed teenage son is at the wheel? If you read this book, you'll know exactly what to do and say. More people than ever are getting arrested—usually for petty offenses against laws that rarely used to be enforced. And because arrest information is so easily available via the Internet, just one little arrest can disqualify you from jobs, financing, and education. This eye-opening book tells you everything you need to know about how cops operate, the little things that can get you in trouble, and how to stay free from the hungry jaws of the criminal justice system. It is now updated with new and important information on the right of the police to search your car; on guns, knives, and self-defense; and on changes in surveillance methods. Dale C. Carson was an FBI field agent, a SWAT sniper, an instructor at the FBI academy, and a Miami police officer who set Florida records for felony arrests. He is currently a criminal defense attorney. Wes Denham is the author of Arrested.




Confessions of a Little Black Gown


Book Description

Lord Larken, posing as a duke's cousin, is searching for the notorious Captain Dashwell. His deception runs into trouble, however, when the duke's tempting sister-in-law starts to chip away at his reverent disguise and his icy, forgotten heart.







Dressed


Book Description

Perfect for readers of Women in Clothes, this beautifully designed philosophical guide to fashion explores art, literature, and film to uncover the hidden meaning of a well-chosen wardrobe. We all get dressed. But how often do we pause to think about what our clothes say? When we dress ourselves, we are presenting to the world an essence of who we are, who we want to be. Dressed ranges freely from suits to suitcases, from Marx's coat to Madame X's gown. Through art and literature, film and philosophy, philosopher Shahidha Bari unveils the surprising personal implications of what we choose to wear. The impeccable cut of Cary Grant's suit projects masculine confidence, just as Madonna's oversized denim jacket and her armful of orange bangles loudly announces big ambition. How others dress tells us something fundamental about them -- we can better understand how people live and what they think through their garments. Clothes tell our stories. Dressed is the thinking person's fashion book. In baring the hidden power of clothes in our culture and our daily lives, Bari reveals how our outfits not only cover our bodies but also reflect our minds.




Slaves to Fashion


Book Description

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora. Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. “Luxury slaves” tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon known for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000 and Sean Combs, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic subject, she considers the black dandy in relation to nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on black masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in contemporary visual art.




Funeral in a Feminine Dress


Book Description

A father's loss of "true love" created a twisted, corrupted courtship that produced 34-years of abuse, pain, and depravity within a family. A son's discovery of "true love" saved his life, and inspired an amazingly loving, happy, family that achieved virtue. These two stories merge into a journey most call shocking, inspirational, and unforgettable. A mother's hideous secret, a son's complicity in her abuse, a grisly act of revenge... MJ's father was one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet-unless you were the mother of his three sons. MJ's mother was a bold feminist and hopeless romantic whose inclination to love was her demise. Verma lived a hellish life-what the author calls an "un-romance"-fueled by liquor, lies, desperation, and hatred. Why didn't his mother fight back? MJ's lurid and intense memoir will cheer yet incense you. MJ was a boy whose parents loved him but, overcome by their demons, caused him misery. Instead of voicing anger, MJ thanks Dad and Mom for their genetic gifts and life lessons. He spotlights his mother as his hero, detailing how her abuse increased as she was bloodied defending her grandson from a devilish mother. He praises the nuns at his school for their whacks to the head and for never giving up on him. Readers will marvel at how MJ escaped this toxic swamp-and his own death wish behaviors-and nine years after their first date, married his high school sweetheart. Today, together, they celebrate their 36-year marriage, much-to-much like a 1950's family sitcom to be true - but it is. MJ constructed a high-powered business career where family was always his top priority. A choice that cost him promotions and money but elevated him to the kind of man his mother wanted him to be. His mother's suffering convinces him God's plan is not working. Praising his Catholic education, MJ agrees all religion is good that teaches people to be good, yet explains how God is a potentially dangerous myth. Interestingly, clergy and his religious friends say his story is a tool to love God more. This memoir recounts the past but is all about our tomorrow's; full of life lessons for men, women and families. Posed are complex, critical questions of good versus evil, relationships and sex, work versus family, God and religion versus personal responsibility.




The Arrest Handbook


Book Description




The Death of the Grown-Up


Book Description

"WHERE HAVE ALL THE GROWN-UPS GONE?" That is the provocative question Washington Times syndicated columnist Diana West asks as she looks at America today. Sadly, here's what she finds: It's difficult to tell the grown-ups from the children in a landscape littered with Baby Britneys, Moms Who Mosh, and Dads too "young" to call themselves "mister." Surveying this sorry scene, West makes a much larger statement about our place in the world: "No wonder we can't stop Islamic terrorism. We haven't put away our toys " As far as West is concerned, grown-ups are extinct. The disease that killed them emerged in the fifties, was incubated in the sixties, and became an epidemic in the seventies, leaving behind a nation of eternal adolescents who can't say "no," a politically correct population that doesn't know right from wrong. The result of such indecisiveness is, ultimately, the end of Western civilization as we know it. This is because the inability to take on the grown-up role of gatekeeper influences more than whether a sixteen-year-old should attend a Marilyn Manson concert. It also fosters the dithering cultural relativism that arose from the "culture wars" in the eighties and which now undermines our efforts in the "real" culture war of the 21st century--the war on terror. With insightful wit, Diana West takes readers on an odyssey through culture and politics, from the rise of rock 'n' roll to the rise of multiculturalism, from the loss of identity to the discovery of "diversity," from the emasculation of the heroic ideal to the "PC"-ing of "Mary Poppins," all the while building a compelling case against the childishness that is subverting the struggle against jihadist Islam in a mixed-up, post-9/11 world. With a new foreword for the paperback edition, "The Death of the Grown-up," is a bracing read from one of the most original voices on the American cultural scene.