Harry Crawford v History: Problem Bodies, Queertrans Cosmogonies, and Historiographical Ethics in Cases of Gender Transgression in Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century Australia

Abstract

The predominant cultural metanarrative of transgender existence is that we sprang fully formed into being sometime in the 1960s, like Athena stepping out of Zeus’s skull. And yet in every corner of human history we find people who might fit modern definitions of ‘transgender’. This thesis does not seek to retrofit contemporary understandings of gender onto the past. Rather, it sheds light on queertrans antecedence, through the case of Harry Crawford in 1920s Sydney. Crawford was ostensibly on trial for murder, but his court case was more concerned with the social crime of gender transgression. He had been assigned female at birth but lived, worked, and married as a man. Much of the subsequent literary and academic work on Crawford has reproduced the assumptions, stigmas, curiosity, and censure of the 1920s, putting him on trial again and again. This thesis examines Crawford’s life and afterlives, his disallowed embodiment, and the cultural myths that were read onto him, by reading resistantly into and against court transcripts, papers and depositions, contemporaneous newspaper records, and secondary scholarship. Crawford’s case articulated a number of cultural anxieties around aberrant bodies, marginalisation, and the maintenance of social hierarchies. It continues to provide insights into undercurrents of paradox, power, self-definition, and historical futurity. This study also investigates possibilities for culturally respectful and harm-reductive approaches for future historiography. By mapping out the histories of people pushed to the margins, we may gain greater understandings of the ways in which cultural identity is defined both from within (i.e. from interior subjectivities) and from without (i.e. against the Other). The work of filling in historical gaps and silences also allows marginalised people to reconnect with a sense of cultural self, and perhaps to more fully realise our place in the universe.