“On Lies, Secrets, and Silence”*: The Politics of Evidence and Interpretive Strategies

Abstract

Debates about identifying and naming lesbians in history and how to characterize relationships between women in earlier historical contexts have been passionately contested since publication of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's (1975) essay “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” Spurred by Adrienne Rich's influential concept of a lesbian continuum and more recent gender-crossings in Queer and Trans-theory, charting the ambiguous spaces of desire is a highly charged political act. Together, these debates pose significant challenges for feminist historians researching women whose lives disrupted any neat correspondence between sex, gender, and sexuality. This article traverses these issues in relation to Amy Bock, infamous as a criminal confidence artist and cross-dresser at the turn of the twentieth century and claimed in recent times as lesbian. Amy herself pleaded an inherited mental instability; the authorities at the time agreed she was a habitual criminal. Mad, bad, or lesbian? Or was she simply unconventional in her gender and sexuality? It is argued that how we approach these questions potentially tells us more about the desires of the researcher than those of our subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• lesbian
• cross-dressing
• masquerade
• male-impersonator
• transvestite
• confidence artist
• Amy Bock
• New Zealand
• sexology
• sexual identity
• heterosexual imperative

Notes

*Sincere thanks are given to Adrienne Rich for permission to use the title of her 1980 collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (London: Virago).

1. For further biographical details of Amy Bock, see Farrell (1993) and Coleman (2005a, 2005b).

2. In Out Front: Lesbian Political Activity in Aotearoa 1962–1985, Julie Glamuzina (1993) states that Amy Bock lived with a woman for many years later in her life but does not provide any sources for this claim.

3. Clark also claims that Bock was imprisoned in a male prison “for dressing as a man in order to marry a woman” (Clark, 2002). This is incorrect. Following her impersonation of a man in 1909, Bock was convicted on three separate charges including making a false declaration under the Marriage Act 1908. She was sentenced to two years on each charge, to be served concurrently in the Public Prison at Dunedin. She was imprisoned in the female wing of Dunedin Prison, and, in December 1910 was transferred to the female section of the New Plymouth Prison.

4. The phrase “lesbian-like” was coined by Judith Bennett as a means of broadening and enhancing the ways in which we might approach a history of lesbianisms (see Bennett, 2000). It has since been used by Martha Vicinus (1994) and Alison Oram (1997).