Unsettled Women

SUMMARY

Amy Bock (alias Percy Redwood) created a media sensation when “The Case of the Woman Bridegroom” hit the newspapers throughout New Zealand in 1909. She was hailed as the “queerest and most interesting character that has ever been before the New Zealand public” and “pitiable in her freakish exploits.” Debates ensued as to whether her crimes were evidence of a mania, a disease, or simply due to a flawed, criminal character. This article focuses on media portrayals of women who did not conform to normative constructions of acceptable womanhood within the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century in New Zealand, as a means of tracing the mutable boundaries of intelligible genders. Newspaper debates and emergent discourses around the medicalisation of social de-viancy are drawn upon to demonstrate how normative constructions of gender were premised upon a defining matrix of mad/bad/woman.

Key Words:

• Amy Bock
• masquerade
• male-impersonator
• transvestite
• unintelligible genders
• medicalisation of social deviancy
• transgressive
• kleptomania
• sexology
• New Zealand