You Have Not What You Ought: Gender and Corporeal Intelligibility in Henry Fielding's the Female Husband (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] Eighteenth-century court records and periodicals provide glimpses of the bodies of women who cross-dressed and married other women, the so-called female husbands whose bodies challenged emergent categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. Mary East, a woman who identified herself as James How for most of her adult life, lived with another woman as husband and wife; Charlotte Charke presented herself as Mr. Brown for many years; and other cross-dressing women like the female soldier Hannah Snell and the pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read all took on traditionally masculine roles by wearing men's clothes. [2] The ambiguities that emerged as cross-dressing and other sex/gender practices were prosecuted as crimes help demonstrate the precariousness of what ultimately became a falsely naturalized binary sex/gender system. During the long eighteenth century, court records show how much effort went into consolidating non-standard sexualities, even before the idea of fixed sex and gender identities had been fully developed and institutionally perpetuated. The Newgate Calendar records the ways in which criminal prosecution led to the delegitimization of a spectrum of sex/gender roles; moreover, it serves as a site for the inscription of class- and gender-based ideologies of sexuality. Kristina Straub has suggested that this is especially clear in how the Newgate Calendars represent female and/or feminine sexuality. She notes that "female sexuality" returns "as the root of the problem" in the descriptions of criminals like Mary Blandy, who was hanged for murdering her father, and Mary/Charles Hamilton, who was whipped for cross-dressing and subsequently marrying fourteen women ("Feminine Sexuality," 228).