Sex Change City: Theorizing the History of Urban Trans/Formation in San Francisco

This paper explores the role of activist transgender scholarship in the recovery and dissemination of historical knowledge about the constitution, elaboration, and transformation of 20^th-century sex/gender systems. It begins with a case study—a brief description of cross-gender, -race, and –class performances in the elite, all male Bohemian Club around the turn of the last century. It argues that these performances, rather than being inconsequential leisure-time diversions of the socially prominent, were actually quite central to how elite men corporealized and somatacized for themselves newly available sexological categories of sex and gender, and new legal concepts of race; they played, as well, a functional role in how these men spatially administered  “deviant bodies” in the urban geography of the imperial city that they, as heteronormatively masculine public bodies, ruled and administered. The paper then cuts to how these interconnected modes of bodily and extracorporeal spatial regulation informed the historical preconditions for identity-based social movement that emerged in specific urban contexts by the mid-twentieth century, and which became the epistemological standpoint that enabled the recovery of their own antecedents.