Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates how female reenactors play by or break the rules in reenacting the past. As strongly male dominated environments, reenactment groups have strict gender policies which impact female participation. Gender cross-dressing will be examined as a strategy to traverse boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

Historical reenactment entails a do-it-yourself, bottom-up and performative approach towards the past. It is thus linked to an effort to invoke the past through immersion, embodiment, heightened emotion, empathy, and through an emphasis on individual experience. Subsequently reenactment is being discussed as a more “democratic enterprise” (Hall, 1994) of representing the past that provides the potential to challenge established meanings (Davis, 2012). Despite its bottom-up and supposedly democratic features reenactment does not necessary bring along a more tolerant, liberal, inclusive or critical attitude towards history or the past (Hochbruck 2012; Engelke 2017). One crucial case in point is the fact, that as a mostly male-dominated social practice reenactment offers only limited access for other genders. Due to this male overrepresentation in reenactment groups scholars have so far studied the phenomenon by focusing on motivations and experiences of male participants (Horrwitz, 1996; Daugbjerg 2016). If gender is addressed in analyzing reenactment the male perspective is foregrounded and questions about how battle reenactment stabilizes or challenges male identities have been tackled (Hunt, 2008). This contribution will focus on female reenactors and their experiences and strategies in reenacting the American Revolutionary War. Including a female point of view not only helps fostering the understanding of the phenomenon reenactment in a more general sense, it also sheds light on how gender is being performed in this social practice beyond the assumption that reenactment idealizes and revalorizes masculinity (Jureit 2020).