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Luzernow - Chansonetten-Darsteller

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Luzernow - Chansonetten-Darsteller
Title:
Luzernow - Chansonetten-Darsteller
Collection:
Postcards of female and male impersonators and cross-dressing in Europe and the United States, 1900-1931, 1955
Date:
ca. 1905
Country:
Germany
ID Number:
RMM07636_B01_010_01
Card Number:
7636_10
Language:
German
Work Type:
Collotype
Subject:
Female impersonators
Measurement:
14 x 9 (centimeters)
Publisher:
Bebr. Ziebner, Kotzschenbroba-Dresden
Cite As:
Postcards of German female impersonators, #7636. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Repository:
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
Archival Collection:
Postcards of German female impersonators
Box:
1
Rights:
This image is believed to be in the public domain in the United States by virtue of publication date, and is presented by Cornell University Library under the Guidelines for Using Text, Images, Audio, and Video from Cornell University Library Collections, http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/CULCopyright. This collection was digitized by Cornell University Library in 2019 from materials held in the Rare and Manuscript Collections, with funding from a Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences Grant to Professor Durba Ghosh and Brenda Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection. For more information about this image, please contact the Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

About the collection

Approximately 380 postcards portraying cross-dressing and female and male impersonators in France, Sweden, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Romania. Postcards include photographic and photomechanical prints, some hand-colored. All are printed between circa 1900 and 1930 and depict performers on amateur, café-concert, music-hall, and legitimate stages at the high-point of cross-dressing as a form of entertainment. Many depict gallant visual narratives of women being wooed by other women dressed as men. Additional postcards include humorous images, popular genre narratives, promotional portraits of theatrical and music-hall male and female impersonators, as well as World War I POW camp theatrical productions. Two postcards are credited to female photographers, Ilse Magenmiller (German) and Jessie Westbrook (American). Sets of postcards depict narrative sequences, including Joan of Arc, Les Cerises, Chasé-croisé, Idylle à Trianon, and Une Amourette Louis XV. One such sequence, Pierrot et Columbine (circa 1900), portrays a sexual ending with Columbine represented nude (in a pink body suit). Male and female impersonators featured include Robert Bertin, Jeanne Bloch, Leopoldo Fregoli, Monte Verdi, Louis Vernassier, Sarah Bernhardt, Gaby Deslys, John Graffton, Betti Kuhn, Hetty King, Zena Dare, Vesta Tilley, Winifred Ward, and Huntley Wright, among others.