Staff profile

Dr Lucy Chesser

Honorary Research Associate

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Historical and European Studies

Melbourne (Bundoora)

 

Area of study

History

Brief Profile

Research interests include Nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian history; the history of gender and sexuality and their various intersections with notions of identity, race, law, medicine and popular culture; cross-dressing and gender inversion. Lucy's novel for young adults, Cut Loose, was published by Ginninderra Press (Adelaide) in 2008.

Recent Publications

Book

  • Parting with my sex: Cross-dressing, inversion and sexuality in Australian cultural life, Sydney University Press, 2008.

Peer-reviewed

  • “'Woman in a Suit of Male’: Sexuality, race and the woman worker in male 'disguise”, 1890-1920, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 56, 2008 , pp. 175 – 194.
  • “More playful than anxious: cross-dressing, sex-impersonation and the colonial stage”, Australasian Drama Studies, no 52, 2008, pp. 148-164.
  • ‘When two loving hearts beat as one’: Same-sex marriage, subjectivity and self-representation in the Australian case of Marion-Bill-Edwards, 1906–1916, Women’s History Review, vol. 17, no. 5, 2008, pp. 719–740
  • ‘A woman who married three wives’: Management of disruptive knowledge in the 1879 Australian case of Edward De Lacy Evans,’ Journal of Women’s History, vol. 9 no. 4, January 1998, pp. 53-77.
  • "Australasian Lesbian Movement, ‘Claudia’s Group’ and Lynx: ‘Non-political lesbian organisation in Melbourne, 1969-1980”, Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, vol. 22, no. 1, 1996, pp. 69-91.

Book chapter

  • ‘What they were doing with their clothes off I don’t know’: Homophobia, lesbian history and responses to ‘lesbian-like’ relationships, 1860s-1890s, in Shirleene Robinson, ed, Homophobia: An Australian History, Federation Press, 2008

Non-refereed article

  • “Cross-dressing, sexual (mis) representation and homosexual desire in Australia, 1863-1893,” in David L Phillips and Graham Willett (eds), Australia’s Homosexual Histories: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, Australian Centre for Gay and Lesbian Research & the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Sydney, 2000, pp. 1-26.