In Melodrama and Modernity, Ben Singer persuasively argues that modernity is marked by dramatic changes to the definition and understanding of gender, which he maps out in extraordinary detail in terms of the serial-queen films that were a staple of early melodrama. My paper returns to and builds on these insights by exploring the implications of the serial-queen’s gender transgressions from a queer perspective, reading the serial-queen’s performance of gender through the lens of lesbian historiography. Lesbian historiography, according to Martha Vicinus, is not just concerned with the retrieval of lesbian lives, but also focuses on butch and femme roles, and the question of when the modern lesbian identity arose and under what circumstances. The dramatic change in gender roles—played out on-screen in early film serials—was the performative embodiment, I suggest, of newly “invented” sexualities. I read the gender-transgressive actions of the serial-queens, such as entering male spaces and usurping male-defined activities, even donning men’s clothes, as indicative of the emergence of new sexual subjects in modernity. Indeed, the explicit connections between gender subversion and sexual desire, particularly of women appropriating “masculine” affect or prerogative, emerged in the public discourse of American modernity as cinema was coming into being.

I contend that the active female body of serial melodrama evokes sexual instabilities because her transgression of gender categories entails a questioning of the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces and enforces rigid binary divisions into disjunctive gender behaviors, meanings and identities. I situate this argument in a reading Sidney Drew’s A Florida Enchantment (1914) in terms of the codes popularized by the serial-queen films of the same period. This film insinuates the codes already available concerning gender transgression and pushes them to their logical conclusion—butch/femme queer desire. By placing A Florida Enchantment on a continuum with the serial-queen adventure, Lillian’s change is measured less in terms of appearance then in action; “Lawrence’s” emergence is indexed in iconography borrowed from serial-queen melodramas, like trains, boats, and even exotic animals. Notably, its transgender “fantasy” is articulated through binaries of public/private, active/passive, movement/stasis, exotic/domestic space. What Lillian/Lawrence brings to light is that which is apparent in the figure of the serial-queen generally. As criticism notes: “the active female body disturbs cultural definitions of gender and collapses the inside/outside boundary that constitutes the social division into female and male.” However, this collapsing of boundaries is made possible by other figurations, specifically of race. In this way, the film renders explicit the racialized sexuality figured in the serial-queen, with her occasional jungle animals and other inferential racial signs.