Performing across Borders: Minstrelsy, Female Impersonation, and the Making of a Working-Class Queer Culture in Windsor and Detroit, 1910–30

This article examines the inter-city female impersonation scene that developed between the cities of Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, from the 1910s through the 1930s, arguing that the Windsor-Detroit borderlands fostered a distinctive queer entertainment culture shaped by industrial labour, cross-border mobility, and changing racial demographics. Rather than treating female impersonation as simply synonymous with “drag,” this article situates these performances within the broader vaudeville stage, where they appeared alongside blackface minstrelsy and other popular entertainments. By tracing advertisements, newspaper coverage, and performance records from both sides of the Detroit River, it shows how female impersonation simultaneously reflected and reproduced tensions around gender, sexuality, race, and class, even as it also offered some performers a form of livelihood, visibility, and opportunity for expression. Not only did queer life in Windsor and Detroit flourish outside the major urban centres that have traditionally dominated queer historiography but also in ways that spoke to gendered and racial tensions of the region and time, producing a uniquely border-crossing queer world in the interwar period.