"A small and skillful hand" - Female Masculinity and Gender Dynamics in John Rollin Ridge's Joaquin Murieta

Abstract

Released in the late 19th century as a dime novel, John Rollin Ridge's Joaquin Murieta is a highly unstable text that simultaneously undermines and upholds societal views of identity categories, including gender. While the text primarily focuses on the simultaneously wildly criminal and honorable chivalrous masculinity of the titular character's bandit group, women appear throughout the margins of the texts in ways that complicate any fixed notion of gendered meanings. By applying a queer theoretical approach, focusing on notions off em ale masculinity, the ways in which the women of Joaquin Murieta destabilize cisnormative and patriarchal notions of how women perform gender can, at least, begin to be rendered intelligible.