UC Irvine

In the summer of 1782, a young woman named Deborah Sampson disguised themselves as a man and joined the Continental Army. It was not until late October of 1783 that they were revealed to be female-bodied and were immediately discharged without pay. Sampson was not the only female soldier to have fought in the Revolutionary War, whether by dressing as soldiers, participating in combat, or both. Margaret Cochran Corbin and Anna Maria Lane also assumed the duties of soldiers and served between the early and late 1700s. While early American scholars characterize the period as a formative time for navigating gender roles, discussions of women who transgress them tend to be lost in broader narratives. The woman warrior is often described as an act of pretense that does not disrupt male-female categories, nor does it directly influence societal developments. A close textual analysis of Sampson, Corbin, and Lane, with a method attentive to queer and trans theory, takes on a perspective that challenges dichotomous ideas of gender, focusing on its historical ambiguity. Using published works, colonial periodicals, letters, and petitions by contemporary writers and by the three warriors themselves, I argue that the early American category, language, actions, and written representations of the female soldier occupied a realm of ambiguity. The category of the woman warrior was not limited to women and femininity but was an indeterminate space pushing femininity beyond what was said to be known. The complexity of Sampson’s experience became incorporated into the theater stage as a symbol of patriotism and a symbol of destabilizing gendered roles for both men and women. In turn, contemporary writers used the death of Sampson to link the female soldier to the founding of the United States as well as to advance national agendas. This study of the woman warrior is not simply an examination of contemporaries’ representations but an unpacking and destabilizing of the “who” behind the category in all its clarity and ambiguity.