Federalism in Drag

Abstract

Abstract This chapter turns to a forgotten figure of eighteenth-century market capitalism who amassed wealth through a chance speculation. To do so, it draws upon drag’s insights on performance and campiness—its aesthetics of imitation and parody—to consider how this self-declared aristocrat, “Lord” Timothy Dexter, seeks inclusion within a Federalist New England as he negotiates his relation to early U.S. market capitalism soon after the Constitution. Dexter commissioned life-size wooden statues of various new republic figures, including himself, and decorated his front lawn with them, thus trying to insert himself into the emerging pantheon of the new nation’s figures of cultural significance.