THE FILM

In Reenactress, filmmaker J.R. Hardman sets out to join the wacky world of American Civil War reenactment and finds the door only half open: welcome to wear a hoop skirt, discouraged from picking up a rifle. After finding a Federal artillery unit and a Confederate infantry unit willing to enlist her, she suits up and learns the drill, embedding herself in this world for over a decade. What she doesn't expect is to find a version of herself in the gender-bending soldiers who fought for the Confederacy and the Union disguised as men. As a gender-nonconforming woman, she finds in their history a mirror, both a justification for her participation and a new way to explore who she is.

However, her participation draws backlash. Online critics accuse her of "prostituting history to have fun." To answer them, she travels the country meeting historians, archivists, and even a descendant of one of these soldiers. Their long-buried stories look less like footnotes and more like her own reflection, proof she isn't inventing a place in this history, she's recovering one.

But the country keeps rebuilding the frame around that mirror. The 2015 shooting at Emanuel AME Church sets off a reckoning with Confederate monuments. The end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the 2016 Combat Exclusion Policy repeal give way to the forced separation of transgender service members in 2025 and the rollback of DEI programs. Stories that widen the Lost Cause narrative to include gender and racial diversity are branded "divisive" and stripped from public institutions.

Watching trusted institutions leave this history behind, Hardman builds her own clubhouse: a new identity as a reenactment influencer known as "The Reenactress," organizing living history programs to hold up the mirror on her own terms.

Reenactress argues that the question the 19th century never resolved, "Who is allowed to serve and live openly as an American?" is still being answered today.

THE CONTEXT

Women (and likely a few transgender men) really did serve in the Civil War. It was estimated by Civil War nurse Mary Livermore that at least 400 to 1,000 soldiers, both Confederate and Federal, were women disguised as men, a number this vague because their disguises were that good.

Historians have documented over 250 individual cases of women who lived and served as men, and if you add those who served openly as women in other military roles (vivandières, spies, scouts, battlefield nurses, and camp followers) the number expands significantly.

Reenactress is our story about the queer and feminist act of taking up space in a history that never left us a chapter. History is meant to be revised and reinterpreted, and we believe telling these stories could help ensure female, transgender, and racially diverse service members today are honored for their accomplishments, not diminished or forced out.