is a feminist + queer interest in fashion possible?
I guess that technically I’ve been working on this post for a while, partially as an addendum to that post I wrote nine months ago and partially in response to a seriously overwhelming number of emails, comments, Formspring questions, and Facebook messages on the topic, ranging from polite or genuinely curious to snarky or straight-up enraged. And all of them boil down to one main question — “But wait, how are you a smart educated woman, a feminist, queer, and interested in fashion? How the hell is this possible? Is something wrong with you?” I was flattered to recently be included in Threadbared’s list of links addressing some of these topics, and that’s a great place to start for some of the other great writing (academic and bloggerly and in-between) on the topic, but there’s probably a bit more for me to say on my personal experience at the least.
It is an unfortunate and oft-discussed fact that feminism is often seen on a root level as being in conflict with queer issues — we’ll take this opportunity to dig out one very old and at this point excruciatingly tiresome (though still frustratingly relevant) question. Simone de Beauvoir admitted that she found it hackneyed and boring when she first posed it in the opening paragraphs of The Second Sex; Judith Butler admitted that it was worn out and problematic in Gender Trouble; every college sophomore at a liberal arts institution in this country has cranked out a caffeine-fueled mediocre eight-to-ten page paper on it. And yet everyone has still struggled to answer, precisely,that extremely puzzling and, at the core, very queer question: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a woman? What does that even mean?
Feminist and queer discourses have traditionally always overlapped, but also mutually excluded and abused each other to no end — Being Queer and Being Feminist are, in a very obvious way, inherently at odds with each other because of this whole “What is a woman anyway?” question. (For the time being, let’s keep the sticks away from the dead horses of the “What is feminism?” and “What is queer?” questions too.) The fact remains that it is commonly understood that the identity politics necessary to understand a universal group as “women” (and to thereby assert the rights of that group) caters to and reinforces the very binary system which it in theory opposes. On the basic academic level, Kristeva’s feminism is often read as a dismissal or even a condemnation of homosexuality while meanwhile Wittig decides that lesbians are, in fact, not actually women. Irigaray kinda thinks that all penetrative sex is rape while our favourite activists these days are positive about ALL kinds of sex. On the mainstream everyday level, pop culture feminism from the Spice Girls variety to the Sarah Palin variety pays no heed whatever to the lesbos; pop culture depictions of queerness often contain antifeminist or misogynistic undertones or, more commonly, fail to address feminine nonheterosexuality (in the absence of a male gaze) at all. We basically can’t win here. We Know These Things By Now. We Have Had This Conversation.
Fashion’s a little easier for most of us to deal with and requires, for most folks, less of a basic theory rehashing, since we all have pretty clear opinions on it. We can answer what that’s about in a much more concise fashion. It’s an epic shitshow of misogyny, female oppression, consumerism, body image distortion, racism, exclusionary and corrupt politics, and, oh, I don’t know, maybe even the root of all evil. It’s the base of any number of humorous epithets and one-liners about the rich and shallow; it’s a central plot focus of Cathy, probably the worst comic in the history of the universe. We get it. Fa$hun is really messed up, you guys.
And yet I still identify vehemently as both feminist and queer. And I love fashion. How is this possible?
Before we get into privilege tennis here or before I even start anything else, let’s throw out the usual disclaimers— I’m white, I’m able-bodied, I’m a reasonably symmetrical ectomorph which is all unfairly normative as well, despite my current state of more-or-less destitution I’m of middle-class background, I have health insurance, I am college-educated, I live in a major metropolitan area in an extremely wealthy and powerful country, and despite being queer I don’t particularly look like a homo in a way that gets me raped with baseball bats or spat at on the train. Relatively speaking, on a daily, personal, and direct level, I do not have to deal with an exceptionally large amount of alterity-related bullshit.
I do however have long hair, painted nails, shaved legs which are usually about 90% exposed because I can’t for the life of me manage to wear a skirt or shorts of decent length and also probably exaggerated by five inch heels, and despite all the blog raging here and propensity for snark, in general I am reserved, overly polite, unnecessarily apologetic, and prone to offering myself up as a social martyr. I have terrible hand-eye coordination and I spend an inordinate amount of time barefoot in the kitchen baking muffins. I wear red lipstick and while I was really into dinosaurs as a kid, I was also usually really into whatever ridiculous sparkly things with matching hats my mother crammed my chubby toddler body into for holidays. In short, for all practical purposes, enough about me is coded feminine to the point where it drastically overrides the things which are not (very tall, moderately low voice, higher than average testosterone/cortisol levels, complete and utter lack of noticeable breasts when clothed, no pink, no florals). In short, I AM REALLY FUCKING GIRLY.
What this means is that on a daily basis — and seriously, I am not exaggerating here, I literally cannot walk down the street without being reminded of the fact that I am a woman, which we have all heard me rant about to NO end — I am exposed to and made aware of these issues, prejudices, opinions, and problems, and since I have to deal with them seriously every goddamned day of my life, these are unsurprisingly the things which get me riled up most often. In some ways, my concept of woman-hood is often defined by the oppositions to it that I encounter and the issues I face as a result of being born with ovaries, and therefore also closely linked to my concept of feminism, despite the infinite issues and complications with that term. I identify strongly as feminist because I feel it is still absolutely necessary, even imperative, in a world where bodies and actions that are coded “feminine” (and the people attached to them) are still required to struggle against harassment, abuse, stereotypes, prejudice, and difficulties as a result.
Please note that I write coded feminine and not female — we, as a society, and even within the queer AND feminist communities, do still have serious issues with shit that we think is too girly. (To say nothing of the issues faced by trans women, whose input I would more than welcome on this issue.) I’m not just talking about catcalls and the wage gap or underdeveloped female characters in film here, I’m talking about the blank stares or raised eyebrows I encounter when I talk about being interested in “feminine” things, like, you know, fashion, or cookies, or small fuzzy animals, or the Formspring questions informing me that I don’t “look” gay or the weird paranoia I have where I’m like “Do I need to take some of this makeup off or put on flats before showing up at this queermo party so that people don’t look at me funny or is that all just in my head,” I am talking about men who are “effeminate” being perceived as lesser and weaker and I am talking about infinite examples of things and objects and animals and ideas which are “feminine” in some way being seen as any number of negative adjectives from dirty to frivolous to weak. Is this to say that there aren’t greater issues out there, or that there aren’t more nuanced perceptions of feminist, queer, and gender issues, or that I don’t pay attention to any other social issues? Of course not — it’s an explanation of why one particular set of issues is strikingly personally and directly relevant to me on a very base level. I am probably going to care about “feminist” issues until my “femininity” is not something which is held against me.
So what the hell does this have to do with fashion, or why I like it, or why I don’t think that being feminist and queer and interested in fashion are mutually exclusive? The most basic example I like to give people is one that’s been extremely popular on my usual blog circuit in the past year and is admittedly overly simplistic — but therefore way easier to understand than a few hundred pages of folks answering that frustrating question I mentioned earlier. And that is as simple as signs on bathroom doors.
The male stick figure is a head, two arms, and two legs; the female stick figure is a the same, in a dress. Sure, sometimes there’s some variation — a bow tie on the male stick figure, or some cutesy and mildly disturbing illustrations of animals, or some other telling and probably somewhat offensive representations of gendered accessories (a tube of lipstick vs a briefcase, for instance.) We can talk all we want here about whether or not this means that the male or female is the “default” or “marked” or “othered” sex, but I really don’t feel like hauling that out to pieces right here — we’re talking on a very base and obvious level which we teach toddlers when we hand them crayons and have them draw stick figures, something which we witness on a daily basis every time we gotta do our business in a public place, which is this: when you take a human form and put a dress on it, and bam! it’s a woman! it must be a woman!
With that most basic and reductive of examples in mind — you really still think that clothing is totally irrelevant to feminism and queer issues? Feminism is really above fashion? Queer issues should never care about style because it’s shallow? Clothes and that “what is a woman” question aren’t related? Understanding gender construction can be done without thinking about clothes? Clothes and your perception of me as a dumb stupid bitch who must be straight and probably kind of flaky and either manipulative or stupid, because I’m wearing four-inch-heels and doing my makeup with a Chanel compact, are totally unrelated? Really? Really?
The thing is, when people ask me how I can possibly ever think that fashion is related to women’s and/or queer issues, I can’t begin to get my head around why they would ever even ask that. Isn’t it obvious? It’s not that men aren’t engaged in sartorial performativity as much as that infinite attention is called to the compulsory nature of it for women — fashion is about women and women are about fashion. Fashion is stupid because it’s for girls, girls are stupid because all they care about is clothes and makeup. And while we all feel free to sneer disdainfully at women and their mysterious and vapid interest in clothes, if a woman isn’t dressing like a woman in the way we expect, or isn’t showing that interest in the way we expect — SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE. PLEASE HELP. WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND. (“But you would look so pretty in a dress! You look so much nicer with natural, softer, more feminine makeup. You didn’t paint your nails today is something wrong, can’t you just make yourself look nice for me? You have great legs and should wear heels more often. I like you best with long hair. You would look gorgeous with some lipstick. You look so much more attractive when you’re wearing softer colours. You have a great body why don’t you show it off more? Is your partner a boy or a girl? Wait did she used to be a boy? Why are you dressed like that? Why are you doing that? If you dressed like that all the time more boys would pay attention to you! I just don’t understand why you don’t shave your legs.” AD NAUSEAM.)
The ever-awesome ladies at Threadbared summed it up pretty damn well here:
“Is fashion feminist?” This is one of the most frequently asked questions I hear when someone finds out that I write about fashion. And I have to admit that I find the question tedious – not because it’s not important but because it’s the wrong question. It may be why we’ve never directly answered this question – though all our posts are informed by a critical feminist perspective. A better question to ask is: How is fashion an instrument of gender oppression and how is it a means to feminist liberation?
Nobody here is saying that fashion IS feminist, or that fashion IS queer-positive, or that fashion IS somehow inherently good. The only point, really, is that they are very, very intricately linked — largely precisely by the very problems which folks tend to want to say make them irreconcilable — and that, for the billionth time, the eternal dismissal of it as shallow and worthless is, besides being damn frustrating, a reductive, incorrect, and I would argue probably misogynistic attitude.
The next question, I suppose, is that how is it that I can get off posting editorials and runway photos, writing basic designer profiles for other publications, talking about personal style with a community of other fashion bloggers who also enjoy such things, and so on and so forth when I’m aware of the massive extent to which these things are problematic?
While I can understand the motivations for asking this question, I find it possibly even more tiresome than earlier ones, and genuinely believe that its basis usually comes from certain dismissive, misogynistic assumptions about fashion and not from a well-thought-out critical concern about fashion, feminism, and queer issues. Can we not also derive pleasure from things which are, at times (or even often), either problematic themselves or emblematic of problems more deeply entrenched in our society? Why is it so problematic to also have a casual and pleasurable interest about something which we also approach somewhat more critically? Is this concept so alien elsewhere in our lives? Do you watch and enjoy sports which also promote a mob mentality, unrealistic body images and achievements, and an exaggerated ideal of masculinity? Did you still enjoy the Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 in spite of the fact that fetishizing zines and an aesthetic which was never meant to be fetishized is problematic? Do you have friends who grate on your nerves or who are occasionally rude or racist or cruel but whom you still love as friends? There is nothing mutually exclusive about enjoyment and criticism, and being aware of problems should not by any means preclude or invalidate a simultaneous appreciation.
Perhaps I’m indulging in a bit of my usual anti-intellectualism and insistence on the casual/lowbrow here but I find it, uh, more than a little bit preposterous to suggest that the fact that we can think critically about fashion means that we ought to do that ALL of the time, or that appreciation of some aspects of fashion somehow indicates that our criticism and analysis must be posturing, or that the fact that some aspects of fashion conflict with other issues I am passionate about somehow invalidates either of those. Enjoyment can certainly lead into a more critical, open-minded conversation about related issues, or even be read as empowering or a reclamation precisely because of the perceived oppression — and I feel like plenty of the blog comment exchanges on many of my posts illustrate this on a very basic, casual, conversational level. Is it not more effective to think about and dissect societal issues when we are also interested in the topics, and is it not more effective to strive for change within channels which reflect our personal interests or even our career expertise? I would maybe even go so far as to argue that a feminist interest in fashion could be reclaimed in the same way that other stereotypically “feminine” tasks (baking, knitting) have been reclaimed as not only feminist but inherently somewhat subversive, or that an interest in fashion could be queered within the radical queer community and thereby function as a way to access and understand further attitudes towards gender.
Because I do love fashion, and I do think it’s fun, and I don’t find it entirely anti-feminist, and I don’t find it entirely anti-queer. I like fashion for all the reasons everyone likes fashion: I love texture and colour and form. I love the social connectivity of it, both the positive (how many friends have I made based initially on being attracted to each others’ style?) and the problematic (how many people have I dismissed, cruelly, because of their clothes? why do we feel uncomfortable when dressed inappropriately in a social situation? what are the ways that race and class boundaries are also defined, illustrated, and enforced through style?) I love playing dress-up and I love costume (anyone who has seen me gleefully putting on lipstick and teasing my hair and parading around in 18 different outfits before leaving the house can attest to this) and I love the effects that presenting myself in certain ways has on my personality or mood that day. (High waisted skirt and glasses and noisy heels? BUSINESS. DON’T MESS.) Beyond that, I am a compulsive mental pack-rat of cultural and social references, and I completely get off on compulsively mentally pack-ratting the names and images of clothes produced by the designers who recodify, concretize, and commercialize those references into garments, in ways that are sometimes beautiful or brilliant and other times hideous or problematic.
And I find that concretization and recycling of references to be, honestly, inspiring and thought-provoking in an associative and creative way; in addition, I find the problems with them to be an extremely accessible pathway to examine and think about the larger social issues which are actually at play there. I like Rad Hourani’s designs, Tisci’s Givenchy, and Rick Owens’ man-skirts because they look nifty and are beautifully made and convey an aesthetic which I am drawn to — and I like them because it calls attention to the ways in which gender binaries are enforced through the convenience of such a polarity in runways, production, and marketing and whether or not their collections successfully challenge anything there. I like Balmain’s leather jackets because they’re effing gorgeous and remind me of all kinds of ass-kicking female characters I dig, but also because they call attention to issues of overt female sexualization, body image, problems of military inspiration in fashion, and what exactly is going on with the rise of “fast fashion” and what it means that an exact copy of that jacket is on sale at F21 two months later after being produced in questionably legal conditions by a some underpaid underage third-world laborers. These things are not entirely mutually exclusive, and I think we ought to give everyone a little more benefit of the doubt for having a casual or aesthetic interest in things which are also problematic - or, rather, to re-frame all these perceived conflicts not as a means to invalidate or dismiss, but rather as channels for conversation, constructive criticism, and understanding.
