Tailoring Gender: The Past, Present, and Future of Queer Dress

Clothing is just one part of a larger ongoing corporeal strategy: constituting the gendered subject. This project explores how clothing is a gendered performance. Following Sedgwick's use of the word queer, I examine queer dress as a mesh of possibilities. I analyze work from Alice Austen, Queen, Gender Free World, 69, and Hood by Air to assess past and present modes of dressing queer. Most of these artists tend to focus on reducing and ignoring the gendered associations of clothing, while Tailoring Gender puts forward a new method of dress: queer styling. Queer styling resists harmful repetitions of binary normativity by focusing not on what garments are worn, but instead how they are worn. With an emphasis on the everyday, queer styling destabilizes the supposed naturalness of the gender binary by acting as a form of silent assembly. Queer styling imagines a queer futurity, without losing body specificity.