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Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend
This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments—how dress creates, disrupts, and transcends gender—the essays investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing.
The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them.
The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them.
- GenresFashion
225 pages, Hardcover
Published March 12, 2020
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July 10, 2020
Introduction, pp.1-20
p.2 – Gender is the social and political understanding of bodies based on a cultural norm, whereas sex is assumed to be a fleshy, corporeal, biological bodily essence: people learn masculinity and femininity but they are assigned at birth as male or female. The ways in which gender is produced and perceived through a person’s clothing create assumptions about their sex. Because we do not move about society naked, we are not gendering each other on the basis of genitals (what is still primarily believed to constitute a person’s gender identity) but based on their clothing and appearance.
We ground Crossing Gender Boundaries in Judith Butler’s conception of gender as a social construction. Butler’s early essay (1988) and subsequent book Gender Trouble (1990) introduced the concept “sex/gender” to demonstrate how sex and gender are co-constructed and how our sex/gender are produced and reproduced through the relationship between individual actions and societal norms. She argued that gender ideology frames how we understand the physical body (e.g. how physicians assign sex to children), and so for Butler, sex was gender all along. Butler theorized gender as performative, but misunderstandings of her intent and meaning resulted in her writing Bodies That Matter (1993) to clarify her propositions.
p.3 – Butler argued that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo? (Butler 1988: 520) and that “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (Butler 1990:33). She argued that gender is performative: an act that constitutes itself and produces an effect. For example, each of us performs sex/gender in our actions – the way in which we dress, speak and behave – on a daily basis. These performances are repeated, and subsequently generate and maintain social norms about the ways in which men and women should dress, speak, and behave that are often mistaken as natural. Butler argued that sex/gender is created within cultural and social expectation, histories and systems, and in the western world these systems are binary – male and female – and that masculinity and femininity have been attached to both, respectively. The acts that constitute sex/gender are controlled by social norms and social sanctions to restrict their transgression. So, although individuals have agency (“the possibility of contesting [their] reified status” [Butler 1988:520]), they are bounded by greater forces and threats of reprimand or censure. Therefore, Butler argued, sex/gender is assumed to be natural when in fact it is a sociocultural product based on a series of repetitions that are imbued upon the body.
Butler was often misinterpreted in both scholarship and popular culture as stating that gender is simply a performance, and so she used the analogy of theatre to illustrate the difference between performance and performative. In theatre, actors take on a role and they understand that they are playing a role; with gender performativity, they may not realize that they are playing a role and think it is natural. So, gender is a performance that people may not realize is a performance. It is the larger sociocultural system that has ascribed femininity to women and masculinity to men. In addition, Butler (1993) argued that the binary gender system is reproduced through imitation that appears natural; however, transgressions, exaggerations and violations, such as drag, she and others noted (e.g. Friedman and Jones 2011; Horowitz 2013; Taylor 2005), can destabilize this power structure by exposing the claim that gender is a natural category, although such transgressions can be met with social sanctions and resistance. “The drag show and stylistic impersonation of men and women via performances act as forms of male and female mimicry and parody, or camp, in order to challenge and destabilize gender practices that prioritize mainstream hegemonic masculinity” (Geczy and Karaminas 2013: 113). Drag is not the exclusive domain of gay men; cisgender women, transwomen, straight men, non-binary people and gender fluid people have engaged in female drag by exaggerating feminine attributes. Singer k. d. lang, who is known for masculine presentation and dress, donned hyper feminine dressed during a PETA event in the late 1990s and called herself “Miss Chantelaine” for a fundraiser for the animal rights organization, and transwomen Gia Gunn and Peppermint from RuPaul’s Drag Race regularly perform in drag.
p.9 – Today the gender binary is regularly disrupted in fashion, popular culture and everyday life. Designers are merging their men’s and women’s runway shows; including male models in womenswear advertising and female models in menswear advertising; removing the demarcation of men and women’s sections from their retail spaces; and increasingly starting completely non-binary lined that are devoid of any sex or gender classifications and labelling.
Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly, “Gender More: An Intersectional Perspective on Men’s Transgression of the Gender Dress Binary” pp.122-136
p.122 – Androgyny is a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics. Although androgyny has been a central component of postmodern self-presentation styles, Morgado (2014) argues that the post-postmodern era has introduced a different take on androgyny. Post-postmodernism is a school of thought that highlights and critiques cultural and social changes in art, media, technology, and popular culture in the early twenty-first century. While postmodernism focused on irony, questioning of tradition, and rejection of authority, these conditions are being replaced by post-postmodernism. The new conditions of post-postmodernism include resistance to globalization and standardization (Bourriaud 2009), hyper-consumption (Lipovetsky [1987] 1994, 2005), digital technology alongside human autonomy (Samuels 2008), and the erasure of defined cultural categories, including sex and gender (Eschelman 2008).
Androgyny during postmodernity focused on blending masculinity and femininity to create a gender-ambiguous aesthetic, whereas the new iteration of androgyny during post-postmodernity highlights conventionally masculine and feminine signifiers to create a juxtaposition of gender presentation. Eschelman (2008) argued that “performatism,” or the elimination of distinctive cultural categories such as sex and gender, is evident in the post-postmodern era.
p.124 – Bringing together extreme masculine and feminine sartorial elements into single outfits is not a new phenomenon for men. Some radical gay men who were part of the Gay Liberation Front during the 1970s embraced a style known as “genderfuck” in which they combined hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine appearance signifiers to expose fixed notions of sex and gender as artificial. For example, they often wore heavy make-up and donned sequined dresses while also revealing genital bulges and growing our facial hair (Cole 2013).
p.133 – Postmodern androgyny was exemplified by combining masculine and feminine elements to create a unified, blended gendered look (Morgado 1996) and seemed to represent appearance modes that were neither entirely masculine or feminine, but somewhere in-between. The new androgynous style of combining elements that obviously signify masculinity and femininity represents an aspect of post-postmodernism (Morgado 2014), specifically Eschelman’s (2008) performatism, or the erasure of cultural categories. Perhaps rather than attempting to visually communicate the equality of genders, this new form of androgyny is intended to highlight the complexity of gender identity and the diversity of masculine and feminine facets. We find that “gender more” not only celebrates archetypal masculine and feminine signifiers but it specifically draws from the intersection between gender and the range of other social identities to express the multiplicity of meanings and manifestations of gender itself. Rather than holding a universal understanding of gender, participants’ dress motivations and aesthetics were located in the complex web of the intersectional identities that co-constituted their embodiments and experiences.
While participants represented a variety of social identities, their commonality was age – all under 35 – indicating that the current trend in androgyny is located among the millennial generation. This may be due to the zeitgeist during their formative years in which the construction and deconstruction of gender binaries were regularly discussed. For example, mainstream reality television shows celebrate men who wear feminine styles, such as Jonathan Van Ness on the reboot of Queer Eye and the casts of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The social media platform Instagram has also become a widespread media source for the generation of participants in this chapter to share and view images of men’s diverse dress styles that unsettle gender norms, including the use of popular hashtags (i.e. #meninskirts and #meninheels) that identify posts of men who combine masculine and feminine dress codes. In Canada, where the participants reside, trans rights and thus the construction and deconstruction of gender binaries have been centered in media and politics, with an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act that added gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in 2018. The fact that participants selected items that specifically reflected classic masculinity (e.g. leather sports jersey) and femininity (e.g. high heel shoes, a skirt) in an effort to create their personal aesthetic demonstrates that they understand how gender is created through clothing and how they can transgress its norms.
p.134 – Despite participants’ confident disruption of gender dress norms, they were cautious about how context-specific oppressions limited their ability to express themselves and participate in everyday life. As a result of their outfits, Andre was reprimanded at work, Alex experienced street harassment and Clinton and Felix faced discrimination on the dating scene. Participants had male privilege in patriarchal western society, yet they forwent this status by embracing femininity – in addition to masculinity – through their clothing. Kimmel argues that the central tenet of hegemonic masculinity is the renunciation of femininity: “Whatever the variations by race, class age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, being a man means not being like women. This notion of anti-femininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood” (2005: 31). As such, off the runways and red carpets, “gender more” remains a brave and defiant embodied act of political resistance because narrow gender dress binaries continue to regulate everyday life. For post-postmodernism to significantly impact society, cultural changes need to move beyond popular culture and subcultures to empower all people in daily life.
Rebecca Halliday, “The Politics of the Neutral: Rad Hourani’s Unisex Vision” pp.152-165
p.154 – Rebecca Arnold cautions that unisex as a historical concept functions as a political salve: “Unisex presents a masquerade of equality for all [and] has [thus] been a recurring utopian dream. […] The fragmentation of traditional lines of status and power has led to periods when solace has been sought through this denial of difference” (2001: 118). Unisex promotes an impossible ideal of sameness that “can only ever be a disguise, a veil to conceal diversity as something troubling, rather than a positive” (Arnold 2001: 121). Scholars and critics concur that people that appear most attractive in unisex clothes possess bodies that read as androgynous – tall and streamlined, without noticeable curves.
p.155 – Arnold traces unisex dress to alternative movements: the 1960s hippie counterculture and the 1980s and 1990s rave subculture (2001: 119-21).
Unisex infiltrated fashion in the late-1960s vis the “Space Age” designs of Pierre Cardin, Andre Courreges, Paco Rabanne and Rudi Gernreich, inventor of the monokini. Arnold also locates unisex within a 1990s recession-era turn toward casual wear and anti-consumerism emblematized in the inclusive brand Calvin Klein (2001: 119-21).
Critics have observed a return to a specifically unisex fashion and credited Hourani as a leader of this movement due to his uber-defined aesthetic and the fact that he works within the sphere of couture (Chrisman-Campbell 2015; Cockrane 2014).
madison moore, “Critical Mascara: On Fabulousness, Creativity and the End of Gender” pp.192-200
p.198 – The stakes of great style are that at the same time that brown, queer and trans bodies express, feel good about and expand themselves through fabulousness and self-styling, that joy is subject to surveillance, torture and ridicule by homonormative, heteronormative, misogynist and patriarchal systems every single day, form the workplace to our living rooms and from the dating app to the sidewalk. It isn’t about looking amazing or utopian aspirations. Fabulousness is always a unique set of aesthetic properties engaged by people who take the risk of making a spectacle of themselves – to stretch out and expand – when it would be much easier, though no less toxic, to be normative. If these fabulous renegades played by the rules and fit in then they wouldn’t have to worry about being harassed or feeling safe on the sidewalks. At the end of the day, the question fabulousness asks all of us is when can we have a world where it will be safe to just be me, where I don’t have to be depressed because my body doesn’t fit in with norms and ideals that never had me in mind in the first place?
For marginalized people, fabulousness is an articulation of self in everyday life.
p.199 – Not everyone is fabulous all the time. It’s hard work and it’s exhausting mentally, physically and creatively. Some days you choose being safe over your favorite wig or eyeliner, and other days you can’t deal with the social harassment. That’s why I like to think of fabulousness as a kind of escape hatch – a way to call a temporary time out on the exhausting norms, systems and structures that oppress us all every single day. Those of us who invest in fabulousness do so while also thinking about safety, how we circulate and how to stay sane in a world that says we should not exist. Attempting to blend in and suppress yourself all in the name of safety does more harm than good. These are the political stakes of fabulousness, and that’s also why it’s an escape hatch, even if a temporary one. It allows us the freedom to imagine a whole new world, one where our bodies are at the center and where we are loved for who we are. In this fabulous new world, we celebrate aesthetic genius without worrying about safety
p.2 – Gender is the social and political understanding of bodies based on a cultural norm, whereas sex is assumed to be a fleshy, corporeal, biological bodily essence: people learn masculinity and femininity but they are assigned at birth as male or female. The ways in which gender is produced and perceived through a person’s clothing create assumptions about their sex. Because we do not move about society naked, we are not gendering each other on the basis of genitals (what is still primarily believed to constitute a person’s gender identity) but based on their clothing and appearance.
We ground Crossing Gender Boundaries in Judith Butler’s conception of gender as a social construction. Butler’s early essay (1988) and subsequent book Gender Trouble (1990) introduced the concept “sex/gender” to demonstrate how sex and gender are co-constructed and how our sex/gender are produced and reproduced through the relationship between individual actions and societal norms. She argued that gender ideology frames how we understand the physical body (e.g. how physicians assign sex to children), and so for Butler, sex was gender all along. Butler theorized gender as performative, but misunderstandings of her intent and meaning resulted in her writing Bodies That Matter (1993) to clarify her propositions.
p.3 – Butler argued that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo? (Butler 1988: 520) and that “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (Butler 1990:33). She argued that gender is performative: an act that constitutes itself and produces an effect. For example, each of us performs sex/gender in our actions – the way in which we dress, speak and behave – on a daily basis. These performances are repeated, and subsequently generate and maintain social norms about the ways in which men and women should dress, speak, and behave that are often mistaken as natural. Butler argued that sex/gender is created within cultural and social expectation, histories and systems, and in the western world these systems are binary – male and female – and that masculinity and femininity have been attached to both, respectively. The acts that constitute sex/gender are controlled by social norms and social sanctions to restrict their transgression. So, although individuals have agency (“the possibility of contesting [their] reified status” [Butler 1988:520]), they are bounded by greater forces and threats of reprimand or censure. Therefore, Butler argued, sex/gender is assumed to be natural when in fact it is a sociocultural product based on a series of repetitions that are imbued upon the body.
Butler was often misinterpreted in both scholarship and popular culture as stating that gender is simply a performance, and so she used the analogy of theatre to illustrate the difference between performance and performative. In theatre, actors take on a role and they understand that they are playing a role; with gender performativity, they may not realize that they are playing a role and think it is natural. So, gender is a performance that people may not realize is a performance. It is the larger sociocultural system that has ascribed femininity to women and masculinity to men. In addition, Butler (1993) argued that the binary gender system is reproduced through imitation that appears natural; however, transgressions, exaggerations and violations, such as drag, she and others noted (e.g. Friedman and Jones 2011; Horowitz 2013; Taylor 2005), can destabilize this power structure by exposing the claim that gender is a natural category, although such transgressions can be met with social sanctions and resistance. “The drag show and stylistic impersonation of men and women via performances act as forms of male and female mimicry and parody, or camp, in order to challenge and destabilize gender practices that prioritize mainstream hegemonic masculinity” (Geczy and Karaminas 2013: 113). Drag is not the exclusive domain of gay men; cisgender women, transwomen, straight men, non-binary people and gender fluid people have engaged in female drag by exaggerating feminine attributes. Singer k. d. lang, who is known for masculine presentation and dress, donned hyper feminine dressed during a PETA event in the late 1990s and called herself “Miss Chantelaine” for a fundraiser for the animal rights organization, and transwomen Gia Gunn and Peppermint from RuPaul’s Drag Race regularly perform in drag.
p.9 – Today the gender binary is regularly disrupted in fashion, popular culture and everyday life. Designers are merging their men’s and women’s runway shows; including male models in womenswear advertising and female models in menswear advertising; removing the demarcation of men and women’s sections from their retail spaces; and increasingly starting completely non-binary lined that are devoid of any sex or gender classifications and labelling.
Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly, “Gender More: An Intersectional Perspective on Men’s Transgression of the Gender Dress Binary” pp.122-136
p.122 – Androgyny is a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics. Although androgyny has been a central component of postmodern self-presentation styles, Morgado (2014) argues that the post-postmodern era has introduced a different take on androgyny. Post-postmodernism is a school of thought that highlights and critiques cultural and social changes in art, media, technology, and popular culture in the early twenty-first century. While postmodernism focused on irony, questioning of tradition, and rejection of authority, these conditions are being replaced by post-postmodernism. The new conditions of post-postmodernism include resistance to globalization and standardization (Bourriaud 2009), hyper-consumption (Lipovetsky [1987] 1994, 2005), digital technology alongside human autonomy (Samuels 2008), and the erasure of defined cultural categories, including sex and gender (Eschelman 2008).
Androgyny during postmodernity focused on blending masculinity and femininity to create a gender-ambiguous aesthetic, whereas the new iteration of androgyny during post-postmodernity highlights conventionally masculine and feminine signifiers to create a juxtaposition of gender presentation. Eschelman (2008) argued that “performatism,” or the elimination of distinctive cultural categories such as sex and gender, is evident in the post-postmodern era.
p.124 – Bringing together extreme masculine and feminine sartorial elements into single outfits is not a new phenomenon for men. Some radical gay men who were part of the Gay Liberation Front during the 1970s embraced a style known as “genderfuck” in which they combined hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine appearance signifiers to expose fixed notions of sex and gender as artificial. For example, they often wore heavy make-up and donned sequined dresses while also revealing genital bulges and growing our facial hair (Cole 2013).
p.133 – Postmodern androgyny was exemplified by combining masculine and feminine elements to create a unified, blended gendered look (Morgado 1996) and seemed to represent appearance modes that were neither entirely masculine or feminine, but somewhere in-between. The new androgynous style of combining elements that obviously signify masculinity and femininity represents an aspect of post-postmodernism (Morgado 2014), specifically Eschelman’s (2008) performatism, or the erasure of cultural categories. Perhaps rather than attempting to visually communicate the equality of genders, this new form of androgyny is intended to highlight the complexity of gender identity and the diversity of masculine and feminine facets. We find that “gender more” not only celebrates archetypal masculine and feminine signifiers but it specifically draws from the intersection between gender and the range of other social identities to express the multiplicity of meanings and manifestations of gender itself. Rather than holding a universal understanding of gender, participants’ dress motivations and aesthetics were located in the complex web of the intersectional identities that co-constituted their embodiments and experiences.
While participants represented a variety of social identities, their commonality was age – all under 35 – indicating that the current trend in androgyny is located among the millennial generation. This may be due to the zeitgeist during their formative years in which the construction and deconstruction of gender binaries were regularly discussed. For example, mainstream reality television shows celebrate men who wear feminine styles, such as Jonathan Van Ness on the reboot of Queer Eye and the casts of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The social media platform Instagram has also become a widespread media source for the generation of participants in this chapter to share and view images of men’s diverse dress styles that unsettle gender norms, including the use of popular hashtags (i.e. #meninskirts and #meninheels) that identify posts of men who combine masculine and feminine dress codes. In Canada, where the participants reside, trans rights and thus the construction and deconstruction of gender binaries have been centered in media and politics, with an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act that added gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in 2018. The fact that participants selected items that specifically reflected classic masculinity (e.g. leather sports jersey) and femininity (e.g. high heel shoes, a skirt) in an effort to create their personal aesthetic demonstrates that they understand how gender is created through clothing and how they can transgress its norms.
p.134 – Despite participants’ confident disruption of gender dress norms, they were cautious about how context-specific oppressions limited their ability to express themselves and participate in everyday life. As a result of their outfits, Andre was reprimanded at work, Alex experienced street harassment and Clinton and Felix faced discrimination on the dating scene. Participants had male privilege in patriarchal western society, yet they forwent this status by embracing femininity – in addition to masculinity – through their clothing. Kimmel argues that the central tenet of hegemonic masculinity is the renunciation of femininity: “Whatever the variations by race, class age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, being a man means not being like women. This notion of anti-femininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood” (2005: 31). As such, off the runways and red carpets, “gender more” remains a brave and defiant embodied act of political resistance because narrow gender dress binaries continue to regulate everyday life. For post-postmodernism to significantly impact society, cultural changes need to move beyond popular culture and subcultures to empower all people in daily life.
Rebecca Halliday, “The Politics of the Neutral: Rad Hourani’s Unisex Vision” pp.152-165
p.154 – Rebecca Arnold cautions that unisex as a historical concept functions as a political salve: “Unisex presents a masquerade of equality for all [and] has [thus] been a recurring utopian dream. […] The fragmentation of traditional lines of status and power has led to periods when solace has been sought through this denial of difference” (2001: 118). Unisex promotes an impossible ideal of sameness that “can only ever be a disguise, a veil to conceal diversity as something troubling, rather than a positive” (Arnold 2001: 121). Scholars and critics concur that people that appear most attractive in unisex clothes possess bodies that read as androgynous – tall and streamlined, without noticeable curves.
p.155 – Arnold traces unisex dress to alternative movements: the 1960s hippie counterculture and the 1980s and 1990s rave subculture (2001: 119-21).
Unisex infiltrated fashion in the late-1960s vis the “Space Age” designs of Pierre Cardin, Andre Courreges, Paco Rabanne and Rudi Gernreich, inventor of the monokini. Arnold also locates unisex within a 1990s recession-era turn toward casual wear and anti-consumerism emblematized in the inclusive brand Calvin Klein (2001: 119-21).
Critics have observed a return to a specifically unisex fashion and credited Hourani as a leader of this movement due to his uber-defined aesthetic and the fact that he works within the sphere of couture (Chrisman-Campbell 2015; Cockrane 2014).
madison moore, “Critical Mascara: On Fabulousness, Creativity and the End of Gender” pp.192-200
p.198 – The stakes of great style are that at the same time that brown, queer and trans bodies express, feel good about and expand themselves through fabulousness and self-styling, that joy is subject to surveillance, torture and ridicule by homonormative, heteronormative, misogynist and patriarchal systems every single day, form the workplace to our living rooms and from the dating app to the sidewalk. It isn’t about looking amazing or utopian aspirations. Fabulousness is always a unique set of aesthetic properties engaged by people who take the risk of making a spectacle of themselves – to stretch out and expand – when it would be much easier, though no less toxic, to be normative. If these fabulous renegades played by the rules and fit in then they wouldn’t have to worry about being harassed or feeling safe on the sidewalks. At the end of the day, the question fabulousness asks all of us is when can we have a world where it will be safe to just be me, where I don’t have to be depressed because my body doesn’t fit in with norms and ideals that never had me in mind in the first place?
For marginalized people, fabulousness is an articulation of self in everyday life.
p.199 – Not everyone is fabulous all the time. It’s hard work and it’s exhausting mentally, physically and creatively. Some days you choose being safe over your favorite wig or eyeliner, and other days you can’t deal with the social harassment. That’s why I like to think of fabulousness as a kind of escape hatch – a way to call a temporary time out on the exhausting norms, systems and structures that oppress us all every single day. Those of us who invest in fabulousness do so while also thinking about safety, how we circulate and how to stay sane in a world that says we should not exist. Attempting to blend in and suppress yourself all in the name of safety does more harm than good. These are the political stakes of fabulousness, and that’s also why it’s an escape hatch, even if a temporary one. It allows us the freedom to imagine a whole new world, one where our bodies are at the center and where we are loved for who we are. In this fabulous new world, we celebrate aesthetic genius without worrying about safety
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