Research Guides: Story of Cloth: LGBTQIA+

Web Resources

A Queer History Of Fashion: From The Closet To The Catwalk
An exhibit from the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.

Articles

Are We Fabulous Yet?
The tyranny of queer beauty.
Article by Yasmin Nair. October 3. 2013. In These Times magazine.
Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking. Ontario, Canada's most populous province, recently elected a socially conservative Premier who repealed the progressive sexual education curriculum that teaches about queer and trans relationships and bodies. This election occurs within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and settler homonationalism that oppresses the most vulnerable queer and trans citizens. The paper examines how queer and trans youth in Ontario leverage fashion hacking to intervene into the current context that reinforces heteronormativity, white supremacy, patriarchy and ableism. We draw upon a series of participatory workshops with queer and trans youth, most of whom identify as Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled and/or working class, in two cities in Ontario. During these workshops, the youth deconstructed and reconstructed existing fashion media, clothing and fashion shows to express their experiences, identities and desired futures. We use an intersectional queer world-making framework to analyze the artifacts that the participants created as well as the interviews with them following the workshops. Our findings demonstrate that fashion hacking enables the most vulnerable queer and trans youth to resist and temporarily exist outside of right-wing ideologies, neoliberal capitalism and settler homonationalism. We argue that engaging queer and trans youth in fashion hacking fosters community and skills that can be mobilized beyond these settings to affirm their intersectional identities and resist oppressive movements, policies, discourses and systems.
Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery This paper is concerned with the different forms of pleasure and identification activated in the consumption of dominant and subcultural print media. It centres on an analysis of the lesbian visual pleasures generated through the reading of fashion editorial in the new lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines. This consideration of the lesbian gaze is contrasted to the lesbian visual pleasures obtained from an against the grain reading of mainstream women's fashion magazines. The development of the lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines, in the context of the pink pound, produces a situation in which an eroticized lesbian visual pleasure is the overt remit of the magazine, rather than a clandestine pleasure obtained through a transgressive reading of dominant cultural imagery. In contrast to the polysemic free-play of fashion fantasy by which readers produce lesbian pleasure in the consumption of mainstream magazines, responses to the fashion content in the lesbian magazine Diva suggest that in a subcultural context readers deploy a realist mode of reading that demands a monosemic positive images iconography. The article uses the concept of subcultural competency to consider the different ways lesbians read mainstream and subcultural print media and suggests that the conflict over Diva's fashion spreads may be linked to changing patterns of identification and the use of dress for recognizability.
Skirting the Issue: Lesbian Fashion for the 1990s
We too have a Style! We too have a Style! - Questioning and Subverting the Masculine Stereotype in Fashion through the Designs of Neil Grotzinger. The social stigma of masculine and feminine, the constant struggle between manly strength and womanly sensitivity, God’s other human creations, labeled as ‘the queer’ are highly neglected even in modern times. Queers’ struggle for acceptance even in the creative fields is sorer to accept than in the commercial fields. Hence, this research focuses on the role and scope of gender agnostic designers and designs in the fashion industry. By questioning and subverting the masculine stereotype and its effects on the creative non-normative brains through the special study of life and designs of Neil Grotzinger; whose mission was to tease society's notion of masculinity and lavish them with intricate embroidery and embellishments that had been previously reserved for women and brought that into menswear. This research conclusively evaluates the effects of Neil Grotzinger’s designs on the male, female, and queer genders and the fashion industry and thus evaluates the scope of queer fashion in the mainstream fashion industry.
Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945–1969
The Subtle Power of Lesbian Style
Fashionable theory and fashion-able women: Returning Fuss's homospectatorial look Criticizes Diana Fuss' article `Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look' in the Summer 1992 issue of the `Critical Inquiry' journal, which attempts to explain the mechanisms of identification and desire. Relation between fashion photography and homoeroticism; Paradoxes of Fuss' argument for the ostensible primacy of the homosexual.

eBooks

Gender, Sex, and Sexuality among Contemporary Youth by Patricia Neff Claster (Editor); Sampson Lee Blair (Editor) Researchers, practitioners, and parents have increasingly become concerned about issues related to sex, gender, and sexuality among children and adolescents. With access to the Internet, young people around the globe can readily obtain virtually any and all information they seek concerning sex and sexuality. In many cultures, the clothing and fashions of children, adolescents, and young adults are increasingly merging, leaving little clear distinction between them, and creating what some consider to be the 'sexualization' of children's and adolescents' clothing. Coinciding with such changes, young people are more openly expressing their own gender identity, often leading to considerable social debate about feminine and masculine identities, and also transgender identities.  This collection provides unique insight into identity formation for contemporary youth and examines the evolving norms concerning sex, gender, and sexuality in the lives of children and adolescents addressing topics including the development of gender identity, sexual behavior among youth, LGBT youth, transgender youth, parental and peer influences upon the development of gender and gender identity and dating violence.
ISBN: 9781787146143
Publication Date: 2017-11-27