Over the past ten years, there have been several fashion exhibitions that have looked at garments designed and worn to unsettle normative gender codes. The number of research articles on queer styles of dressing focusing on the experiences of designers, vendors, and (more rarely) wearers has increased exponentially; and collaborations between fashion brands and queer artists, activists, and thinkers (as is the well-known case of Gucci and Paul Preciado) have emerged in the public domain. Additionally, more and more trans, genderqueer and nonbinary models are walking the runway of major international shows and becoming ‘the face’ of luxury brands, and fashion media outlets have been prompt to capitalize on gender-inclusive discourse to rebrand themselves as neoliberal bastions of progressive cultural production. Within critical fashion studies, however, there is still an absence of scholarship on the politics of representation and the embodied sartorial experiences of trans folks. The field is also proving slow in engaging and keeping up with the important theorizing on the dressed body produced within trans studies. This special issue seeks to provide a cogent corrective to such critical silence. It, thus, purports to: a) highlight how transgender and gender nonconforming people from multiple contexts have been using the sartorial to intimately reckon with their subjectivity, foster affective bonds and kinship within their communities, and/or develop aesthetic-political imaginings of a queer future; and b) expose how transness has been narrated in fashion and beauty discourses produced across different decades, geographical sites and media outlets.
Submissions are encouraged that explore trans sartorial embodiment informed by trans and queer theory, including, but not limited to:
• Discursive and visual representation of transness in fashion and beauty media (e.g. fashion periodicals, zines, weeklies, glossies, blogs, newsletters, social media platforms and YouTube channels with a focus on fashion or beauty)
• Participation in the fashion and beauty industries by transgender creatives, whose lives and work have been omitted or sidelined by mainstream fashion history
• The uses and meanings of ‘transgender’, ‘transsexual’, ‘transvestite’, ‘travesti’ and ‘cross-dresser’ in fashion and beauty discourses across temporal, linguistic and transnational boundaries
• Transgender fashion collectives and the political uses of clothing within trans activism
• The sartorial legacies of iconic trans figures in queer history
• Wardrobe stories and personal fashion archives
• Fashioning and costuming in trans artistic performance and filmmaking
• Trans fashion pedagogies: teaching fashion from a trans perspective and/or teaching fashion in the queer and trans studies classroom
We encourage in particular submissions that look at trans fashion stories from the Global South and contributions that pay attention to the relation of transness to Blackness, Indigeneity and whiteness, as well as to racist, colonialist and heteropatriarchal ideologies in the fashion and beauty systems. We are also open to contributions that incorporate more experimental and artistic forms of writing into the academic essay.
Please submit a 250-word outline of your proposal, followed by a brief (max 150 words) author bio by 15 July 2022 to roberto.filippello@ubc.ca and erique@u.northwestern.edu. If you have questions or ideas you want to share with the editors of the special issue in advance, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Editors
Susan B. Kaiser (University of California, Davis, USA)
sbkaiser@ucdavis.edu
Anneke Smelik (Radboud University, the Netherlands)
anneke.smelik@ru.nl
Guest Editors
Roberto Filippello (University of British Columbia, Canada)
roberto.filippello@ubc.ca
Erique Zhang (Northwestern University, USA)
erique@u.northwestern.edu