#6 My gender expression
Dec. 8th, 2014 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettItem the first: insofar as context permits I reject gendering of clothing and presentation, helped in large part by being extended-family-of-a-sort to ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
stammsternenstaub, who are pretty much never-endingly fabulous.
Item the second: context, unfortunately, is often not terribly permissive. (In the land outside this social scene/the streets are filled with the gender police/I guess the streets are no place for kings and queens...)
Item the third: up until I was about sixteen I thought I gave no shits about clothing qua style (as opposed to practical considerations) and mostly used it to hide in, as disguise and camouflage (at which I was not very good). Between sixteen and eighteen I got one of the best compliments I've ever had, presentation-wise, from a school friend: there's masculine, and there's feminine, and then there's you, and it's kind of disturbing when you cross over into either. Aged 18 I started binding regularly, and also began developing what has (slightly to my horror and definitely to my confusion) morphed into An Aesthetic, or possibly a set of styles.
To begin with: my hair is long and my hair has always been long. (For those of you who are new, by this I mean waist-length.) I have established (via costuming with short-haired wigs) that short messy hair is a good way to get people to instantly start gendering me male around 50-60% of the time -- but I don't actually want to cut it off, mostly because it'd be substantially harder work to maintain but at least partly because insisting on being correctly gendered with this hair expands at least a little the range of perceived possible presentations for other folk.
Other basics: these days I am almost always wearing a necklace, usually with one ofelisem's pendants, as a focus and a fiddle-toy and a comfort, usually on a brown cord that sits very close to my throat but occasionally on a silver chain. I also usually wear perfume, deliberately close to the skin, again as a focus and for soothing. Both I skew towards the masculine end of signalling as far as I can -- hence the close-fitting cords to hang my pendants from, and my perfume collection is heavily biased toward scents based on leathers and woods rather than florals.
Beyond that, how I dress varies at least in part based on degree of legibility. So if I'm hanging out with queer friends or doing something else in a place where I'm reasonably likely to be read as queer, especially since I started using the 'chair and developed some visible upper-body muscle definition (not a lot, but), I'll tend towards twinky: close-fitting t-shirts and close-fitting trousers with something resembling a boot. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on this is most likely to happen when my mood is in general somewhere between fuck you and up yours. A notch up the formality scale (and corresponding to being rather more relaxed) I tend towards corduroy or linen trousers (winter & summer respectively; always pockets) and slightly loose long-sleeved button-down shirts, sleeves rolled up to my elbow. As things get more formal I tend more heavily towards male-coded dress: for Posh Stuff I've a dinner suit and double-cuff shirts and bow ties, etc, and for a different kind of dress-up I have a blue velvet suit I acquired in a charity shop yonks ago. (Shoes are pretty much always boots, except when laces are hard or I'll be in and out of lab a lot, for which purposes I own some peacock blue Crocs and for damper weather some teal faux-suede pull-on closed-toe things that were fifteen quid off ebay a couple of years ago; I wouldn't want to walk in them but they're fine for wheelchairy stuff, so.)
What this means in practice is that I tend towards a general aesthetic that is somewhere between "second-generation academic" and "camp as in fuck you"[1]. I am (very tentatively) beginning to experiment with dragging up in small ways for contexts where it will be understood as such - I still own a big swoopy black linen skirt with godet panels, and that + boots + a great big unambiguous collar + swoopy metallic teal eye make-up gets some of the effect that I'm after.
The biggest shift in my presentation in the past few years has as it turns out been a shift towards blending in absolutely in cities and looking hideously out of place on Cornish cliff tops even if I think I've dressed appropriately for them. I think this is partly because I've largely stopped wearing my hiking boots (for the obvious reasons) and also partly because I now tend towards big wool coats rather than anything actually waterproof; it's only since moving to London that I've really begun to understand that the goal isn't to stay dry but to be sufficiently layered that (1) you won't freeze on the short walk between public transport and whereever your endpoint is, and (2) you won't overheat enormously on the tube. Hence. Big swoopy woolen coats, rather than the GoreTex I mostly lived in while I was still, you know, capable of doing fieldwork.
I think I first heard the term "genderfuck" when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and fell instantly in love. It's still sort of where I want to go, but from a different starting point; it's now less for the sake of disturbing people and more with a view to expanding possibilities.
[1] Gloss: with reference to "not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you".
Item the second: context, unfortunately, is often not terribly permissive. (In the land outside this social scene/the streets are filled with the gender police/I guess the streets are no place for kings and queens...)
Item the third: up until I was about sixteen I thought I gave no shits about clothing qua style (as opposed to practical considerations) and mostly used it to hide in, as disguise and camouflage (at which I was not very good). Between sixteen and eighteen I got one of the best compliments I've ever had, presentation-wise, from a school friend: there's masculine, and there's feminine, and then there's you, and it's kind of disturbing when you cross over into either. Aged 18 I started binding regularly, and also began developing what has (slightly to my horror and definitely to my confusion) morphed into An Aesthetic, or possibly a set of styles.
To begin with: my hair is long and my hair has always been long. (For those of you who are new, by this I mean waist-length.) I have established (via costuming with short-haired wigs) that short messy hair is a good way to get people to instantly start gendering me male around 50-60% of the time -- but I don't actually want to cut it off, mostly because it'd be substantially harder work to maintain but at least partly because insisting on being correctly gendered with this hair expands at least a little the range of perceived possible presentations for other folk.
Other basics: these days I am almost always wearing a necklace, usually with one of
elisem's pendants, as a focus and a fiddle-toy and a comfort, usually on a brown cord that sits very close to my throat but occasionally on a silver chain. I also usually wear perfume, deliberately close to the skin, again as a focus and for soothing. Both I skew towards the masculine end of signalling as far as I can -- hence the close-fitting cords to hang my pendants from, and my perfume collection is heavily biased toward scents based on leathers and woods rather than florals.Beyond that, how I dress varies at least in part based on degree of legibility. So if I'm hanging out with queer friends or doing something else in a place where I'm reasonably likely to be read as queer, especially since I started using the 'chair and developed some visible upper-body muscle definition (not a lot, but), I'll tend towards twinky: close-fitting t-shirts and close-fitting trousers with something resembling a boot. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on this is most likely to happen when my mood is in general somewhere between fuck you and up yours. A notch up the formality scale (and corresponding to being rather more relaxed) I tend towards corduroy or linen trousers (winter & summer respectively; always pockets) and slightly loose long-sleeved button-down shirts, sleeves rolled up to my elbow. As things get more formal I tend more heavily towards male-coded dress: for Posh Stuff I've a dinner suit and double-cuff shirts and bow ties, etc, and for a different kind of dress-up I have a blue velvet suit I acquired in a charity shop yonks ago. (Shoes are pretty much always boots, except when laces are hard or I'll be in and out of lab a lot, for which purposes I own some peacock blue Crocs and for damper weather some teal faux-suede pull-on closed-toe things that were fifteen quid off ebay a couple of years ago; I wouldn't want to walk in them but they're fine for wheelchairy stuff, so.)
What this means in practice is that I tend towards a general aesthetic that is somewhere between "second-generation academic" and "camp as in fuck you"[1]. I am (very tentatively) beginning to experiment with dragging up in small ways for contexts where it will be understood as such - I still own a big swoopy black linen skirt with godet panels, and that + boots + a great big unambiguous collar + swoopy metallic teal eye make-up gets some of the effect that I'm after.
The biggest shift in my presentation in the past few years has as it turns out been a shift towards blending in absolutely in cities and looking hideously out of place on Cornish cliff tops even if I think I've dressed appropriately for them. I think this is partly because I've largely stopped wearing my hiking boots (for the obvious reasons) and also partly because I now tend towards big wool coats rather than anything actually waterproof; it's only since moving to London that I've really begun to understand that the goal isn't to stay dry but to be sufficiently layered that (1) you won't freeze on the short walk between public transport and whereever your endpoint is, and (2) you won't overheat enormously on the tube. Hence. Big swoopy woolen coats, rather than the GoreTex I mostly lived in while I was still, you know, capable of doing fieldwork.
I think I first heard the term "genderfuck" when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and fell instantly in love. It's still sort of where I want to go, but from a different starting point; it's now less for the sake of disturbing people and more with a view to expanding possibilities.
[1] Gloss: with reference to "not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you".
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Date: 2014-12-08 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2014-12-08 05:44 pm (UTC)(One of my favourite compliments was that when I was doing a photoshoot with