sub/Cultural semiotics of clothing

[kaberett]

So a few weeks back I acquired the twinkiest jeans, as discussed: blue metallic sparkly "super-skinny" jeans with an enormous blue faux-rhinestone button fly. I was wearing them for the interaction with the splendidly queer nurse, and I mentioned to my mother that part of the reason I'd thought it might be even a tiny bit okay for me to ask him about his partner was that I was wearing clothing that read as sparklegay too.

My mother, who had been great up to that point (and as we know is generally great these days), said something to the effect of "Ugh, I don't think it's fair that any one group should get the monopoly on bits of clothing and what they mean."

That's the context; this is my attempt to put my thoughts in order enough to e-mail her an explanation. (It's extremely focussed on the context of choosing to make legible otherwise invisible characteristics; obviously I'm leaving a very great deal out for the sake of Explaining Stuff To My Mum.)

The thing is, a lot of us have had really bad experiences with being noticeably queer, or at school not even with it being noticed, just a thing that got flung around for "fun" by other kids. I get the impression that this was something that those of us growing up under Section 28 did (and do) particularly badly with: homophobic bullying simply wasn't addressed, ever, as a thing in its own right that messed people up, in no small part (as far as I could tell) due to "promoting homosexuality in schools" being sufficiently broad strokes that adult authority figures were terrified of landing on the wrong side of it (which is understandable enough, given the kind of thing that was done to teachers who were suspected of being queer by their bosses, including but not limited to being treated as predators if parents got wind of the rumours instead of being supported by their colleagues). Right up til I left, I was the only out student and Chesterton, to the extent that I'd get year sevens coming up to me and going "are you the bi one" in tones of fascinated disgust.

So: being visibly out in ways that are legible to the general population is hard even when it doesn't come with being physically attacked for it.

And coming out (which you don't do just once, you have to do it over and over again; you can't say "please don't use 'gay' as a derogatory term", even, without getting looked at suspiciously) runs the risk of that kind of reaction, every time; I have been actively scared of mentioning "my girlfriend" to colleagues in the same way that they'd mention their partners' genders to me, and I am definitely not ever going to mention it explicitly to any of my undergrads even though I know how much it mattered to me to have visibly queer authority figures (because it meant they'd survived, and they'd grown up, and they'd found things they wanted to do) because of the risk of, again, getting labelled or perceived as predatory (in ways that are just not even considered when they're reading me as straight - and they are, by and large, assuming that I'm straight).

And that's where dressing in ways that signal that I'm probably queer comes in. The nurse was doing it - he'd got a single earring in a way that was strongly suggestive (though it's increasingly something straight folk do too, and thus the language moves on). On its own, I'd have wondered but not asked; on its own, him carefully referring to his partner is something I might not actually have noticed. But the combination made me, as someone who deals with this kind of thing myself, go hmm. And then I double-checked what I was wearing: because asking "is your partner a dude" is actually a massively threatening thing to do to a bloke, because if I'd been a homophobe and I'd clocked him and he then admitted it when I asked, I could very easily have been the kind of person who filed a formal complaint against him or against the project he was working for. That's the kind of arithmetic of risk we're absolutely just used to doing. So: I double-checked what I was wearing, because phrasing the question as "I can't help that you keep referring to your partner..." in combination with sartorial signalling that maintains plausible deniability but is noticeable to someone else in-group? Signalled that I was safe, and I was asking him because I wanted him to be happy, rather than because I was going to give him grief over it.

That's why clothing is important, and why it's important to me to dress in ways that make people go "hmm", and why I think it's very different to one group of people claiming a monopoly or what have you: it's not about elitism or exclusion, it's about /flagging up to other people that you're safe/, and that if they need you to you'll have their back, and that failing that there's someone they can come grab for coffee at some point and whinge about heteronormativity and the fear that leads you to talk /around/ rather than /about/ your life and be understood. And beyond all that, it's for the kids: it's for the kids who'll spend an entire term watching me very carefully and not daring to ask and not daring to believe or even hope, up until I let them catch me wearing understated rainbow jewelry and I get to watch their worldview and their ambitions and their sense of belonging rearrange all at once, and I very carefully pretend that I haven't noticed and that they're not that transparent or that unguarded or that vulnerable.

That's why it matters.

Comments

[kihou.livejournal.com]

> "Ugh, I don't think it's fair that any one group should get the monopoly on bits of clothing and what they mean."

I'm just imagining your mom picketing outside a department store telling them to de-segregate their clothing lines. But somehow I doubt your mom objects to all the "mainstream" uses of clothes for social signaling in the same way.

[kaberett]

Actually she's generally pretty good on this one; not sure why she's picked here to dig her heels in, but I suspect she'll sort herself out once I've sent her the above.