Evasive Dress: Misdirecting the Gaze through Queer and Trans Wedding Apparel

Drawing on a corpus of over fifty interviews with queer and trans people, this presentation will consider sartorial self-fashioning for the wedding as a means of navigating visibility for people with a keen understanding of the representational and political stakes of their weddings. In particular, it examines participants’ novel framings of their clothing through complex renderings of authenticity. In complicating the distinction between performance and authenticity, the interviews reveal the ways that queer and trans people use clothing to move between being visible and being hidden.

Bio

Ilya Parkins is Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Poiret, Schiaparelli, and Dior: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity, and co-Editor of several books and special issues about fashion and its intersections with feminist theory, affect, and fashion media. Her essays appears in venues such as Fashion Theory, Feminist Review, and Cultural Studies. Ilya’s current research investigates feminist and queer wedding apparel imaginaries.