Fashion Performativity By: Mia Petersen Why is it still considered questionable when men dress in feminine-coded clothing? The theory of performativity helps understand our own perception of clothing belonging to a gender. In this article, I analyze two cases to show how performativity relates to gender and to fashion, and why we should break away from putting things and people into (gendered) boxes. Mark Bryan and Myles Sexton show us a different way to approach fashion. Both men, one gay, the other straight, use skirts and high heels (typically coded as feminine) as their daily attire, breaking away from gendered stereotypes and empowering others through their social media channels.
Gender Ideology and Hegemony
Today’s fashion industry is still dominated by the belief that there are only two genders. We see it with the use of pink and blue colour codes at gender reveal parties, in baby and kids’ stores, as well as in most retail stores, designer boutiques, and department stores. But what we believe to be girly or boyish is an idea that is socially and commercially constructed in that we believe that clothing and colour belong to a specific gender, and that the two genders are supposed to act in a certain way. Yet, you can be feminine without having a female gender or sex, or be masculine without identifying as a man or having masculine body parts - or be somewhere on that binary spectrum without identifying with any gender. We naturalize cultural myths as biological facts because it suits material consumption practices, political ideologies, colonial exploitation, or gender-based discrimination and exclusion. We naturalize cultural myths as biological facts because it suits material consumption practices, political ideologies, colonial exploitation, or gender-based discrimination and exclusion3. We think about the body through the heterosexual lens and understand that to be the normative identification of who we are.
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Gender Performativity
Judith Butler argues that we are not our gender - we do (or perform) our genders. Performativity investigates the way we do our gender and how gender exists because of our cultural and social understanding of it. Biological sex has nothing to do with gender identities and in fact, because gender is socially constructed, there may not be such a thing as gender at all. Performativity also questions the categorizing and the psychological meaning of fashion. Feminine and masculine are tied to expressions and codes of being male or female, which are culturally imposed understandings of gender and sex. These codes prescribe that if you identify as female, you must be feminine. But our identity is not shaped by our sex or gender, but rather a moisaic of expressions across the binary spectrum that manifest how we see ourselves. But social constructions and codes of clothing, fashion, and gender norms are presented to us in terms of what is seen as “correct”, which can have the isolating effect of making us feel wrong in our own body, clothing, culture, and communities. Yet, if gender is performative, then we act, dress, or talk in a certain way that is expected of us to conform and perform as feminine or masculine because of social codes and expectations and not because it reflects our true selves. Gender identity is an act you do or perform, made up of social forces throughout history. So, if the gender norms of our society are imaginary, why can the way we dress not reflect our own imagination, creativity, and self-expression and why do we have to keep fitting in? Butler also argues that gender is not a noun but a verb. Our language plays a big role in the understanding of how we describe and see gender. Because we see it as a noun we think it exists on its own. Gender becomes something through practices of gendering that involve the body in a psychic and material way, often through fashion choices, repetitions and variations of performativity.
