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Ex aequo

versão impressa ISSN 0874-5560

Ex aequo  no.31 Lisboa jun. 2015

 

RECENSÕES

Geczy, Adam and Karaminas, Vicki (2013). Queer Style. London and New York, Bloomsbury, 208 pp.

Ece Canli1

 

1Design Researcher and PhD Candidate in Design at University of Porto, Portugal

Although recent investigations on gender and sexualities have attained a considerable space within cultural studies, there is still vast amount of unrevealed accounts on queer identity and its historical, cultural and social constructions. Queer Style, as a white knight for this need, splendidly fills the gap in queer history in its relation to fashion as one of the most important signifier of visual and material identity. Written by visual artist and arts scholar Adam Greczyand and fashion studies professor Vicki Karaminas, this groundbreaking book vibrant with extensive bibliographic research approaches to queerness through the language of garments, mannerisms and accessories; namely [life]style. The authors not only propound a historical background of the queer epoch, but also analyse socio-political impacts of queer look by regarding it both as the subject and the object of socio-sexual paradigm shifts. By melting the variety of subjects in the same pot successfully, the book bestows new knowledge on cultural studies, fashion studies, design studies, and naturally, queer studies.

Queer Style starts with a seminal introduction in which the authors elucidate their interpretation of queer and style and how these terms will be addressed throughout the following chapters. Whilst they do not deem queer a fixed essence of homosexuality but a greater subcultural phenomenon; they consider queer style as significant to queer subjectivity and its performance, as apparels and bodily instruments fabricate both material identity and social space of queer-self. On the trail of Butlerian performative and assigned gender, the book traces such assigned stylistic embodiments and aesthetics as a resistance, sometimes a manifestation of queer identity.

In this regard, what the authors promise is consistent with what the book offers to us. The first conspectus chapter entitled The Meaning of Style between Classic and Queer explicates how the rise of straightness reproduced the idea of queerness in order to sustain itself as standard and normal. Being blended with the eighteenth century’s homoerotic ideal Greek-Roman figuration that set a standard beauty in art and culture, the chapter recounts how from then on dresses and codes started undergoing a polarisation between what is acceptable and what is not. It reached its peak when modernist aesthetics came to the stage, associated artifice and flamboyance with gay, homosexual and feminine; and denigrated everything related to it.

The second chapter, called Lesbian Style: From Mannish Women to Lipstick Dykes, is sort of response to cliché prejudices that reckon lesbians as invisible or ugly mannish women. It demonstrates us how during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries – though mostly within Paris, London and Berlin – butch appearance in tuxedoes, cropped hair, suits and cigarettes were common and sprawled into lesbian bar cultures during the ‘40s and the ‘50s. The authors depart from the feminist liberation movements of the ‘60s and the ‘70s in which lesbians rejected strict roles of butch-femme that reproduced gender stereotypes and arrive at the ‘80s and ‘90s popular culture where gender-bending androgynous performances and cross-dressings were provoked as spectacle political force. The chapter saturninely ends by pointing out today’s miscellaneous identities from designer dykes to stone butches and to lipstick lesbians that subsist in fashion magazines and in TV series where lesbians’ visibility is normalised, fashioned and even straightened as a marketing strategy.

The following complementary chapter Gay Men’s Style: From Macaroni to Metrosexual depicts how effeminacy and visual representation started being linked with samesex desire during the nineteenth century. Geczy and Karaminas take us back to the eighteenth century’s exaggerated, extravagant and intriguing Macaronistyle whilst allocating a notable space for arty, aloof and poseur Dandy as the first important diffraction of Butler’s heterosexual-matrix. In following, we set on a journey to the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries of Avantgarde movement that hosted many dadaist and surrealist queer figures; to the ’60s’ ambiguous, androgynous and commodified sexuality which mediated queer style in the mainstream popular culture; and to the ‘70s’ bodybuilding trend that magnified masculinity just before the ‘80s’ art-fashion brought about extreme cross-dressings masquerades. When it comes to the present, the authors evince their concern that contemporary gay identity is vogue-styled, mixed with metrosexuality in the mainstream fashion magazines and TV shows that reduce gayness to a matter of choice than a political statement. However, they also accept the fact that for gay identity «charitable tolerance is increasingly ebbing to give way to acceptance» (p. 98).

The fourth chapter Kiss of the Whip: Bondage, Discipline and Sadomasochism or BDSM Style briefly explains the sense of sadomasochistic practices and gives us an overview about their vamp and leathery stylistic instruments linked to the institutional and organisational power such as police, and military; thus obeisance and punishment. Pacing from the ‘80s’ «power dressings» to motorcycle clubs as broad subcultural formations, the authors’ statement that «it is not actuality of power or submission that holds the sadist and masochist in thrall but the signs of power: images, words, costumes, scripts, uniforms» (p. 107) indicates the vital role of style and design apparatuses in such practices.

Having already given an account to cross-dressing practices in the previous topics, the fifth chapter Drag: Of Kings and Queens dedicates itself to dragging. Different from transvestism that passes to man or to woman by building the illusion of the other gender, the chapter states that drag imitates and plays with stereotypical characteristics of man and woman in an exaggerated staged performances in order to dislocate normative gender roles and hegemonic masculinity. It, despite its short content, gives us a tour to the times of divas and dames in the early drag balls of the nineteenth century and introduces us to the popular culture’s provocative pop drag icons. The featured account the authors emphasise in this section is the power of fashion with its stylistic surface markers such as hairstyles, accessories and garments to disguise the fact that fashion is about disguise, just like drag. Here we understand better how dragging, far from a mere masquerade of the opposite gender, can subvert gender norms by revealing how they are performed and imitated in everyday life. Borrowing Halberstam’s notion of female masculinity, the authors shed light on what the dominant paradigms of masculinities and their artificialities are; furthermore how they can be deconstructed through drags’ aesthetic choices in the way of transcending social acceptability.

Due to the consciousness of the authors that the book is not only about queer style, but Western queer style, especially within the boundaries of Western Europe and partially United States; the last chapter entitled Crossing Genders, Crossing Cultures crosses the continents toward East and pursues non-occidental queer practices, styles and culture-specific modes of being. By the effect that homosexuality «occurred» in Europe and that in some cultures there is no corresponding sexual identities or gender roles, the authors dwell on Eastern «third-sex» practices, their sartorial embodiments and manners as marker of status in their culture. They introduce us Japanese dandy style, Singaporean Mardi Gras boys, Albanian Sworn virgins, Polynesian gender crossings, Indian Hijras and Thai ladyboys and tomboys, despite their recent changes influencedby Western gender and queer scholarships in our global era.

With its highly literary and academic quality, Queer Style is utterly a potential reference guide for queer studies in the realm of material culture, arts and fashion. Moreover, it does not only offer a bland history, but also rich analyses and interpretations connecting past and present, historical and actual, representative and performative. The authors, thus, apparently achieve their intention of writing this book: to bring the queer style to the light; a style which «disrupts and destabilises cultural presumptions about sex and gender orders and creates possibilities of re-articulating and refraining meanings of gender» (p.139). On the other hand, it contains a few contextual shortcomings. First of all, although the writers clarify their use of queer as fluid and beyond binaries, yet inclusive, the hierarchy of the subjects takes place as it does in the mainstream: dominantly gay, secondarily lesbian, hardly transsexual, neither intersex and nor today’s anti-category queers. Secondly, although the cross-cultural chapter aims to explore «other» sexual beings, it does not succeed in detaching us from Western European and American context due to its geographical limitations and omission of criteria of «otherness».

Such limitations, nevertheless, are surmountable for a 208-page book, therefore, it is better to celebrate the Queer Style’s arrival and upcoming researches on the subject matter. This book gives us hope that even though we live in a post-subcultural era in which everything becomes mainstream, marketable and «recuperated» as Situationists would call, queer will always keep on reinventing itself. In the words of the authors, since «there is no queer style in and for itself; rather it exist as a multilayered form that both celebrates and desecrates in the same movement» (p.87), queer will remain ambiguous and erratic. The more society tries to stable it, the more it will be mercury-like slippery.

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