Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Transgender Embodiment in Fashion and Beauty, Jun 2024

More than 5 million pairs of falsies, also known as bust pads, were sold in the United States in 1946, exceeding prior sales records. In the postwar United States, falsies were an increasingly popular way of shaping the body into a fashionable curvaceous silhouette and utilized the latest in wartime synthetic material developments. Falsies were an important part of trans and queer life. However, these wearers and makers have been largely omitted from histories of fashion, foundationwear and material culture. This article traces the trans feminine history of falsies and other padded foundationwear in the postwar United States. The author analyses a range of archival materials largely sourced from the Digital Transgender Archive including publications and print ephemera from the 1950s–70s to show how trans feminine, queer and gender-nonconforming people innovated falsie design through DIY practices. While the majority of individuals in the postwar United States were unable to access trans healthcare and anti-trans legislation continued to publicly police bodies, trans feminine networks circulated information on how to purchase, wear and make padded foundations. These collective efforts empowered wearers and built community in a variety of ways.

This article investigates the artist Sin Wai Kin’s (單慧乾) speculative approach to drag through the prism of ‘transgendering-assemblages’. Influenced by the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda and Jasbir Puar, I propose that transgendering-assemblages actualize the properties of transness (Marquis Bey) through particular trans techniques (Grace E. Lavery). I introduce Sin’s more-than-human trans techniques, from make-up to costume, and approach to nonbinary storytelling to investigate identity assemblages more broadly. With explicit attention to their engagement with Chinese opera and Taoism, the speculative boyband in Sin’s Turner Prize nominated work It’s Always You (2021) prompts my proposal for ‘boybanding’ as a technique for investigating identity assemblages. The final section is focused on the genderings of East Asian masculinities in Sin’s work to argue how all gender-assemblages are also ‘racializing assemblages’ (Alexander G. Weheliye). I conclude with a provocation on what assemblage as a nonbinary concept (defined by what it does rather than what it is) can offer studies of gender.

Discourses around Afghan women’s fashion and beauty during the so-called War on Terror have been used to justify interventions and war. From the Beauty Academy of Kabul to Vogue’s Burqa series, Afghan women have lurked within the possibilities and impossibilities of the traditionally oppressed and modernly liberated. Trans Afghan women have remained invisible. Building on the feminist critique of the discourse of beauty in Afghanistan, this article brings into conversation the everyday performances of fashion and beauty in the lives of murat, trans Afghan women. Through a de/colonial ethnography of three murat/trans Afghan women in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Dublin, Ireland, I argue that clandestine fashion for some murat/trans Afghan women becomes means of belonging and sites of negotiations with home and exile. Some use fashion to escape the everyday violence of war and refugeeism, while others use it to disrupt the heterosexist gaze on the streets of metropolitan cities such as Kabul and Dublin and give visibility to trans women and their embodiment of fashion as political acts of resistance. ‘Clandestine fashion’ and beauty embodiment and performances of these trans Afghan women shed light on everyday security, friendship/kinship, joy and the complexities of trans refugee life during times of war and exile.

This article traces the material effects of Black trans death on Black trans life, particularly in the dimensions of aesthetics, fashion and beauty. I use a Black trans hauntological approach to analyse recordings of Balls, film and television, and personal anecdotes of Black transness in order to develop a transtemporal mapping between ghosts and their haunted subjects. On the one hand, my research builds upon a growing field of work in Black queer and trans studies that looks at Black trans life and its relationship with the ‘afterlife’. On the other, it critiques the liberal humanism that grounds much of fashion studies, thus foregrounding subjects, methodologies and worlds that are still under-researched within the field. By focusing on the practice of dressing, and specifically on the autonomous garmenting of trans people, I show how the violated and murdered Black trans person’s haunting can be traced materially. At the centrepiece of this article is the interrogation of how contemporary dressing practices of ‘living’ Black trans people invoke and are possessed by the ghosts of anti-trans violence. Found in the reciprocal relationship of invocation and possession is the mutual care transmitted between and through the barriers of Black trans life and death.