← Dressed: The History of Fashion
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- [00:00]
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- [00:56]
Cassidy Zachary
Find your American Express card and start earning rewards with cash back and bonus points on your everyday purchases. Like dining in or eating out, shopping at your favorite retail stores, or picking up groceries. You can earn rewards when you use amex. See if you pre qualify with no impact on your credit score. Learn more about our offers@americanexpress.com check for offers. Your credit score may be impacted if you submit an application. Terms apply. Dress Listeners, Please enjoy this episode from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows. You have been very patient with us and we assure you Dressed will be back with all new content in the form of Season eight. Can you believe it? We have so many wonderful things up our sleeves that we cannot wait to share with you. But until then, please consider heading to dressedhistory.com where you'll find information regarding our upcoming fashion history tours of Paris and New York, which are both open for registration and selling fast. And while you are there, also consider signing up for our upcoming online course offerings, which include what Women Wore to the Revolution coming your way in May. More from Dressed coming your way very soon. There were 7 billion people in the world. We all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get dressed.
- [02:20]
April Callahan
Welcome to Dressed, the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what, when? Of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts.
- [02:29]
Cassidy Zachary
April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary, welcome Dressed listeners. As we've talked about many, many times on Dressed, gendered fashion in its most basic incarnation is this societally constructed, diametrically opposed idea that that dresses are for women, trousers are for men, et cetera, et cetera. And as we've also discussed in the show, pants have perhaps lost that gender distinction. But the dress, skirt, high heels have overwhelmingly not. And I want to emphasize the word constructed because even as logic might tell us that clothing is an inanimate object. How can it possibly have a gender? Society repeatedly tells us that it does.
- [03:14]
April Callahan
Yeah, absolutely. And if you really think about it, Cass, we are socially conditioned from a very young age to not only perform a gendered identity, but to see it. And gender is mapped onto everything from our physical bodies to our actions and our emotions to the careers we choose or are chosen for us in other cases, the products we use and for our intents and purposes today, the clothing that we all wear.
- [03:39]
Cassidy Zachary
But just how did clothing, and by extension beauty standards and practices, how did that become gendered? A process that was years in the making. And so for answers we are going to turn to the expert. Today's guest, Alok Vad Menon. Alok is a gender non conforming wearer of many fabulous hats, including performance artists, poet, designer, public speaker, writer, scholar. And Alok is one of the most important and exciting voices working with and in fashion today. And they join us for an important two part conversation on the past, present and future of gendered and degendered fashion. And you may never look at clothing the same dress listers.
- [04:21]
April Callahan
And this is a particularly important conversation at a time when an unprecedented amount of anti trans legislation is sweeping the United States. As Alok will remind us today, this is nothing new. There is a strong historical precedent to be found in the 19th and 20th century America when cities across the country passed a series of anti cross dressing laws that made it illegal to dress in clothing that was not assigned to quote one's sex. And these laws themselves have antecedents in imperialist projects intent on controlling colonized individuals. All of these examples represent active and purposeful erasure of non gender conforming individuals from society by literally policing them into the gender binary of male and female, man and woman.
- [05:13]
Cassidy Zachary
But as Alok will also show us, gender identity is a spectrum. And wherever there has been gender policing historically and today, there are individuals living within and beyond the gender binary who brazenly resist and defy it.
- [05:27]
April Callahan
And we are so pleased to have Alok with us today. Alok, welcome to Dressed.
- [05:32]
Cassidy Zachary
Alok, welcome to Dressed. I am so excited to have you here today.
- [05:35]
Alok Vaid-Menon
I am fangirling because I've been a long fan of Dressed and so when I got your email I was like, it's happening.
- [05:42]
Cassidy Zachary
I've written that email a couple different times. Let's just say I'm a huge fan and admirer of your work. This is really an honor for me. So I thank you so much to jump off our conversation. Alok, can you Give us a brief introduction to the gender binary and how it relates to gendered clothing and what you mean when you say we need to move beyond the gender binary.
- [06:05]
Alok Vaid-Menon
So the gender binary is the cultural decision to divide billions of people into one of two genders and sexes. That's man or male, woman or female, that are seen as distinct, opposite and intention or conflict. I say cultural decision intentionally because the gender binary will naturalize itself as a biological fact when it is anything but. It's a decision with historical and cultural parameters, not a universal frame of reality. What the gender binary does, as you're alluding to, is recruit human and non human objects into the saga of its story that says things like women are weaker than men, or men are less emotional than women, or pants are somehow masculine. And so we circulate these stereotypes and tropes as if they are truths and rarely take a second to be like, hey, an article of clothing is an inanimate object that does not think like, of course, when I say clothes have no gender, what I mean is that anyone can put on a skirt regardless of their gender. And that's the same thing around anger. Anger is an emotion that we all feel. Why are we gendering it? So what the gender binary does is it recruits these things into saying that they are biological truths when they're not. And then what the gender binary does is it requires us to erase anyone and anything that challenges its authority. So what this has looked like historically, especially in the past few centuries, is the mutilation of intersex children and the policing of intersex people into the binary of male and female. And for those listeners who might not be aware, intersex people are a natural variation of our species who are born with sexual characteristics that defy this easy categorization of male or female. This also looks like the erasure of gender non conforming people who defy these traditional gender norms and the continued attempt to disappear trans people who show that these gender categories are not fixed and absolute. So in this way, the gender binary has two parts. The promotion of gender stereotypes and the punishment of gender nonconformity. And I think that that sort of bi vocal part of it often doesn't get discussed enough. And I want people to understand then from that framework, violence against transgender non conforming people is foundational to the gender binary. So oftentimes when people speak about discrimination against trans people, they see it as exceptional or as just like, you know, something that happens on a spin off occasion because of individual prejudice. But the reframe I'M trying to offer here today is that in order for the gender binary to exist, I cannot. And so in that way, the reason that trans and gender non conforming people are hunted and attacked is because we present a livable alternative to this house of mirrors that postures itself as reality.
- [09:45]
Cassidy Zachary
You write in your wonderful book beyond the Gender Binary that quote, while the actual words might be new, living beyond the gender binary is not, as you just alluded to, non gender conforming individuals, and by extension, non gender conforming dress and beauty practices have existed for millennia before Western gender norms and roles were literally enforced on people around the world through colonization. Can you give us some examples of these people and practices?
- [10:15]
Alok Vaid-Menon
Absolutely. So unfortunately, in 2021, we've seen the most ever number of anti trans legislation being debated and passed in the United States. And I've been reviewing what a lot of these politicians are saying in their justifications of this legal assault. And one of the reoccurring themes is that trans and non binary people are new or that we're some newfangled millennial Gen Z Internet phenomenon. And we know, especially in this podcast, that history is valuable because it can enter the chat and say, no, this is not unprecedented. And that having access to history is about having access to legitimacy. And so the truth is it's not that transgender non conforming people are new. It's that we've been written out of history. And the reason we've been written out of history is so much because of colonization. So we have evidence of thousands of years of people living proudly and defiantly outside of the western gender binary. That looks like Hijra Kothi Arvani people in what is now South Asia. That looks like Faafafine people in the Pacific Islands. That looks like Mushe people in Mexico, Bacla people in the Philippines, two spirit indigenous peoples in the Americas. We have so many evidence of indigenous names and terms to describe people who did not fit into these easy categories of man or woman. And then one of the first things that colonists did was impose gender norms that were from Europe and then to criminalize cross dressing. So the thing about criminalizing cross dressing is that for many people, it wasn't even considered cross dressing. It wasn't seen as transgressive gender norms for a man to have long hair or for a woman to be bare chested, that was just how people adorn themselves. So the creation of cross dressing is linked to the law. The law doesn't just demonize, it also designates and defines. And so what that looked like where my people are from in India is the British sought a complete cultural genocide of gender variant people where they were trying to essentially eliminate the possibility of anyone ever being trans or gender non conforming. They would require gender variant people to register themselves with the police and check in to make sure that they weren't quote, unquote, cross dressing, even though this is what they've been doing for hundreds of years. But when I have this conversation, I also have recently been letting people know it's not just that there are examples of gender variant people in indigenous communities and communities of color across the world. Even as recent as 100 years ago in the US there was this acknowledgment. So in the early 1900s, there was actually the term third sexer that was used to describe fairies, mollys and other gender non conforming people in urban cities. In Chicago, New York, Los angeles. In the 1930s in the US we were in something called the pansy craze. And at the peak of the pansy craze, there were visibly gender nonconforming people who were wearing dresses and makeup outside, who were socially understood as women and the working class districts that they were a part of. This erasure isn't just about international existence of trans and gender conforming people. It's also even within white Euro American culture. That's the deep amount of disappearance. Is that as recent as less than a century ago? We have newspaper clippings that acknowledge people living outside of the binary, and yet people are saying that we're new. So the intervention that I try to make is rather than focusing on the novelty of our emergence, what if we focus instead on the design of our disappearance? What if we move the onus to think about how do you naturalize us not existing when we've always been alongside you?
- [14:16]
Cassidy Zachary
Yeah, it's a project of erasure, an active project of erasure. And there's books dedicated to this very topic. There's a wonderful book called the Straight State by Margot Cannaday that basically talks about how the binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality was part of the building of American bureaucracy. As the American state was built in the 20th century, so too was this heteronormative construct. And the entire book is fabulous because she looks to history and shows you the ways in which we start out with third sex concepts. We start out with these ideas and how they're actively morphed into this binary across the 20th century, through legislation, through law, through the military. It's really, really incredible. Once you look to history and bring receipts like you do so well in all of your work, to show that this is. This is a process that's existed for many, many years. And this is something that I investigate in my own research or I'm interested in, is how fashion, especially in the 19th century, was used as an imperial tool in various projects. Over and over again. In the historical archive, we see the ways in which white colonizers use clothing as evidence of their civility and superiority to differently clothed, indigenous and foreign others repeatedly used as justification for colonial projects. So this segues perfectly into my next question, which is about gender, clothing, and how clothing became gendered in the process of imperialism. In many ways, I'd love if you could talk about its connections to imperialism and why you think it's played such a significant role in the categorizing of bodies historically. And that's not just by gender, but also by race.
- [16:00]
Alok Vaid-Menon
So what I really first want to get people to understand is that when I'm saying that the gender binary or the sex binary were created in the 19th century, a lot of people will say, no. There's examples of men and women from hundreds of years before. But what I'm alluding to when I say that is that our modern definitions of what defines a man or woman that we now use in the 21st century emerge in the 19th century. So defining sex by genitals, defining sex as a binary, that's oppositional. Those kinds of ideas emerge. And what's really important to understand here is, is that, of course, there have been other gender and sex binaries across the world. But this particular modern European dichotomy begins in the 19th century. And fashion is one of its primary tools. So for a long time, even in European history, ornamentality was not a gendered thing in fashion. Ornamentality had more to do with class, caste, religion, than it had to do with gender. So you would have men wearing wigs, men wearing makeup, men wearing heels, men wearing lace, men wearing very pretty garments. But then what you begin to see in the 19th century is this idea that bifurcated clothing can only be worn by men, like pants. And that sort of ornamental or adornment is only the domain of women. And so ornamentality became sex specific in the Western gender binary, which meant that only women were supposed to be concerned with questions of fashion and adornment, even though we know that men have always been concerned about fashion and dormant. But the fantasy project is that beauty and fashion are the realm of womanhood. And so what this looks like is a strict separation of gender, dress codes, where women would be punished for wearing anything that was associated with men, and men would be punished for wearing anything that was associated with women. And this looked like cross dressing laws that emerged in the United states in the 1840s and on that made it a criminal act for women to wear pants in public. Right. Which I think a lot of people are shocked to hear that it used to be illegal and that women would actually often be physically attacked for wearing pants in public. But that was the stakes. So then people might be wondering why, like, why were they so concerned with gendering fashion? Well, it had to do with people's role in society. So what you began to see also 19th century, is the hyper clarification of men's role in white society and women's role in white society. Men's role was allowed to have access to the public sphere of rights, education, leadership, whereas women were meant to be confined to the domestic sphere. And once again, these are all bourgeois fantasies. There were, of course, women workers, and there were, of course, men who didn't work. But that's the thing about gender norms, is that they take an illusory world, and we all regulate our lives through them, even though they don't even apply to our experiences. So even though women were being depicted as frail and weak and meek, they were still working in coal mines. That's the irony about all of this, and this is the point I'm trying to make to people, is that gender norms don't make sense to anyone's lived reality. So the reason fashion became so politicized in this way was to justify the economic sexual separation of spheres, the division of society into these binary lines of women being in the domestic sphere, men being in the public sphere. Now, this was actually also a function of race. And this piece, I'm really glad that you're bringing up the question of imperialism, because it often gets lost in a lot of feminist historical criticism. You read a lot of feminist historians, even feminist historians of fashion, talking about women being confined to the parlor. But the parlor was in so many ways emblematic of whiteness. And so much of where the way white men would justify white supremacy was by saying, unlike indigenous communities, they are savage matriarchies. So part of the ways that they would demonize indigenous people, black people, and communities of color was by saying, women in those communities work, women in those communities have leadership positions. Then another function that they would do is they would turn to describing the fashion and adornment of indigenous people, black people, and people of color, and say, look at the men wearing makeup, look at the men wearing accessories and dresses, look at the women being bare chested. And then they would use Western gender norms to say that these people were gender nonconforming, sexually indistinct, sexually ambiguous. So by depicting communities of color as gender non conforming, they could then justify racism against them. One of my favorite examples to talk about this is the history of Indian and Chinese migration in the US in the early 1900s. Part of the way xenophobia against Asian migrants was justified was by depicting our communities as queer and gender non conforming. So newspapers would say that underneath the turban of Indian men was actually a woman with long hair hiding in disguise. And they would depict Chinese men wearing traditional Chinese clothing as feminized. And the idea was the ornate, and that word keeps on coming up, especially in fashion history, the ornate kind of aesthetics of Asia were going to come and blur the gender lines and markers of Western society. So in this way, the gender binary is actually a function of colonialism that's about creating this narrative of white supremacy that says, and this is like people like Krafft Ebing, a famous European sexologist in the 19th century, saying that as civilizations evolve, and this is of course a misuse of Darwin's theories of evolution, they perfect the distinction between male and female. And so they would say that indigenous people, black people, and people of color had not evolved as much as Western civilization. That's why they didn't have as clear and gender specific dress codes. And that's why white women would literally go to indigenous lands across the world and teach indigenous women how to dress. So there would be this idea of, you don't know that being bare chested is a marker of your savagery. So here, put on this dress. You don't know how to iron, so here, let me teach you how to iron. And the colonial feminist mentality was, you have to be oppressed as women before you can be liberated as women. Which is such a perverse way of thinking that white feminism gives us.
- [23:11]
Cassidy Zachary
I'm actually really happy that you brought up the role of white women for so long. Starting in the 60s, you have all these feminist historians who start writing women back into the historical record to counteract that patriarchal grip on history writing, right? We all these women were written out of the record. Let's write them back in. But they're writing back in white women, right? And they're making them heroes of their own narratives. And they're not addressing the fact that white women were slave owners and that white women, you were Referencing teaching indigenous women how to dress. They also ripped indigenous children away from their families, put them into boarding schools, and then literally were trying to teach them how to be white. And one of the ways they taught them and were seeking to acclimate them was through clothing. And the fact that these women were. There's a lot of scholarship about this now, but how these white women were basically using indigenous women to make themselves seen in society, to up their position and allow themselves a public position and professional positions by using feminist maternalist notions to push forward the colonial project.
- [24:16]
Alok Vaid-Menon
Right. There's no one more emblematic of this than Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who is one of the most prolific white feminist writers in the early 1900s. So what's important for people listening to understand is that when white women began to demand political rights, that didn't just challenge patriarchy, it challenged the logics of white supremacy that required women's subordination in order for there to be this racial supremacy. And so when you read a lot of the pushback against the suffragist movement in the early 20th century, men would say, we're going to racially devolve if we allow women the right to vote. And there would be this idea that if women got the right to vote, they would start wearing pants, be bearded and hairy, and that they would lose the sex based distinction that white people differentiated themselves from communities of color from. So what white feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman did is rather than saying, hey, this entire system is racist, they found a way to say, I promise blurring the sex based distinction is good for the race. What she would basically say, and she wrote a book on dress reform where she was advocating for white women to be able to wear what they want and not have to be confined into what she saw as uncomfortable, restrictive clothing. She would basically say that white women could join white men in the pursuit of civilization across the world. So rather than actually saying, our natural solidarity should be with black and indigenous people against this entire racist colonial system, many of our key white feminist leaders in the early 20th century instead conceded the ground to colonialism and said, we're going to join you. And in fact, often some of their first leadership positions were in these colonial projects. And the way that that maps into fashion today and the work I do today is really important to me because there's still this pervasive myth that femininity is owned by white women. So so much of the undertones of a lot of transphobia actually echo the same claims that white feminists made to black and Indigenous women in the early 20th century, where they would tell black women, indigenous women, you're not women enough yet to be part of feminism. You have to change the way that you dress. You have to join the cult of the true woman in order for us to be taking you seriously. Now we're seeing the racial afterlives of that in contemporary transphobia, where there's this idea that trans people are invading into some realm or that femininity is not organic to us, which is historically incorrect because I have the citations and receipts to show you that much of the contemporary beauty and fashion trends that we now associate with women actually came from queer and trans people who were the first people to wear full faces of painted makeup in this country. Drag queens, trans people and sex workers who were the people who innovated so many of our contemporary fashion trends. Trans people and drag queens who people would come to our shows and performances from the late 1800s, copy our entire aesthetics, sell them to vogue, and make them go mainstream. So the paradox that we find ourselves in as trans and gender non conforming people in the 21st century is we're being policed out of gender norms that we materially helped make. And that's such a perverse construction to be told that we're somehow new, when in fact our aesthetic sartorial genius is what has created the very structures that are trying to displace us now.
- [28:01]
Cassidy Zachary
You were recently on Liver and Cox's podcast, which I'm a huge fan of now. I had never. I didn't. I was not aware that she had a podcast. And now I am. I have been like, making. Doing a lot of catch up. But you both were talking about how trans people are basically like, living the feminist dream. Like, this is what feminism is supposed to be. Which I thought was so, so fascinating and so absolutely true.
- [28:29]
Alok Vaid-Menon
Yes. You know, when I was saying what Charlotte Perkins Gilman did is she conceded that the sex binary still had to exist. So it's so funny because if you read their work, there's so much promising stuff there. They're basically being like, I know that you're afraid that if we wear pants that people aren't gonna be able to tell the difference between men and women. But I promise you still will be able to tell. When in fact the more rebellious thing would be, like, why do you need to tell the difference? You know, like, why is that so important to you? And that's what trans and gender non conforming people are actually doing, is we're continuing a feminist tradition where we're Actually saying feminism is a challenge of the gender and sex binary, not a concession or assimilation into. Because I want listeners to really understand the gender binary was not just created to oppress gender trans people. We were kind of an afterthought. Actually. It was first created to oppress cisgender women because what the gender binary was about was about telling cisgender women, you can't go to school because biologically you're just meant for reproduction. Eugenicists like Herbert Spencer would describe women as the sex sacrificed for reproduction. So the only role of women under white civilization was, was to be mothers. If women had any aspirations, ambitions, economic interests outside of reproduction, they were literally lobotomized by eugenicists. So that was part of the gender binary. Policing you back into this category of mother. And what trans and gender non conforming people are actually saying is only you get to determine what your role in society is. Only you get to determine what your body's functions are. Only you get to determine what your body is, how you dress and adorn yourself. And then I think the next piece that I really want people to understand too is there were gender non conforming feminists who were involved in the suffrage struggle. We have a deep and long history of lesbian women who are wearing pants before anyone else did. It's interesting because a lot of times when we speak and write about the dress reform movement in the early 20th century, we speak about people like Amelia Bloomer, other white women who were pushing gendered fashion codes. But the actual people who were dealing with the brunt of it were lesbians and gender non conforming people who were people like Stormy was at the Stonewall rebellions in 1969 and was a stage performer constantly dressing up in men's clothes, wearing mustaches, gender nonconforming and butcher women who at the time identified as women are often used different words to describe themselves. So the work that I'm doing now is a continuation of that feminist legacy of actually being like my body. My choice extends to the way that we dress as well.
- [31:14]
Cassidy Zachary
Absolutely. And we are going to talk more about all of this when we get back from a short sponsor break.
- [31:23]
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- [31:48]
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- [32:28]
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- [33:24]
Cassidy Zachary
Welcome back dress listeners. So Alok, the control and categorization of bodies extends beyond clothing to include hair. And I know that many of our listeners can relate to me when I say that I could not wait to shave when I was a preteen. It was this rite of passage. I did it without telling my mother. I cut myself. I mean it was very all very exciting. As a 12 year old girl, body hair is absolutely stigmatized in our society. Something like 99% of US women remove their body hair, which is an astonishing number. And I wonder how many of us, and I certainly haven't until being exposed to your work, stop to think why? Why do we shave? And alok, I know you have the answer to this question and it dates back to the 19th century. So please share.
- [34:17]
Alok Vaid-Menon
So my knowledge around this is indebted to Dr. Rebecca Herzog's amazing scholarship. In particular, her book plucked A History of Hair Removal. So I refer people to that for more citations. But in the meaning of the conversation I was alluding to how racist eugenicists and social Darwinists would use Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as a way to justify their racism with the idea that as races evolve across time, they moved towards perfection of civilization. So the narrative became that white people had evolved farther than black and indigenous people who were seen as stuck in a kind of racial past. So part of this language also gave birth to this term called atavism. Atavism was a term that society used to describe features in the race that were savage leftovers that had accidentally not been pruned out through racial evolution. So what we see happen in the late 19th, early 20th century is body hair on women becomes seen as a form of racial atavism, a lingering vestige from the primitivity and animality that the white race has moved from. So if one of the ways that white civilization justified its racism was by saying we have a clear distinction between men and women, how do you visually display that distinction? Through fashion and through body hair. These become two locations where you can aesthetically create a distinction between what men and women look like and then make the illusion that all men are hairy and all women are hairless, which is just not true. There's so many hairy women listening to this right now who know that is absolutely not the case. And so what happened is that in the early 20th century, there was an all out attack on women's body hair, and hairlessness became seen as a emblem of white womanhood. And so what would happen is that immigrant communities, we're talking here, predominantly Italian, Jewish, Eastern European immigrant women, would go through X ray epilation, dying in the numbers of thousands because it would be told to them, if you remove your body hair, that's how you'll become a true American woman. Dr. Herzig says is that body hair removal became a social ritual of assimilating into whiteness. It was all based off of this racial paradigm that having body hair made you closer to being an animal or made you closer to being a person of color. This is such a great example of how these foundationally racist principles get coded through gender. And this is something that I really want people to understand because I still see gender and race often discussed as completely separate phenomenon. And I think you're alluding to that when you're speaking about feminist historical work that will engage white women leaders for their proto feminist politic, but then not actually speak about the ways that they thought about slavery or colonization and somehow understand women as outside of blackness, indigeneity, race and imperialism, which is just not true or fair. What I hope that you begin to understand through listening to this podcast is that gender is a modality of racism and has been and continues to be. So. The policing of gender norms is about the maintenance of white supremacy. And that means that the reason that we're seeing so much backlash against trans and gender non conflict people, it's not just a gender issue, it's a racial justice issue. So if we understand that there have been black and brown gender non conforming people since the beginning of time, and that it was our communities that were first targeted by colonists as a way to indoctrinate people into the Western gender binary, then we have to understand now that we're still informed by that history and that so much of the contemporary animus against trans people is this colonial history. And I think what's deeply concerning to me as a trans person is all of me and my community know these histories so well. We know the ways in which we've always been here. And yet the mainstream feminist conversation, this country continues to posture us as new, as if we're knocking on a door for acceptance, which makes no historical sense whatsoever.
- [38:43]
Cassidy Zachary
Yeah, and you spoke about it a little bit earlier, but it's been an active project to erase and right trans individuals and non gender conforming individuals. Really, anyone who doesn't subscribe to this heteronormative ideal that was constructed, actively constructed, purposefully constructed, you're erased or dismissed. And this leads me to my next question, which is about gender policing, because you speak about gender policing and beyond the gender binary, and I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit later, but this has strong historical antecedents and actual law and legislation enacted historically to control and categorize bodies through clothing. Can you please talk about the history of anti trans legislation in the United States?
- [39:28]
Alok Vaid-Menon
So from the 1840s until mid 20th century, there were hundreds of pieces of anti cross dressing legislation passed across us. These would often be known as mass aid laws. And they essentially forbade anyone to appear in public disguised, quote, unquote, in a costume. These were selectively used to target LGBTQ communities. In the 20th century, our community referred to this as the three article law, meaning we had to wear at least three articles of clothing associated with our assigned sex, otherwise risk being thrown into prison. And I want to remind people here, babies aren't born in dresses or in pants. So when they're saying three articles of clothing that correspond with your sexual, that is a cultural decision to say that pants are men dressed as women, that makes no sense. But that all the fashion historians and theorists will understand, that's because in our society, fashion is not just that which adorns the body. It is its own body. And that's an intervention. I think that fashion theorists and historians have been trying to say forever is that you can't speak about the social choreographies of race, gender and class without talking about fashion. Because fashion is a material structure through which meanings of race, class and gender are produced and generated. Which is why fashion needs to be part of everyone's analysis and imagination. But that's another talk. So what would essentially happen is we'd be thrown into prison. And what I really want people to understand here is that when people were writing us up, they would literally describe what our outfits were. So fashion police was not a metaphor for us. It would be police officers being like, he had a painted face and these long earrings and this garish gown. Like, it's like they were literally Joan Rivers, like, writing our fashion for the police. And then they would often make us take photo shoots in the prisons and then post our photos in the newspapers as a way to make it so that we could never seek formal employment again. And they would sometimes even publish the names and addresses of people, which would ruin people's entire lives. And what Dr. Claire Sears does amazing work on this. And their book, Arresting Dress, also says, this is about enlisting the public to be able to spot and identify cross dressers. Now, what we can understand here is that this is how the gender binary works. It has to erase people who contradict it so that people think that there's no other alternative. I want you to ask yourself, why don't I see visibly gender non conforming people in public? Why don't I see people with beards and miniskirts walking in my supermarket? That's not because these people don't exist. That's because policing of gender punishes us for existing, makes us have to be disappeared from the public so that people can believe the myth that there's only two choices. What we're seeing now in 2021 is a continuation of this historic project. The goal has always been genocidal, meaning the goal has always been, let's make it impossible to live a visibly gender non conforming, visibly trans and visibly intersex life. And once again, trans and gender non conforming intersex people. This is not just about us. This is about everyone. Because what they're trying to tell you is you're never allowed to question your gender. In fact, in North Carolina, they were trying to pass a law that would require school administrators to tell Parents if their children were questioning gender norms. So they were literally making thinking a crime. And this is how the project works is it actually normalizes the gross abrogation of consent for all people. Every person out there was never asked, hey, do you want to be a man or woman? What does being a man or woman mean to you? What would it look like if even non trans people were allowed to have those conversations as young people? What do you want to wear? How do you want to present yourself today? Who do you love actually given permission and license and creation? So so much of the reason I am interested in fashion is because trans people didn't just comply with the cross dressing laws. We actually used fashion as a modality of resistance. One of my favorite stories and icons is that of Sir Lady Java. Sir Lady Java was a black and native trans woman in Los Angeles who used to perform in LA in the 50s and 60s and was known as a local icon. One time, 50 LAPD Police officers came to one of her shows to arrest her under cross dressing law. She pointed to her tie, her wristwatch, and I think one other thing on her shoes maybe, and said, see, I am wearing three articles of clothing for a man. You can't arrest me. And she turned them away. And then she started to protest. And her activism was responsible for the repeal of Article 9, which made drag performances illegal in the city of Los Angeles. So what I find across the historical archive is that trans and gender nonconforming people, rather than just complying with these unambitious and unfabulous dress codes, said, I'm going to be me and I'm going to be glamorous and you have to change, not me as an individual.
- [44:56]
Cassidy Zachary
Yeah. And actually the digitization of sources over the last 10 or 15 years has brought these voices to the fore in this unprecedented way. No longer can you say they didn't exist because they are here. You can find them in the historical record. And historians like Claire Sears, Peter Bogue, who we had on as a guest, Channing Gerard Joseph, are all working to bring these voices to the fore and say, no, they've always been here. And it's super interesting because we've been talking about the active erasure of trans people from the historical record. And so a lot of the ways that these historians find these voices and find these individuals is through, like, as you mentioned, newspaper articles, through arrest records. Channing Gerard Joseph, who I just mentioned, has a forthcoming book about William Dorsey Swan, who's the first described drag queen found in the archive because they were arrested so many times for hosting drag balls in the 19th century. You mentioned Claire Sears. They introduced readers to Jean Bonnet, who was arrested more than 20 times for Cross dressing and declared, you may send me to jail as often as you wish, but you can never make me wear women's clothing again. So these people are actively resisting. They're resilient and they're resistant. And so finding their agency is part and parcel of this historical rewriting of history. You mentioned Sir Lady Java. Is there anyone else you'd like to introduce us to? Any other people that you've met?
- [46:24]
Alok Vaid-Menon
I just did a book report on this in my Instagram. But one book that has moved me so deeply is called the Fabulous Life of Sylvester. And people might know Sylvester from his amazing song, you, Make Me Feel Mighty Real. But they don't know Sylvester's history, which is that Sylvester was a homeless queer teenager in Los Angeles who's part of a group of trans and drag queens called the Discotees that used to carry rags in their back pocket to wipe off their makeup before the police came and arrested them. And. And Sylvester was continually asked throughout their life, are you a man or a woman? And they'd say, darling, I'll be whatever you want me to be. And was a fierce commitment to individuality, such that music execs kept on telling Sylvester, you will make more money, you will become more mainstream if you just tone it down. And Sylvester said, I'm going to rev it all the way up. And Sylvester is a possibility model for me. And I really have such a deep and intimate relationship with history because it can feel so lonely and isolating to be the only gender non conforming person walking down a street, even in a city like New York City, and to have everyone staring at me. But what I try to do is I try to remember that people like Sylvester, like Sir Lady Java, that people like Ms. Major and Sylvia Rivera, they walked the same streets that I did, felt the same fear that I did. But the reason that they gave the world their beauty was to create permission for me to expand, to allow my wings to emerge, to feel like I'm part of the sacred tradition. And that is a different register to understand fashion. So often the ways that we speak about fashion is still in this dominant patriarchal frame that says that we get dressed and adorned as a way to impress or entice the male gaze. But I wonder, what if trans and gender non conforming people were getting glammed and dressed up for each other? What if we're actually saying we live in A world that tells us that we don't exist. So we're documenting our existence here on this face, with this makeup and this outfit. What if fashion for us is about creating a living memorial for all that we were and all that we could be? What if fashion was part of our spiritual and political practice? I think that oftentimes the state recognizes our power more than we do. Why were they trying to disappear us for wearing what we wanted? Was it that the state understood that dressing can actually be a form of rebellion that creates and births possibilities for people to imagine ways of loving, living, and looking outside of the gridlock of heteronormativity? I think so. And so what I find in my work over and over again is people don't understand why I'm so insistent on politicizing style. But when you familiarize yourself with this historical archive, I don't think that there's any other way. People fought for the right to wear what they wanted to wear because they knew it was not just about what they looked, it was about the kind of world that they wanted to live in.
- [49:33]
Cassidy Zachary
In your podcast interview with Laverne Cox, you said that you view the presence of the arrests in the archives that you just mentioned as your trans foremothers writing love letters to those who don't exist yet. And I just thought that was such a beautiful sentiment and way of looking at the historical archive as something that you can relate to and use in the present.
- [49:54]
Alok Vaid-Menon
Yes. I truly feel like so much of the work that I do is about understanding that in five years, 50 years, 500 years, there will be people who I can't even imagine that will exist. And that is what I love about history. I'm such a history buff and nerd, is that I realize that I'm living people's wildest dreams. Like they would have never thought that I could be doing the things that I'm doing. And so I recognize I'm only able to do it because of the Sylvester's of the world, who were probably deeply and impossibly lonely, who probably felt like freaks and insecure, and they did it anyways. And I think that for me is the importance of material culture. And I think why I design and why I'm interested in fashion is it allows me to create something physical that encapsulates the kind of imagination that I have. What I think fashion does is it brings artistry into every arena. So in the US we're comfortable with art when it's on a stage or when it's in a gallery. Or when it's on a billboard. But when we bring art to a grocery store or a subway, people start to say, that's too much. To which I respond, why have you not been given permission to stretch your creativity? Why do you not express as well? And that's why I think of fashion as mobile poetry and political Protestants, is that it actually allows me to create physical, material culture that shows the kind of celebration and reverence for individuality, for humor, for camp, for zest that I so deeply believe in.
- [51:42]
Cassidy Zachary
Yeah. And I just want to say that you just said that you are a living dream for your ancestors, but I also would say that you are absolutely a living dream for so, I mean, a role model and an inspiration for so, so many people today, including myself, about what it means to live and what it means to express yourself as who you are. It's such a beautiful, beautiful journey that you've been on and that you've, you've allowed all of us to go on with you and to learn from and be inspired by. So I just want to thank you for that.
- [52:13]
Alok Vaid-Menon
Thank you, Cass.
- [52:16]
April Callahan
I second everything you just said, right.
- [52:19]
Cassidy Zachary
Interest listeners. I highly encourage everyone to tune in Thursday where ALOK will share with us their vision of a de gendered fashion future. What would the world look like if we moved not just beyond the gendered fashion binary, but beyond the gender binary in general?
- [52:33]
April Callahan
Well, a world with a lot more love in it cast. That's what I think, you know, to exist in a place where we weren't beholden to societal beauty and fashion standards and can really love ourselves and each other as exactly as we are. So, you know, however you choose to identify, we can all learn from what ALOK has to teach us about fashion and the fashion to self. And as they show us, fashion can be a powerful form of self expression and it can also be a self care practice. Fashion can be a political protest, a love letter, a language and a celebration of the beautiful differences that make us all, at the end of the day, human.
- [53:13]
Cassidy Zachary
Exactly. And I just want to be clear too that expanding beyond the gender binary is not getting rid of the categories of man and woman. It's just expanding the narrative to include our beautiful rainbow of identities. So you can find more on Alok's work at their website alokvminon.com that's a L O K V M e n o n.com and you can also find them on Instagram @alokvmenon and be sure and check out their books beyond the gender binary and feminine public. Alok is also an incredibly prolific reader and writer on this topic. So head on over to goodreads.com where you can check out over 600 of Alok's book recommendations that help to illuminate this topic as well as many of their insightful book reviews. And of course we will provide links to all of these sites in our Show Notes. That does it for us today Dress Listeners, May you give yourself permission to sartorially celebrate and express your self determined identity next time you get dressed.
- [54:11]
April Callahan
Remember, we love hearing from you, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so@hellorusthistory.com or you can also DM us on Instagram at Dressed Underscore Podcast, which is of course where you'll find reels and posts accompanying each week's episodes. We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books, so if you're interested you can always find a link in our show Notes to our Bookshop Bookshelf. So that address is bookshop.org shop dressed and there you can find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles.
- [54:50]
Cassidy Zachary
You can also find a link to that in our show Notes where you can find a link to DressedHistory.com, which of course is our website where you can check out our latest offerings from the Dressed Universe that includes our cloud classes and our tours. So head over to DressedHistory.com and see what we have up our sleeves. Love Dress but want to skip the ads? Consider subscribing to our ad free version of the show for just $3 a month and enjoy our eight new episodes a month ad free. That does it for us today. Dress listeners. Thank you as always for tuning in and more dress coming your way very soon. Dress the History of Fashion is a production of Dressed Media.
- [55:28]
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