Gender/Queer: Dress to Kill, Fight to Win
Racialicious (race in pop culture blog)
by Mimi Thi Nguyen
February 17, 2010
http://www.racialicious.com/2010/02/17/genderqueer-dressed-to-kill-fight-to-win/Against discourses of the authentic, real, or natural, [Dean Spade] challenges the notion that persons who change their appearances, their bodies –with commodities, with clothes, with surgeries– are necessarily duped or self-hating; he further argues that there is no necessary or singular correlation between one's aesthetic practices and political commitments. (In the most familiar "dilemma" of this sort, can a feminist wear heels? In another, does a femme have to? And yet another, can a feminist wear hijab? Answers: Yes, no, yes. You get the drift.)
Although Spade writes about trans surgeries in particular, his analytic cautions are useful for thinking through other bodily practices in general and –yes, this again– the unreliable stories these tell about our psychic interiors or political convictions.
