The Politics of Getting Dressed

Binaries, gender, and waking up

By Charles A Sasaki-Skopp

Queer Theories Blog Contributor

Every morning when I wake up, I comb my hair and dress myself. The choices I make hold a preparatory significance, a prelude to the social act I will perform for the remainder of the day. In this simple, everyday act I perform an unintentional masculinity. A daily repetitive performance of gender builds through repetition “gender norms that enable the repetition itself.” (Butler, p 203) Such a masculinity, unexamined, potentially “replicates gender dynamics that are really dangerous.” (Driskill, p. 104) When my masculinity walks into a room, it “takes over space and movements.” (Driskill, p. 106) It receives consistent social validation for acts of aggression and violence. In unconsciously dressing for this particular act of the social stage, I may even provide a tacit approval of the aggression of others.  

In creating a masculine personal, I commit an act with public consequences, but these consequences, rather than being an extension of an essential identity, “found and consolidate” a veneer of essentiality. (Butler, p. 191) As Sedgwick recognized, the expression of genders and sexualities can feel very essential to those performing them, akin to a piece of their biology. (Sedgwick, p. 25) And yet, the roles we dress for, the categories we slip into can be altered at a whim. Would wearing a dress truly alter anything essential about who I am? Would an intentional act of femininity challenge the “naturalization of sex and of bodies,” and call the biological into question alongside the social? (Butler, p. 202) If, as Butler suggests, physiological and even genetic sexual divisions suffer from the same cultural construction as gender identity, then we might question why there must be such a division at all. 

Removing biological certainty surrounding sex cuts into the heart of what trans means. A transgender person receives, or chooses to take on, such a label because their gender expression does not match their gender biology. But if the categories by which their biology has been sorted are arbitrary, without clear demarcation, then a critical part of trans identity (or the non-trans identity, for that matter) no longer exists. Without a clear, binary biological sex to compare gender to, the label “transgender” loses some of its definition. Without a biological binary, when a person wakes up and festoons themselves with the trappings of gender, no “presuppositions [...] about sexed bodies” exist to define one’s expected performance. (Butler, p. 149) Without this tether, all expressions would be inherently intentional, with their political meanings exposed instead of hidden behind the articulation of bodily meanings, ready to generate alternative understandings in place of oppressive constraints.