Queer Fashion and Style

Abstract

Aspects of our identities such as sexuality and gender are negotiated through style-fashion-dress. We analyzed the recent history of style-fashion-dress through a queer lens by examining how queer identities have been negotiated on and around the body by women in the Midwest region of the United States from the late twentieth century to the present. Based on our research, we created an exhibition using community-participatory practices that allowed us to authentically tell the histories of ten queer-women’s styles. We told stories that reflect some of the long-standing stereotypes of queer woman and the butch-femme dichotomy, but when we unpacked these histories, they more closely aligned with Kaiser and McCullough’s “(k)notty model” metaphor. The women’s garments, styles, and fashions represent the “shifting queer styles” that capture the lived experiences of midwestern queer women in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.