Queer Style

Description

Queer Style offers an insight into queer fashionability by addressing the role that clothing has played in historical and contemporary lifestyles. From a fashion studies perspective, it examines the function of subcultural dress within queer communities and the mannerisms and messages that are used as signifiers of identity. Diverse dress is examined, including effeminate 'pansy,' masculine macho 'clone,' the 'lipstick' and 'butch' lesbian styles and the extreme styles of drag kings and drag queens. Divided into three main sections on history, subcultural identity and subcultural style, Queer Style will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies.

Adam Geczy is an artist and writer. He is Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, Australia, and author of several books including (with Michael Carter) Reframing Art (Berg, 2005) and Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (Berg, 2008), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009. Vicki Karaminas is Associate Professor of Fashion Studies and Associate Head of the School of Design at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She is the Executive Director and Chair of Fashion for the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand and the Chair for Subcultural Style and Identity for the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations. She is the editor of The Men's Fashion Reader (Berg, 2009), Fashion in Fiction (Berg, 2009) and The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture.

If clothes make the man (and the woman), how much more do they make the queer man or woman. This insightful book looks at the way fashion has coded same-sex desire, from eighteenth-century macaronis and gentlemen fops to modern leathermen and muscle queens, from mannish Sapphic women to lipstick lesbians. As those with homoerotic orientations constructed their sexualities and identities, the authors reveal, so they dressed themselves for the parts they played. -- Robert Aldrich, Professor of European History, University of Sydney, Australia From Rosa Bonheur and Radclyffe Hall through Bowie and Warhol to Boy George and Leigh Bowery: just a few of the style icons present in this wide-ranging, illuminating and highly readable account of over two centuries of queer performance and posing. -- Nick Rees-Roberts, author of French Queer Cinema, University of Bristol, UK. This book provides a refreshingly engaging and extraordinarily superior standard of scholarship that inquires analytically into complex LGBTQI issues and challenges & complements the works of Bultler, Foucault, Halberstam, Shapiro and others in the field. Their work will contribute to original scholarship on LGBTQI in a number of related ways. This text further gives voice to the many LGBTQI communities of actors and displays a scholarly trajectory that is not only well-grounded but combines the best traditions of theoretical and methodological triangulation. -- Dr. Wesley Crichlow, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada. This book is impressive in rigor, scope and scholarship. It assembles iconic stylish and fashionable gay, lesbian, transgendered and queer characters such as: dandies and dykes, leather-boys and lipstick lesbians. While, there has been a tremendous amount of writing in queer studies, none has combined it with fashion and style to give us a fresh look at fashion studies. With panache and humor, this much-anticipated text is the first extensive analysis of both fashion scholarship and queer theory - it undoubtedly is destined to become a classic. -- Joseph H. Hancock, II Drexel University, USA Much of what counts as queer theory now, and in recent years, has danced around the question of style. Is style the name for a self-fashioning that marks the emergence of self-consciously gay and lesbian populations around the beginning of the twentieth century? Or is style a recognizable form of gay, lesbian and transgender narrative, readable on bodies and texts alike? Is style a mode of being and becoming that both disrupts chronological histories of sexuality and confirms them all at once? The answer given by this fresh, new volume on the subject is yes, yes, and yes. As to whether you can wear white shoes after summer's end, blue and green together or a meat dress to the Oscars...you are on your own... -- Professor Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure and Gaga Feminism. This is an extremely important book. The subject of GLBTQ fashion and style has been sadly neglected and this book marks a clear redresseing of that neglect. Queer Style is a well researched and eloquently written book that fills a massive gap in the current writing on this important area of fashion, dress and identity. The subject matter covered in this book is a much neglected area of study and Geczy and Karaminas's complementary backgrounds and areas of interest provide a much needed and long overdue articulate contribution to the area. The depth of research as well the global aspects of the book make this an invaluable text for accomplished scholars and to students from a range of academic courses. I thoroughly recommend this book. -- Shaun Cole, London College of Fashion, UK