Cloth Wounds, or When Queers Are Martyred to Clothes: The Value of Clothing's Complex Debasements

Abstract

Against the backdrop of western culture's strong investment in gendered clothes, Stockton looks at clothing's intricate relations to shame and, for some queer women and men, the surprising value of these humiliations, especially in the service of sexual attraction. The word 'martyrdom', with its associations to bodily wounding and psychic pain, is not too strong for the acts of clothing and sartorial preference she discusses. Working through concepts that emerge from Sigmund Freud on femininity, Georges Bataille on sacrifice and Leo Bersani on debasement, along with debates among feminist thinkers about the New Woman, Stockton takes up 'martyrs' from three distinct histories, martyrs as diverse as the mannish lesbian of Great Britain's 1920s, American butches and femmes of the 1960s, and even the sailors of post-war France. How public self-betrayal and self-debasement in terms of clothes can offer creative social formations is the focus of this article. The highly famous novels of three queer authors provide the means for this surprising look: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Jean Genet's Querelle.