Dress Suits to Hire and the Landscape of Queer Urbanity

Abstract

In Holly Hughes’s 1987 Dress Suits to Hire, directed by Lois Weaver and performed by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Britches, principal characters Michigan and Deeluxe ‘travel’ to California, Ohio, and, well, Michigan — all without leaving their East Village dress shop. Along the way they cross borders, invade iconic landscapes, and challenge the premiere geomythology driving queer life in America today: that the only good queer is an urban queer, and that to venture, as a gay or lesbian, into the nation’s ‘heartland’ is to find oneself marooned in alien, enemy territory. In this chapter, I read Dress Suits to Hire through its 2005 revival in Austin, Texas, in order to explore the performative work it does at the crossroads of rural and urban, straight and queer. I use a combination of human geography and architecture theory to understand how Hughes, Shaw, and Weaver play with and against pre-existing mythologies about whose bodies belong in what spaces as they draw an alternative map of America’s sexual topography.KeywordsArchitecture TheoryMapping DesireQueer IdentityWhite TrashQueer LifeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.