The trans gender subject of fashion

Abstract

The T-girl is a trans feminine subject whose trans-ness is embodied sartorially in controlled environments for a short amount of time. Her trans-ness is not socially visible, her existential possibilities have accompanied the imbrication of digitality in everyday life and she escapes well-acknowledged trans feminine categories such as the Latin American travesti or the trans woman writ large. The T-girl is yet to be rigorously theorized. In this auto-theoretical psychoanalytic inquiry I propose to theorize her alongside her lovers by placing the sartorial as the de facto object of desire between them. The methodology involves culling from personal sartorial-sexual experience as well as the language around clothes found in private messages sent by trans-attracted and straight-identified men to the author, a T-girl. What does such an intimate archive tell us about the way the trans subject negotiates her desire with and through the other? Their sartorial exchanges serve as unprecedented insight into the intrapsychic mechanisms a trans subject deploys to forge a position for herself where the sartorial all but replaces the anatomical as the slippery guarantor of gender. I articulate the function of clothing in conjuring a trans-ness addressed to a ‘other’ interpellated to ratify the (trans-)gendering process. This turns out to be a rather primary dynamic that founds the speaking subject as such. And yet, the T-girl and her lovers may end up getting more than what they bargained for from their sartorial-sexual encounter. What becomes clear is the fundamental function of clothes not just to render the T-girl girl, but as exhilarating signifiers in the written and oral exchanges between the T-girl and her lovers. Particularly for the lovers themselves, who can be quick to slip from the position of the subject who enjoys feminine clothing in the other to that of the subject who enjoys wearing such clothing themselves.