the public and private flesh
May. 11th, 2009 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmClothes used to be a lot more structured than they were today. They nipped you in, held you up, gave you shoulders and sent you on your way. With clothes like these, the body did not have to be "perfect" -- the clothes did the work of encasing us, hardening us, and creating the difference between the idea of the public and private body.
Now, the casual world has a lot of things going for it. Cheap clothes and variety. The ability to leave the house without spending hours getting ready or requiring the assistances of others. However, the increasing absence of structured clothes has eliminated the idea of a different between the public and private body and has also required our bodies to do what our clothes no longer do.
The problem, of course, is the flesh doesn't actually work like that. The fact that male clothing has remained more structured (and covering) than female clothing I think speaks a great deal to the way women get more grief about their weight. Our clothes are doing less work and revealing more. The private body is judged on a public stage and public opinion is being dictated to us from so many avenues that that opinion is no longer personal.
All this stuff really interests me. I love spending my mornings on the subway looking at people in their clothes and then thinking about how the clothes do or do not effectively create a public body. Take women's shoes! Feet don't look like that, the idea that feet, which are very different shape than most women's shoes, go into these things that are totally the wrong shape for them is seriously weird and fascinating. There was once a time when everything was like that. When a woman takes a corset off, the flesh does not stay in that arrangement. We ask our bodies to do too much now.
My body is interesting in this context because I'm so thin. Some of that is because of what I do, but most of that, as we know now, is genetic disease. Anyway, even if we lived in a society with a difference between public and private bodies, I wouldn't really be able to have that as a woman: a corset doesn't do much to me. I lack flesh to remold.
Which may, of course, be why menswear is so interesting to me (gender-identity issues aside; that's a separate post).
Here's another thing about clothes. You have to learn how to wear them. Let me tell you, standing up straight in an evening gown and standing up straight in a suit to make each of those garments look marvelous -- totally different thing. The posture is different, the center of gravity is different, where I center my weight over my feet is different, how far apart I keep my legs. It's all different. Right now I am learning the suit.
As a woman in a dress, I want my ankles and feet to be a sharp and narrow point, and I want to choose clothes that create an hour-glass. Because I am small-chested, I look for dresses that create an hourglass between hips and shoulder, instead of hips and breasts and I stand accordingly.
So this is where we get into the business of this suit and how it gets complicated. In doing this drag thing (I'm actually not entirely comfortable referring to this as drag, but let's just run with that here so I can make my point), one of the issues over and over again in my mind is my height and my slightness. The other issue is of course my hips: where a woman should be an hourglass a man should be a triangle -- broad shoulders, narrow waist and hips. I order the suit, and I talk to the pattern maker about building up the shoulders a bit to compensate for my hips. Clothes are an illusion. The suit creates a public body over my private flesh; if done well, no one has to know my shoulders aren't really there.
And lo! They did a very good job. It is so desperately pleasing to me in ways I can describe to have the possibility of existing as a straight line. But here is the thing! Because the shoulders have been built out and I'm not that tall, now, I am no longer thin in the same way I have always been. My public body in this set of illusions, must necessarily be slightly stocky.
And oh my god, is that weird. Completely goddamn bizarre. And deeply challenging to all sorts of weird internalized shit in my head that never needed to apply to me before and is even funnier, because my preference has rarely run to delicate boys. In a suit, I look more like what I desire than I would have thought, and yet, less like I always expected.
It is a strange adjustment and when you dress as many different ways as I do, a confounding one to make over and over again, because between suits and pushup bras and tight pants and trim boots and a million other little tricks, the public shape of my flesh varies nearly constantly, and it's very weird to have the difference between the public body and the private body when most people no longer bother or don't have that luxury or don't even know there was once such a distinction. It's interesting, no matter what I'm wearing, to catch people looking, because they don't know what shape I really am.
Now, the casual world has a lot of things going for it. Cheap clothes and variety. The ability to leave the house without spending hours getting ready or requiring the assistances of others. However, the increasing absence of structured clothes has eliminated the idea of a different between the public and private body and has also required our bodies to do what our clothes no longer do.
The problem, of course, is the flesh doesn't actually work like that. The fact that male clothing has remained more structured (and covering) than female clothing I think speaks a great deal to the way women get more grief about their weight. Our clothes are doing less work and revealing more. The private body is judged on a public stage and public opinion is being dictated to us from so many avenues that that opinion is no longer personal.
All this stuff really interests me. I love spending my mornings on the subway looking at people in their clothes and then thinking about how the clothes do or do not effectively create a public body. Take women's shoes! Feet don't look like that, the idea that feet, which are very different shape than most women's shoes, go into these things that are totally the wrong shape for them is seriously weird and fascinating. There was once a time when everything was like that. When a woman takes a corset off, the flesh does not stay in that arrangement. We ask our bodies to do too much now.
My body is interesting in this context because I'm so thin. Some of that is because of what I do, but most of that, as we know now, is genetic disease. Anyway, even if we lived in a society with a difference between public and private bodies, I wouldn't really be able to have that as a woman: a corset doesn't do much to me. I lack flesh to remold.
Which may, of course, be why menswear is so interesting to me (gender-identity issues aside; that's a separate post).
Here's another thing about clothes. You have to learn how to wear them. Let me tell you, standing up straight in an evening gown and standing up straight in a suit to make each of those garments look marvelous -- totally different thing. The posture is different, the center of gravity is different, where I center my weight over my feet is different, how far apart I keep my legs. It's all different. Right now I am learning the suit.
As a woman in a dress, I want my ankles and feet to be a sharp and narrow point, and I want to choose clothes that create an hour-glass. Because I am small-chested, I look for dresses that create an hourglass between hips and shoulder, instead of hips and breasts and I stand accordingly.
So this is where we get into the business of this suit and how it gets complicated. In doing this drag thing (I'm actually not entirely comfortable referring to this as drag, but let's just run with that here so I can make my point), one of the issues over and over again in my mind is my height and my slightness. The other issue is of course my hips: where a woman should be an hourglass a man should be a triangle -- broad shoulders, narrow waist and hips. I order the suit, and I talk to the pattern maker about building up the shoulders a bit to compensate for my hips. Clothes are an illusion. The suit creates a public body over my private flesh; if done well, no one has to know my shoulders aren't really there.
And lo! They did a very good job. It is so desperately pleasing to me in ways I can describe to have the possibility of existing as a straight line. But here is the thing! Because the shoulders have been built out and I'm not that tall, now, I am no longer thin in the same way I have always been. My public body in this set of illusions, must necessarily be slightly stocky.
And oh my god, is that weird. Completely goddamn bizarre. And deeply challenging to all sorts of weird internalized shit in my head that never needed to apply to me before and is even funnier, because my preference has rarely run to delicate boys. In a suit, I look more like what I desire than I would have thought, and yet, less like I always expected.
It is a strange adjustment and when you dress as many different ways as I do, a confounding one to make over and over again, because between suits and pushup bras and tight pants and trim boots and a million other little tricks, the public shape of my flesh varies nearly constantly, and it's very weird to have the difference between the public body and the private body when most people no longer bother or don't have that luxury or don't even know there was once such a distinction. It's interesting, no matter what I'm wearing, to catch people looking, because they don't know what shape I really am.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 04:21 pm (UTC)When a woman takes a corset off, the flesh does not stay in that arrangement.
And in a time when men expected women to wear corsets, men expected that the "flesh does not stay in that arrangement" when the corset came off. In other words, men expected the clothes to do the work. They did not expect a woman's body to be perfect according to some arbitrary and changing standard of perfection. So it might be that, while corsets and other confining or shaping garments were instruments of oppression in the sense that they contorted a woman's body into a currently fashionable shape, in another sense they freed a woman's actual flesh from having to maintain that shape. Hmmm.....
no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 04:50 pm (UTC)I hope you don't mind, but I expanded my comment above into a post at my journal, and linked both this post of yours and your most current post into it. Just a head's up.
Also, a question that occurred to me while I was writing the post, and please forgive me if this is inappropriate either in this venue or in general (just delete this comment if necessary!): may I inquire which (if any) gender pronouns you prefer? (He, she, ze?)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 04:55 pm (UTC)Anyway, my great, fundamental problem is that I find the gender neutral pronouns really weird and clunky, even if they are a better choice for me. Generally, if someone uses gender neutral pronouns regularly in their journal or other writing, that's what's best for me. If they don't, I'm comfortable with male or female pronouns as fits the context of whatever I'm on about -- because I often talk about feminism the reality is (and this is sad, because feminism is about gender but interest in it should not be gendered) is that it's less confusing to people if when using gendered pronouns for me you use female ones. Should we ever meet, I tend to prefer it correlate to wardrobe of the occasion. Sorry, essay!
no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 05:00 pm (UTC)Yeah, gender neutral pronouns are clunky, but that's for a number of reasons. (1) Even the most progressive of us are not yet used to using them on a regular basis; (2) the people we're talking to may not yet even be aware of their existence, prompting the "whuh?" reaction; (3) there hasn't yet been a settled consensus of what those non-gendered pronouns should be or how to spell them! Fortunately, language is an ever-changing thing, and in a generation or so I predict things will be much easier. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-18 05:15 pm (UTC)