Subversive Gender Acts

 

The gown that Billy Porter wore to the Oscars in 2019 is stunning. Describing why he commissioned and wore this piece in an interview with Vogue, Porter explains that he always wanted to wear a ball gown, and wanted this look to "play between the masculine and the feminine". He's intentionally not dressing drag, and he is intentionally wearing a dress. When he first put on the gown, Porter's reaction was:

I felt alive. I felt free. And open, and radiant. And beautiful!

 Especially in pandemic times, when I can barely be bothered to put on actual pants instead of sweatpants, I find this sentiment impressive. You've got a dang good outfit when you not only feel at home in it, but free and beautiful. 

Porter knew that his gown would get some reactions, and not all of them great. In the Vogue interview he recalls how people treated him when he wore a pink cape to the Golden Globes: "What is masculinity? What does that mean? Women show up every day in pants, but the minute a man wears a dress, the seas part." He was ready for the fallout: "People are going to be really uncomfortable with my black ass in a ball gown".

I think this is really interesting--that a man in a dress is still highly taboo. I remember when one of my friends who is also a philosophy professor told me that he wore a dress to teach in a university class one day, I thought: bold move. To appreciate the taboo, contrast Porter's ball gown with this awesome editorial from Blackattitude. This model looks fantastic, but not particularly edgy!

 I also find it fascinating that men in dresses have been taboo for quite some time. One of Monty Python's most famous (and genius) sketches is "The Lumberjack Song" from 1975, in which an apparently butch lumberjack reveals wearing high heels and a bra as among his customary acts, alongside chopping down trees and eating lunch. The chorus in the sketch, and the lumberjack's "best girl" eventually leave the scene in disgust. 

In out current cultural climate, which apparently hasn't changed much in this respect from the 1970s, it is still subversive and transgressive for a man to wear a dress in everyday life. It disrupts the expectations about what counts as falling within the boundaries of masculinity. Pink polos are allowed, apparently. Colorful men's dress socks, are still controversial in some circumstances (see Justin Trudeau). But dresses? Still shocking.

The fact that dress-wearing-men is evidently a tender spot in our collective consciousness, renders it a possible site of potent activism. At the same time, the very tenderness of this spot makes those who press upon it particularly vulnerable to abuse. While Judith Butler's view of gender as performative bears certain analogies with theatre, which Butler (1988) in fact elucidates, there is a very crucial difference between acts on stage and acts of gender about which Butler cautions us. In particular, the play comes to an end, the actors exchange their costumes for their 'real clothes', and the lives of the characters are delimited within the production. In contrast, the acts via which we constitute gender can't be construed as 'just an act' in the same sort of way:

On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act, indeed, on the street or in the bus, there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality; the disquieting effect of the act is that there are no conventions that facilitate making this separation. (Butler 1988, 527)

Butler emphasizes a distinction between gender "expression" and "performativeness" (ibid., 528). "Gender expression" invites the implication that a person's gender identity is "core" and "internal"--that someone chooses to express their deep gender identity via clothing, behavior, etc. Instead, Butler's view is that there is no such core to gender. Gender just is what we create publicly through "the stylization of the body" through repeated acts (ibid., 519). Nevertheless, Butler is also clear that on her view, gender performativeness is not unencumbered by context. The gender embodiment of men wearing dresses take on meaning 'mid-stream' in the flow of history and the evolution of culture. 

Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives. (Butler 1988, 526)

Certain acts aren't possible--aren't even conceivable--in certain contexts. Butler's analysis helpfully entreats us to think about how subversive gender performances can expand our cultural horizons and to be emancipatory. What would our world be like if men wearing dresses in 'real life' was no longer taboo, no longer subversive? What broad cultural conception of masculinity would allow men wearing dresses to be mundane? Perhaps Porter's reflections provide some clues. If men could wear dresses, perhaps masculinity would encompass feelings of openness, of radiance, and of beauty. That sounds like the kind of world I want to live in.