Fabulous Femininities: Extravagant Costume and Transformative Thresholds

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Fabulous Femininities will seek to understand the way that resistant feminine identities are performed by burlesque club-goers via specific DIY approaches to costume. The ethnographic study will focus on a range of participants who identify as women (biologically born women and male to female transsexual woman) in order to document, understand and theorize the transformative threshold between the everyday self and the extravagant spectacle. The project will explore this transformative element of costume in order to understand the way costume performs and politicizes alternative embodied versions of 'womanhood'. It is timely to undertake this exploration as the category of 'woman' has been significantly challenged in recent years with trans people becoming more visible and central to cultural debates. Both popular Second Wave and Fourth Wave feminists who deny that trans women are 'real' women have been vociferously challenged as transphobic, regressive and intolerant (Finlayson, Jenkins, Worsdale 2018; Pearce 2018)The burlesque club is a socially sensitive and aware space that encourages a conscious and accepting attitude to this change, with many club night and event organizers insisting on unisex toilets and changing facilities as well as wheelchair accessible venues. The heightened subcultural space, enables the clubbers to transform into more expansive notions of what constitutes 'woman' via feminized costume. The significance of this research lies in giving a platform to the way that marginalized women in the UK are reacting and responding to this societal gendered shift from the grassroots level up. This will prompt us to reinvigorate more open, tolerant thinking about the possibilities for femininity and the female body at large.It is important that this theme is explored because 'self-narrative' or 'self-construction' as Mason-Schrock argues in relation to transsexuals, are not just about revealing the pre-existing self but also about bringing 'phenomenologically real "true selves"' into being (1996). Feminine dress and styling of the body allows the male to female transgender community for instance to feel 'at home'; and in contemporary debate there has been a strong push for acceptance of this as a human rights issue. However, there is an urgent need to understand and address exactly how the feminine accessories performatively work to that end - how do items of feminine dress enable this? The performance of spectacular femininity facilitates the process of feeling at home on three levels. Firstly, within a subcultural community the person feels at home as a collective outsider - this is a safe zone where alter egos can be expressed theatrically and femininity can be personalized. Secondly, there is a sense of being an outsider and excluded from femininity itself which has been harnessed and straitjacketed by the requirements of heteronormativity. 'Straight' cisgendered women (women who feel that their gender identity matches their sex as assigned at birth) find themselves squeezed out of any right to cultural resistance because it is persistently taken as read that they are normalcy and privilege itself (Willson and McCartney: 2017). Exploring DIY approaches to costume in subcultural spaces will give us a better understanding of feminine costume's role in fashioning and magnifying 'othered' subversive female identities.Costume performs and politicizes belonging with extravagant accessories operating as a linchpin - threshold - between imaginative and real topographies; between subcultural/minority scenes, spaces and sites and mainstream spaces of heterosexuality and 'womanhood'. This project seeks to understand the way in which this process performs both a psychological and social need and a political desire for democratic representational freedoms.