Fabulous Femininities: Extravagant Costume and Transformative Thresholds

神话般的女性将寻求了解的方式，抵抗女性身份是由滑稽俱乐部观众通过特定的DIY方法来服装执行。民族志研究将侧重于一系列认同为女性的参与者（生物学上出生的女性和男性到女性的变性女性），以记录，理解和理论化日常自我和奢侈景象之间的变革门槛。该项目将探讨服装的这种变革元素，以了解服装的表现方式和政治化的替代体现版本的“女性气质”。现在进行这种探索是及时的，因为近年来，随着跨性别者变得越来越明显，成为文化辩论的中心，“妇女”这一类别受到了重大挑战。流行的第二波和第四波女权主义者都否认跨性别女性是“真实的”女性，他们被强烈质疑为跨性别恐惧症、倒退和不宽容。（Finlayson，Jenkins，Worsdale 2018;皮尔斯2018）滑稽俱乐部是一个社会敏感和意识的空间，鼓励有意识和接受这种变化的态度，许多俱乐部之夜和活动组织者坚持要求男女通用的厕所和更衣设施以及轮椅无障碍场地。提高的亚文化空间，使俱乐部成员能够通过女性化的服装转变为更广泛的“女人”概念。这项研究的意义在于为英国边缘化妇女从基层开始对这种社会性别转变做出反应和回应的方式提供了一个平台。这将促使我们对女性气质和女性身体的可能性进行更开放、更宽容的思考。探索这一主题是很重要的，因为梅森-施罗克认为，与变性人有关的“自我叙事”或“自我建构”不仅是揭示预先存在的自我，而且是将“现象学上的真实的“真实的自我”“带入存在（1996）。女性的着装和身体造型使男性到女性的跨性别群体感到“自在”;在当代的辩论中，人们强烈要求接受这一点，将其视为人权问题。然而，迫切需要了解和解决的是，女性配饰是如何发挥作用的-女性服饰是如何做到这一点的？壮观的女性气质的表现在三个层面上促进了宾至如归的感觉。首先，在一个亚文化社区里，这个人会觉得自己是一个集体的局外人--这是一个安全区，在这里，改变自我可以被戏剧化地表达出来，女性气质可以被个性化。其次，有一种局外人的感觉，被排除在女性气质本身之外，而女性气质本身已经被异性恋的要求所利用和束缚。“直”cisgendered女性（女性觉得自己的性别认同与出生时分配的性别相匹配）发现自己被挤出了任何文化抵抗的权利，因为人们一直认为他们是正常的，特权本身（威尔森和麦卡特尼：2017）。探索亚文化空间中的服装DIY方法将使我们更好地理解女性服装在塑造和放大“其他”颠覆性女性身份方面的作用。服装表演和政治化的归属感与奢侈的配饰作为一个关键-门槛-在想象和真实的地形之间;在亚文化/少数民族场景，空间和网站与异性恋和“女性”的主流空间之间。该项目旨在了解这一过程如何表现出心理和社会需求以及民主代表自由的政治愿望。

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.