CLOTHES AND SKINS

Traditional warshirt

Note that the bottom is not cut off square,

but keeps the shape of the animal.

Chapter two of “Beautiful Bottom, etc.” is entitled “Cloth Wounds, or when Queers Are Martyred to Clothes: Debasements of a Fabricated Skin.”  The idea seems to be wanting to wear clothes normally assigned to the “other” gender, but I don’t think it works that well in a post-Chanel world where we all wear — or don’t wear — whatever we can get away with.  Anyway, the binary gender world gets ambiguous (men in skirts) and various when one takes a planetary approach, unless you’re talking about New Guinea penis sheaths which are definitely gender assigned.  

Anyway, I’ve been looking for a place to wedge in concerns of Native Americans instead of all the black/white stuff, so maybe this is the place.  The central dilemma of NA’s is not whether they’re male or female, but whether they’re NA or “white.”  I suppose “vanilla” still works and that it works for either the standard Euro mode (on top) or the standard kind of sexuality (assigned holes), though in fact both race and gender (certainly gender/desire) use vanilla in similar ways.

So for the NA (and let’s stick with “he” because most vanilla people are already totally confused and misinformed about NA’s in general) the real question is how to reconcile being NA and being assimilated/educated, and it is often presented as being about clothes.  A pre-contact NA would have had only a breech clout, if it’s warm enough, or pieces of clothes: a long fringed shirt, accompanied by tie-on sleeves and leggings, all of which can be adjusted.  If an NA man were active, for instance hunting, he would just wear the shirt, which was quite long.  

If you went up to the Heart Butte high school and looked around, you would get the impression that anyone under eighteen is in black sweats, like ninjas.  Or if the weather is warm, shiny to-the-knee basketball pants that look like skirts.  In the Sixties players wore shorts so short that the Pentecostals considered them indecent.

What Stockton suggests is that “plain style” is a Euro-convention that forces conformity by indicating respectability.  (That's the dark three-piece suit, matched.)  NA’s have an opt-out for ceremonial clothes, which means a full suit (Euro-style) made of buckskin and beaded in strips plus moccasins and a Sioux-style (fanned) eagle-tail-feather headdress.  The spectacular formal wear of an NA is therefore at the opposite end of the spectrum from tuxedos and indicates the opposite of shame or wounds.  (Does a cummerbund suggest a bandage?)

What Stockton, in her circumscribed academic world, doesn’t seem to know is that cowboys wear elaborate shirts with creative yokes and pearl snaps, plus jeans (quite stylized), silk scarves (NOT farmer bandannas) and what used to be wide-brimmed hats but are now more likely to be billed caps.  These confer status — even privilege and competence — as well as being practical.  But the wearers in movies seem to be “injun-haters”, shooting anyone with a headdress off his horse.

Temple Grandin, both sides of everything.

Leaving that, Stockton has another trope to explore that I don’t quite get, but I’m writing on Easter weekend, so maybe I can manage.  It is the “garment worn” — meaning wounded nakedness as in Jesus crucified, and then like his cast-off body/clothing thrown down into his mother’s arms, the Pieta.  As it happens, there’s considerable association with these figures for me because Bob Scriver made a sculpture of each, the Crucifix by commission and then the Pieta when his daughter died.

Bob Scriver's "Pieta"

The Pieta’s Mary figure stayed with us for weeks because when Bob was working on the folds of her robe, he needed “her” to stay still so they wouldn’t change.  I made the gown for the human model to wear and I also made an effigy form and put the gown on it after the model had left.  For a summer I was a costumer at a summer theatre so I used my Lucy Barton book to design what I hoped would be authentic, but used a fabric that was soft polyester so it would drape nicely.  After it had been there a week or so, one of the kittens began to sleep in its lap.  The clothes had acquired a comforting mother dimension, cross-species.

Garment as symbol comes up in the Easter story “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments (ta himatia) and divided them into four parts, to every soldier a part, and the coat (kai ton chitona). Now the coat was without seam, woven whole from the top down. Therefore, they said among themselves, let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, whose it will become. Thus the saying in Scripture was fulfilled.”  So the principle of “not-dividing” that which is whole is invoked.  

But since Jesus was nailed to the cross, had thorns thrust onto his head, and was speared in the side, he was certainly wounded and there are many symbolisms for that.  The wound as a speaking mouth, the wound as a place of entry for truth, the wound as stigmata, being marked.  Even a strange Euro myth about pelicans feeding their babies with blood from a wound in their side like that of Jesus.  Blood as milk.

Clothing a mastectomy scar with a tattoo.

In these times some have made our skins more splendid than our clothing and there are businesses who will remove tattooed skin, preserve it and frame it for the families to keep.  This counters the stories of Jewish holocaust victims’ skins made into lampshades but rhymes with the rumored books bound with the skin of the author at the author’s request.

Clothing as a second skin, deliberately ripped, purposely leaving exposed skin in usually shielded places, or — going the other way, homely fabrics studded with rhinestones — can be meant to turn away shame, to either suggest a working person or to demonstrate glamour even in a t-shirt.  But “high” sophisticated culture can be embarrassed by such efforts, respecting plain elegance.  Abby on NCIS exemplifies tacky "theme" glamour.

I suppose this is where “camp” comes in, when sophisticated wealthy people violate expectations for fun.  In “White Mischief”, about African colonialists, the corrupt swankers cross dress.  Charles Dance in an evening gown and earrings is not to be missed. (I couldn't find a photo.) Or if one is enslaved, it can be a point of mockery to wear exaggerated goofy imitations of fancy dress.  Though sometimes, like toddlers in high heels, they are “trying it on.”  The maid trying on the ball gown of Miss. Scarlett.  A transvestite is crossing over vestments, changing clothes, but a transsexual may be changing sexual skin, with the healing wounds of surgery instead of the stitching of clothes.

Christian imagery would say that the flesh shirt of the body is torn off at death and thrown down like the skin of a snake into the embrace of those who love, as a memento, a mere keepsake of a changed being.  And that those in hell are trapped in their burning flesh, unpurified.  Pretty drastic stuff, but that’s the point of religious symbols.

Socially, something as small as which side your buttons are on can be gender significant.  White people could hardly rest until they got the girls of Heart Butte into “proper” glamorous ball gowns for their senior prom — echoing the British custom of “coming out,” a formal declaration of readiness for marriage.  They thought they were making life wonderful for those girls.  But were they inflicting humiliation?  When the girls leave the rez and discover they are not equal after all?  And the feminists tell them they were acting like sex objects, not valuable marriage partners.  (They have to give the expensive dresses back after that one night.)