Playing Dress-Up! Fashion, Gender Play, and the Politics of Embodiment: Workshop One

Bom Dia!

Last weekend, ReciclaGEM in partnership with the oh-so-fabulous, PhD candidate and gender play aficianado, Kelly McKay, facilitated our first fashion-think tank at UCLA. As part of the Hemispheric Institute's Graduate Student  Initiative's Convergence (GSI), we facilitated a set of digital and in-person dialogic spaces, where we engaged in discussion, academic presentations, dress-up, and conversation on the ways in which our garments facilitate political, social, and hegemonic spaces.


Lots of big fancy academic words, right?


Well, let me break it down this way.

We fly into the city of Los Angeles, California, USA, the home of Hollywood, the city of bright lights, big dreams, and gendered spaces. We, alongside hundreds of other PhD students, performance artists, professors, activists, and anti-imperialist visionaries from throughout the Americas, entered a series of audoritorum spaces where presenters discussed everything from Guahan's (Guam's) fight for sovreignty from the U.S. imperialism to artists serving as witnesses to the social climate of their times, and to ways that we can shake down the hegemonic walls of academia to create truly democratic, just, experimental spaces for thinking. Revisit some of these spaces here.

(Screenshot of panel "(T)racing the Archive" at USC. Full video here)

In between all of these panels, performances, and presentations, Kelly and I gathered a limited selection but nonetheless experimental set of highly gendered garments on a table with pieces of paper, and asked our brilliant four participants (who you shall here about in future posts very soon) and two wonderful faculty mentors to respond with their initial reactions.

Before participants were given any prior information on the garments, simply asked to respond viscerally, emotionally, intellectually, from the gut, these were some of the reactions.

Garment: Six 8,  iridescent sequined pants finished with elastic at waist and hem
Reaction: Looks like it belongs in a drag queen's wardrobe closet. The falling sequins and roughly sewn elastic are reminiscent of well-loved use.

Garment: Recycled button down shirt with train of ruffles
Reaction: "There were so many shades of white that I began to forget what 'white' looked like"

Garment: "Safe Darfur" Black and green message t-shirt
Reaction: Message t-shirts are offensive. The reportrayal of the women and children by the tree is a common trope of poverty porn. Message t-shirts only serve to brand the ideals of the person wearing.

The conversation, which traversed discussion on colorism, memory, and the classicism, among others, provided an effective icebreaker for participants to talk about their research. Without revealing too much of their evolving research, some of the topics, artists, and images discussed, shown and reacted to were the following:

(Zanele Muholi, "Miss Divine," 2007)

(Tommy Ton, Style.com"Street Style" Photographer, Spring 2014 Season)

(Chilean designer, Juana Diaz, Collection: Potencial Pandemia)

(1880 vs. 2012. How much has changed?)

*What are all of these images saying about gender, race, class, and the politics of embodiment?

 Feel free to comment below.*

Much of the discussion was open ended as an effort to following the guidelines of the conference's theme, "Experimental Collectivities."

The goal was not necessarily to assert a certain knowledge claim over fashion, gender play, and the politics of embodiment, but rather to introduce unseen or niche but highly provocative images, subjects, and garments to elicit the reactions that will create the connections of how garments work to create political, social and gendered spaces.

While our time in Los Angeles was brief, the conversation will continue in our ever-evolving digital workbook in preparation for the second workshop, set to take place October 2014 in New York City.

Join us in this experimental collectivity of bodies and minds invested in de-mechanizing the political, social, gendered, racial, classist, colorist nuances of our garments so that we can build new, balance, and just worlds.

Peace, love, and image activism,

T*

The First Workshop of ATELIER RECICLAGEM: Apply July 31st

Hello again! Bom dia! Bonsoir!

The first official workshop of ATELIER RECICLAGEM will take place at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Los Angeles (UCLA) for the HEMI Graduate Student Convergence. I will be co-facilitating alongside PhD candidate and burlesque performer, Kelly McKay a workshop on how garments facilitate conversations with gender, internal conversations, social conversations, and how dress up and play can be a medium through which we can dialogue in ways that change the world.

**These garments will be muslin mock ups of the Spring 2014 ATELIER RECICLAGEM Couture collection, the first couture collection of the project. So in your participation you will shape and mold the silhouettes as they shape and mold your conversations.

In essence, playing dress up WILL change the world, and we want to explore how to do that.

The process of participation in the work group requires an application: a 500 word research abstract and resume, which you are to send to hemigsi@gmail.com by JULY 31ST 2013. More info can be found here.

And to find out more information about our workshop, please find the official description on the site as well as below:

7. Playing Dress-Up: Fashion, Gender, and the Politics of Embodiment

Co-conveners: Tamara Leacock (NYU), Kelly McKay (University of Minnesota), Sean Metzger (UCLA), Jack Halberstam (USC)

How do our garments and adornments shape our ways of seeing and being in the world?  This working group takes “fashion” as a starting point from which to initiate a critical and artistic dialogue around questions of politics, identity, queerness, and embodiment.  We seek participants to join us in beginning a collective exploration of how fashion functions as a technology of identity.  We are interested in the political potential of adornment, affective attachments to garments, and the relationship between adornment and embodiment.  As we approach these topics, we are deeply committed to engaging play as a mode of investigation.  We welcome imaginative contributions from scholars, artists, and activists working in fashion studies.  We envision the work group as both a discussion forum and an experimental, artistic research laboratory, a place for sharing our projects-in-process but also for making new work together.  We hope that our collective conversations will speak to the emerging field of fashion studies with a voice distinctly situated in a hemispheric perspective, recognizing the United States and Latin America as playing key roles in shaping the realities of the global fashion economy.  Broadly speaking, we ask: how do we understand the complex relationships between people and clothing?  What kinds of political, social, emotional, and other attachments shape our relationships to our garments?  As we combine our practical work as artists with our scholarly work, we eagerly seek collaborators and interlocutors in this experimental process.  Come play dress-up with us!

We look forward to playing a revolutionary game of dress-up with you.

Peace and play,

T*

Rebirth: Welcome to the Atelier

Oi minha gente, minha familia, tudo bem??

So if you have been following me on instagram or facebook (@reciclagem), you are aware of the journey that has transpired thus far.

But if you haven't let me tell you.

So after doing quite a few fashion shows (from Fashion Envie to One Night of Jungle Fever) in New York, I have moved to Paris for the month to study haute couture, to make "American Thrift Couture" real.

And thus far, I have worked backstage at couture fashion week, learned the special techniques of Madame Gres and shibori dyeing, and started designing pieces that transcend.

I am rethinking the function of ReciclaGEM as more than just an indie locavore line, but something that will serve as an Atelier, a workshop, for re-thinking the ways in which clothing can facilitate conversations on our social world.

When we put on clothes every day, what conversations are we having with ourselves, with our higher spiritual worlds, with each other, with the planet? Are these conversations about gender, race, spirit, earth, love, hate, progress, regression, confusion, clarity?

What this is is a workroom, a think tank to rethink, rethink and rethink some more the ways in which clothing serves as a medium for our humanity.

And once we do that, I think, we will have a more amenable relationship with the planet and with ourselves that is conscious, evolving, potentally imperfect, but ceaselessly empathetic, kind and forgiving.

I shall support all movements of fashion that are for progress, but release the labels that may alienate such conversations from the audience that most often times is the one that needs to hear it.

Ase. Rebirth in Paris. More to come, more to post, more to reveal.

I am and we are re-thinking the way clothing functions as social recycling, recycling the social elements of our world.

Peace, love, and consciousness.

Beijos and bonsoir,
T*

Garments as Sites: Playful Dress Up as Vehicle for Think Tank

Greetings my loves,

Firstly, let me begin by saying that the Hemispheric Institute of Politics and Performance's Encuentro, which just wrapped up Saturday night, was one of the most mind-blowing events and experiences I have had in my political-social-and artivist (activist-artist) life in a very long time.

Finally, with a few extra days in São Paulo, I now have time to write, to blog, and to review some of the experiences in which the work of ReciclaGEM explored the role of Cities and Corporeality, the theme of this year's conference.

Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of spending some time with two fellow attendees and artivists, actress and M.A. Performance Studies Candidate, Lindsay Benacka  and burlesque performer and PhD Candidate Kelly McKay.

For the first time, I managed to bring my Ashae skirt, the first fashion piece I have ever created, inspired and provoked by my investigation into my Brazilian heritage as well as my Eshu tails and Re*Collar Body GEMs to create, instead of a photo shoot, an aesthetic space to discuss garments and the thought spaces they create. 

Lindsay and Kelly graciously adorned this garments within the outer walls of SESC Vila Mariana, one of the chain revolutionary artistic spaces in São Paulo that supports independent and critically engaged performance. We dialogued and played after one of the many panel discussions in which we engaged corporeality and activism.

There was no aesthetic instruction. Just mere conversation where the adornment of textures, color combinations, and silhouettes that sharply contrast quotidian dress marked a change of space.

With this change of space, marked by the change of corporeal space, the following themes emerged:

• Life as an activist would just feel good if our fashions felt more like blankets. 
• What cultural regulations are preventing us from wearing blankets all day? Social construction.
• What makes us feel less comfortable in our skin? Comments that sexualize parts of our bodies that we'd just rather feel are normal...but...they are.
• Being photographed in a corporeality that is not our quotidian (i.e. dressing out of the norm) would feel better if we are given instruction. Without that, it feels pointless. (But then again, when you buy a garment in a store, what is the point at your point of purchase?)
• Nonetheless, we want more spaces to discuss the activist potentialities of fashion because fashion is always with us and has such a tremendous impact on our emotions, our centeredness and our corporealities.

Lindsay and Kelly, thank you for entering this corporeal-cloth space with me and engaging my questions and my camera lens. Feel free to add what conversation points I've missed and let's keep the conversation going...Hemi Encuentro Montreal 2014!

Peace, love and clothing as a corporeal think tank,

T*