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Abstract
This paper presents a critical ethnography of an example of fashion's mediating cultural work: sneakers and North American gay men. This rich example presents fashion with a specific garment and wearers, yet mediating work in multiple directions, exemplifying fashion's ambivalence and flexibility. I will describe three positions taken, articulated around gender, and their relations to dominant culture: (1) sneakers are feminine and rejected in opposition to dominant culture; (2) sneakers are masculine and embraced in assimilation into dominant culture; and (3) sneakers are masculine and embraced in opposition to dominant culture. Beginning from a position of ambivalence (like fashion itself), I will elaborate historical and cultural contexts, showing a particular garment, among a particular group, put to varied ends. However, multiplicity is not necessarily progressive. While there are counter-hegemonic aspects to these sneaker positions– resisting stereotypes, embracing difference, denaturalizing sex, gender, and sexuality constructions– other aspects preserve the status quo. While admiring the creativity evidenced, I ultimately question positions untaken, such as embracing femininity.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
A version of this essay was presented at the 2008 International Communication Association Conference in Montreal. The author would like to thank Larry Gross and participants in his 2006 Sexual Minorities in the Media seminar at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alison Trope, Greg Wise, and anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback, as well as interview participants, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Chicago Leather Archives and Museum, and San Francisco GLBT Historical Society for information and assistance.
Notes
1. Subsequent references to gay men are referring to those in North America.
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41. I do not wish to collapse various subgroups but am unable to come up with a preferable umbrella term, “hypermasculine” seeming too pathological.
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46. Note “antifeminine” rather than “masculine.”
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48. Welch, “Homosexuality in America,”, 70.
49. Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 159.
50. Bronski, Pleasure Principle, 90.
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55. The tagline “America's Magazine for the Macho Male” replaced “For the Man Who Marches to a Different Drum,” reflecting the move of “macho” culture from a position critical toward the gay mainstream to the mainstream.
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57. Interview subjects’ names were changed, excepting published and widely recognized experts. Comments from public websites and message boards are attributed as posted.
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63. Although changes in formats, publication styles, and editorial runs prevent scientific content analysis, some trends were overt enough for general conclusions to be drawn from this informal review.
64. The magazine at this time had an erratic publication schedule, so the sample was extended.
65. Robert Davolt, “Open Letter,” Drummer 208, (1997): 39.
66. Levine, Macho, 30–54.
67. Levine, Macho, 60.
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79. Healy, Skins, 184–9; Nick Knight, Skinhead (London: Omnibus, 1982); George Marshall, Spirit of '69: A Skinhead Bible (Dunoon, Scotland: S. T. Publishing, 1994), Skinhead Nation (Dunoon, Scotland: S. T. Publishing, 1996). Similar UK gay male adoption of scally and chav working-class looks are discussed in Shaun Cole, “Butch Queens in Macho Drag: Gay Men, Dress and Subcultural Identity,” in The Men's Fashion Reader, ed. Andrew Reilly and Sarah Cosbey (New York: Fairchild, 2008), 287–302.
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