Explorations in Non-Binary Poiesis: A Sartorial Path to Wholeness in Queer Body

Abstract

The path toward coming home to an embodied sense of wholeness in queer identity is often a long journey marked by personal severance. For trans and non-binary people, the arts have become an invaluable space for reclamative wayfinding and liberation. Artistic pathways offer processes to (re)presence the severed parts of ourselves that were laid down to survive in a binary framework that collapses wholeness. Here, I offer forward a sartorial expression of non-binary poiesis as a reclamative act of (re)weaving the lost threads of self. In the disassembling of my adopted aesthetic, sewing and sartorial expressions become a pathway home to wholeness in queer body, where (re)stitching binary endpoints gestures toward a third space for belonging.