There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment.
AhmedSara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York and London: Routledge.
2.
AhmedSara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
3.
AhmedSara (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
4.
AlbalaKen (ed.) (2013) Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies. London and New York: Routledge.
5.
AllenPaula Gunn (1986) The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
6.
BaileyMarlon (2013) Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
7.
BerlantLauren (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
8.
BordoSusan (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
9.
BrownElspethPhuThy (2014) Feeling Photography. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
10.
ButlerJudith (1990) Gender Trouble. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.
11.
ButlerJudith (1993) Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge.
12.
ChengAnne Anlin (2019) Ornamentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
13.
CohenCathy (1997) ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?’. GLQ, 3(4): 437–465. DOI: 10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.
14.
CoyoteIvan (2016) Tomboy Survival Guide. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
15.
DavisAngela (1981) Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books.
16.
DelanySamuel (1999) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York and London: New York University Press.
17.
DorriesHeatherHenryRobertHugillDavidet al. (eds) (2019) Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie WestWinnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
18.
EngDavid (2001) Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
19.
FeinbergLeslie (1993) Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
20.
FikkanJanna L.RothblumEsther (2011) ‘Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias’. Sex Roles, 66: 575–592.
21.
FoucaultMichel ([1978]1990) The History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction. New York: Random House.
22.
GeczyAdamKaraminasVicki (eds) (2019) Fashion and Masculinities in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
GrayMary L.JohnsonColin R.GilleyBrian J. (2016) Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies. New York: New York University Press.
25.
Hill CollinsPatricia (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge.
26.
Hill CollinsPatricia (2004) Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. London and New York: Routledge.
27.
InnesRobert AlexanderAndersonKim (eds) (2015) Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
28.
JohnsonE. Patrick (ed.) (2016) No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
29.
KennedyElizabeth LapovskyDavisMadeline D. ([1993]2014) Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. 20th anniversary edition. London and New York: Routledge.
30.
KwanSamantha (2010) ‘Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body Privilege in Everyday Life’. Feminist Formations,22: 144–166.
31.
LambertLéopold (2016) ‘Introduction’. The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, 3, p. 15.
32.
LeeS. HeijinMoonChristina H.TuThuy Linh Nguyen (eds) (2019) Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia. New York: New York University Press.
McClintockAnne (1995) Imperial Leather; Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial ContestNew York and London: Routledge.
36.
MillerMonica L. (2009) Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
37.
Miller-YoungMireille (2008) ‘Hip-Hop Honeys and Da Hustlaz: Black Sexualities in the New Hip-Hop Pornography’. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 8(1): 261–292.
38.
Miller-YoungMireille (2014) A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
39.
MirandaDeborah A. (2010) ‘Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California’. GLQ, 16(1–2): 253–284.
40.
MoonChristina H. (2020) Labor and Creativity in New York’s Global Fashion Industry. New York and London: Routledge.
41.
MorgensenScott (2011) Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
42.
MuñozJosé Esteban (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
43.
NguyenTan Hoang (2014) A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
44.
Paris Is Burning (1990) [Film] Directed by Jennie Livingston. USA: Off-White Productions.
de PertuisKarenFindlayRosie (2019) ‘How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram’. Fashion Theory, 23(2): 219–242.
47.
PhamMinh-Ha T. (2014) ‘Archival Intimacies: Participatory Media and the Fashion Histories of US Women of Colour’. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 2(1): 107–122.
48.
PhamMinh-Ha T. (2015) Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
49.
PrassoSheridan (2005) The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient. New York: Public Affairs.
50.
PuarJasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
51.
RandErin J. (2017) ‘The Right to Be Handsome: the Queer Sartorial Objects of “Masculine of Center” Fashion’. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 4(3): 12–40.
52.
RaultJasmineCowanT.L. (2018) ‘Onlining Queer Acts: Digital Research Ethics and Caring for Risky Archives’. Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 28(2): 121–142.
53.
RifkinMark (2010) When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
54.
RocamoraAgnès (2009) Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media. London: I.B. Tauris.
55.
RocamoraAgnès (2015) ‘Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-Portraits’. Fashion Theory, 15(4): 407–424.
56.
RodriguezJuana Maria (2003) Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York and London: New York University Press.
57.
RothblumEstherSolovaySondra (eds) (2009) The Fat Studies Reader. New York and London: New York University Press.
58.
SaguyAbigail C.WardAnna (2011) ‘Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma’. Social Psychology Quarterly74(1): 53–75.
59.
SalamonGayle (2010) Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press.
60.
SharpeChristina (2016) In the Wake: on Blackness and Being. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
61.
ShimizuCeline Parrenas (2007) The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
62.
ShimizuCeline Parrenas (2012) Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
63.
SniderStefanie (2012) ‘Fatness and Visual Culture: a Brief Look at Some Contemporary Projects’. Fat Studies, 1(1): 13–31.
64.
SnortonC. Riley (2017) Black on Both Sides: a Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
65.
StolerAnn (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
66.
TatonettiLisa (2014) The Queerness of Native American Literature. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.
