In the last couple of months I have come to feel much more conscious of my femme identity – not necessarily because of the clothes that I wear, but because of how much skin I show and what skin I expose.

Currently I am covered in lesions of an unknown nature to my Western doctor. Some of them are small and some of them are quite large and cannot be hidden. At first I was terribly ashamed of them, trying to cover them up by hiding the parts of my body that they’re on. But now that almost all of my body is covered with these lesions, it’s difficult to hide them. And soon it will be impossible to hide. With the warm weather about to arrive, I do not want to sacrifice ample opportunity to have fun in short skirts and skimpy tops. So what’s a femme to do but to tackle the sites of shame that make me want to hide underneath my clothing?

In turning to my disability**/queer/femme politics, I have a lot to use to take on my body shame. It’s a bit of a matrix, a puzzle of politics and ideologies mixed together. So when starting to become conscious of this riddle it’s daunting to know where to begin. I begin with asking myself, what do I actually have to be ashamed of? I haven’t quite unravelled this answer yet but I have some guesses and sources to pull from.

After many years of working through gender politics, I finally feel empowered to choose when and how to wear provocative and sexy clothing. I no longer feel the need to dress in a way because that’s what I *should* do (although I would be lying if I said I had escaped cultural norms about femininity and that I never pine over wardrobe decisions about what to wear in certain places so that I ‘fit in’). I intentionally show flesh and dress the way I do in ways I did not feel before having this set of politics.

Drawing from feminism, I think about the personal is political or what I have come to define as the private is political (thanks to Barbara Fawcett) to get me to think about outing my body. I want to make my private political. And by showing fleshy skin that isn’t perfectly white and pretty I know I’m making a bold move. It might be easy to cover them up and not talk about them. I also know that since lesions and scars are typically defined as something shameful and disgusting they’re also something that transgresses femininity because they aren’t “pretty”. And that’s exactly why I want to expose them. I think there’s something incredibly sexy about things that don’t fit into the norm.

The fighter in me doesn’t want to just expose my scabs and lesions. So far I have intentionally dressed up in provocative clothing with my fishnets to expose portions of my body, especially the scars/lesions several times. This past weekend I got dressed up in a short skirt with fishnets that exposed the scars/lesions. The scars look really sexy beneath the fishnets; after all the combination of the red and black makes for a sexy pairing.

But maybe there’s also something problematic about making my story seem tidy and clean. Struggling with body stuff is not a pretty story; it isn’t something one can just chose to step out of and ‘overcome’. I have many more questions to ponder.

But for now, I have sexy outfits to wear that cannot be ignored. Summer fashion is almost upon us and I plan on taking full advantage of it!

Do you have any scars, lesions etc that you chose to show or not show? How does it relate to your gender identity and/or performance?

**By referring to disability I do not mean to name my skin condition as a disability. Instead I am referring to set a politics that question normalcy and narratives that make me want to normalize my body and be a ‘proper woman’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.