Marc Schorin is a Best of the Net-nominated philosophy student at the University of Paris St. Denis-Vincennes. In May 2022, they were granted the Edmund Keeley Literary Translation Award from Princeton University. Their work is available or forthcoming at The Adirondack Review, New Note Poetry, and Wrongdoing Magazine, among others. They can be found on Twitter as @inopportunejew.

you dress how they tell you to dress until you don't: queer taste and cishet fashion

marc schorin

I first truly explored Paris about a year before I moved here from America for a Master’s. I was twenty-one and a French major hoping to learn more about Paris as a city. I was staying at a family friend’s apartment on Île St-Louis, one of the two tiny islands in the on the Seine. There were not many young adults in that milieu; most people were gray-haired and put-together.

There was, however, a high school around the corner. Every day around noon, teenagers would stream out of the imposing stone edifice, clustered in cliques of three or so, looking for food or cigarettes. I was embarrassed by how much they intimidated me. I would be standing in a bookstore or a café and suddenly a child would be at my elbow, almost to a person incredibly thin and wearing designer t-shirts, colorful wool sweaters, shoes that ran the gamut from loafers to high-heels. The students themselves were almost always white, visibly bourgeois and cisheterosexual in a way that only the cisheterosexual bourgeoisie can be. It was here that I first began to seriously consider fashion and identity, but particularly fashion as a constitutive element of non-cisheterosexuality.

I had never really thought about what I wore. I was never interested in clothing; or, rather, the clothing I wore, and the codes that came along with it, were never interesting to me. They were not playful, fun, expressive of myself or of what I wanted. In all fairness, “fashion” as such cannot express any individual’s desires. Fashion is already a societal relationship.

Fashion is not just “the fashion world.” It is not just X number of companies, magazines, etc. It is a network of signs that derive meaning from their context, which in turn represents the ever-changing relationships between classes, races, sexes.… It creates its own formal grammar. And as with speech, slippages in how we articulate sexuality in fashion reveal the bones of the broader framework: capitalism and the oppressions that nourish it.

Fashion choices of the oppressors do more than show off a certain status. It helps create that stratification in the first place. Indeed, the French word for fashion, la mode, literally means “the way,” as in, the way in which things should be, must be, or are done. French writer Monique Wittig made a similar point about the English word “straight”: it implies that heterosexuality is the mode from which one might deviate. Fashion, then, as a whole refers to a ruling class’s taste.

Granted, taste is developed in line with whatever materials are available — at one point, sugar and cacao were “fashionable,” in the sense that they were only available to the colonizing aristocracies; then they were “fashionable” in the sense that they were desirable commodities that had been made more widely available.

Conversely, one could understand oppressed people’s tastes as making the best of a bad situation. Take modern-day thrifting, for example. The few studies available indicate that LGBT people in France are significantly less likely to find and hold jobs than their cishet counterparts. Assumedly, this would lead to the same kind of disproportionate levels of poverty in Paris that oppress American queer people. In other words, although thrifting may have become a fad, it is also the cheapest way for queer people, especially youth, to dress themselves. Which means being very unlikely to find an outfit that is not cobbled together from many different items, times, and places. That said, to simply equate fashion with economics would be to elide the choices that people make, the deviance they might choose to insist upon.

In other words, what is interesting about taste is not merely that it relies upon access to materials, but that that there should be an intentionality behind what would otherwise be a matter of necessity. Fashion is the codification of that relationship between necessity and choice: it insists upon taste as the mode.

Fashion companies are not unaware of the class tensions underlying its meaning-making—a mainstay of advertising strategies is to emphasize that X Y Z product will allow someone to express themselves, become more themselves, to defy homogenization and group-think. The irony is that this capitalistic self-help jargon only serves to monetize people’s thirst for something to hold onto, an identity or a source of meaning, a search generated by capitalism itself.

In my own life, it was only when I stopped thinking of fashion as a neutral, a covering of one’s self in gray slab, that clothes became literally meaningful. Of course, I did not “find myself.” I would rather die. But I was able to rethink my body and what it wore as tools within my control, things that belonged to me and were available to me as my own. It was not ownership per se that excited me, but specifically ownership of my own body, of something not cisheterosexual. Dressing, piercing, bejeweling, tattooing, painting, molding were all operations I now wanted to think about as I reworked myself. It did not matter if what I chose had any obvious connection to queer symbolisms. What mattered was that I chose them: a bat tattoo on my upper left arm, a black blouse gifted to me by a friend, chains and a skull ring I found in a thrift store, and so on.

According to the definitions I’ve employed, it would be impossible for the oppressed to have their own fashion. Furthermore, it becomes increasingly important to distinguish between oppression, the oppressed, and any given individual. Because not all queer people are discriminated against equally, not all queer people have faced any instances of oppression, and not all queer people are your friend. Pete Buttigieg would be case in point.

However, as a group, people who do not conform to cisheterosexuality are indisputably discriminated against. Phrased in non-individualistic—in systemic—terms, cisheterosexuality oppresses those it does not understand, those it cannot account for. This forces us into another otherwise loosely-defined, heavily-intersected group of non-cishets. We do not—cannot—respond with our own fashion, because we do not hold power; contrary to the most fashionable conspiracy theories, there is no queer power-structure secretly pulling the strings. That said, we can, consciously or not, offer a counter-system of taste.

For instance: are piercings fashionable? That depends. Because where earrings for most women are a non-issue, nose-rings on anybody can signify anything from punk nostalgia to queerness to, simply, youth. And yet, if I were in a bar, or if I felt threatened on the subway, I would want to stand near the young people with nose-rings rather than the white ladies with pearled earlobes.

Implied above is that taste that gets broadly assimilated by queer communities is a survival mechanism, a way to identify one another and provide safety in numbers—or else make it clear who to flirt with without fear of a violent response. Again, this is true, and still needs to be considered in relation to the specific choices that are made: why nose rings, for example? Why mullets, or shaved heads, or bobs—all meaning different things alongside different bodies and presentations? Why might some fashion choices be considered straight in one context and queer in another?

Here I can only briefly propose this particular jumping-off point—the formal structuration of “fashion” vs. “taste”—for any actual research into those choices. My hope is that it will help us be more honest with ourselves and each other—admit that we are less of a “community” than many would like to think, that we do not hold power and yet should not seek to ingratiate ourselves with cisheterosexuality, and that there will be no security for our lives so long as cisheterosexuality and its codependent oppressions exist.

The photos below were taken a few months ago by a friend, Vic Krass. The idea was to stock up on “author photos” as my poetry has begun to be published and I hate most pictures of myself. However, they also demonstrate the kinds of things I like to wear. Obviously, they retain a relationship with prevailing fashion dictates, as well as with the more clichéd responses on our part. All the same, even with the superficiality and the commodification of myself, they do demonstrate how I choose to dress.