Something Off My Chest: Queer Sensibilities of Clothing, Gender, and the Body

This thesis explores how people who live outside, between, or beyond the gender binary navigate the embodied and material experience of gender through clothes or the way they dress. To do so, it uses a queer adaptation of the wardrobe interview, understood as a material-semiotic approach to methods. In total, ten wardrobe interviews were conducted. Theoretically, the project is situated within queer studies, primarily indebted to the works of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and José Esteban Muñoz. The combination of the materiality of the wardrobe, personal narratives, and theoretical concepts such as performativity, disidentification, and queerness, yields an understanding of gender that is closely tied to the materiality of clothing and the body. In the discussion, the writings of Andrea Long Chu are used to critically consider gender as a category of inquiry as well as the wardrobe as a political space.