Re-Dressing Race and Gender: The Performance and Politics of Eldridge Cleaver’s Pants

Abstract

In Paris in 1975 Eldridge Cleaver, exiled revolutionary African American activist, former Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, appeared in photographs and newspaper articles wearing, and discussing, pants he had designed. The major innovation in Cleaver’s pants was a redesigned crotch: instead of the usual button and zip front opening, his pants featured a soft panel with a protuberant fabric appendage into which Cleaver intended the wearer’s penis to fit. Why did Cleaver channel his intelligence and creativity into menswear at that moment? How did Cleaver’s penis-positive pants design resonate in 1975 with black politics and gender politics? And why am I, a queer transgendered man, writing about these pants? Through this article I hope to contribute to a discussion in fashion studies about the materiality of bodies and the role of self-fashioning, particularly for those living in resistance to dominant codes of gender and race. I situate and analyze Cleaver’s pants in a broad context of the postwar politics of dressing and redressing race and gender in the United States, with references to a longer American history, as well as to a global context of clothing in a postcolonial era. The pants, in both their design and in the act of being worn, materialize acts of raced and gendered insurrection, but in a web of historical power relations that privilege whiteness and cisgender masculinity.