Epiphenomenology of the closet: Feeling and fashioning sexuality in everyday life

Abstract

Clothing is an essential means through which social actors construct, perform, and negotiate their sexualities in their everyday lives. Existing research about dress and sexual performance suggests that social actors carefully balance institutional demands, their sexual identities, and their erotic desires when determining what to wear. Yet broader theories of culture and cognition point out that the majority of everyday social action is much more rapid and automatic than cautiously and deliberately considered. How can these accounts be reconciled? Drawing from interviews with young adults comprising a variety of sexual identities about the contents of their closets, I find that my respondents are sometimes strategic about how they present their sexual identities and desires with their clothes. But much more often, they articulate connections between emotions and temporalities: how particular items have made them feel in the past, how they expect certain outfits will make them feel in the future, and what sorts of feelings emerge when they wear clothing in the present. Moreover, they link those affective understandings to specific recollections of face-to-face interaction. Their memories of previous interactions drive their anticipations about future face-to-face interactions, and those same memories further imbue particular articles of clothing with an emotional charge that innervates affective states for them in the present moment. Thus, I argue that the intersection of emotion, interaction, and temporality crucially informs how social actors use their clothing to manage their sexualities, and more importantly, how they experience their sexual desires and identities in the first place.