Abstract
The path toward coming home to an embodied sense of wholeness in queer identity is often a long journey marked by personal severance. For trans and non-binary people, the arts have become an invaluable space for reclamative wayfinding and liberation. Artistic pathways offer processes to (re)presence the severed parts of ourselves that were laid down to survive in a binary framework that collapses wholeness. Here, I offer forward a sartorial expression of non-binary poiesis as a reclamative act of (re)weaving the lost threads of self. In the disassembling of my adopted aesthetic, sewing and sartorial expressions become a pathway home to wholeness in queer body, where (re)stitching binary endpoints gestures toward a third space for belonging.
Loose Thread. Cheverie, 2022.
12:36 a.m. I am at the sewing machine sliding mauve cotton under the Singer foot, adding lavender thread-seam to a new pocket. I have the disassembled panels of a man’s shirt scattered around me on the table to be pieced back together around florals, warm hues, and silk, with hips and movement. I am making to be unmade (Kelly, 2019), stitching to find knowing in patchwork (Lindström & Ståhl, 2015). I sew the way my mother taught me—as Granny taught mum, and great-Granny taught her—a long thread passing through mothers’ hands to mine.
As I pull apart the male aesthetic of my closet, stitching femineity into broad shoulders becomes a reclamative practice (Huang, 2016). I am relieved to be surrounded by this disassembling. The womb-womb-whir of the electric foot creates echoes of matrilineal rhythm and I find myself tracking inward (Meyer, 2014) along vibrating threads in the topography of my being.
In Florals. Cheverie, 2022.
Mum Taught Mum. Cheverie, 2022.
My journey toward wholeness began here, guided toward a trans identity by a legacy of knots I had twisted in the fabric of myself since I was a child. In the ecology of my being (Kelly, 2019), knots are scattered along threaded pathways like cairns on a landscape, marking old trails and points of severance.
For those born male, the intergenerational impact of colonially informed masculinity— structured within and by patriarchal confines—is a legacy of severance from the spiritual and cosmological wholeness (Davis, 2009) of what it means to be a man.
Notes to Self. Cheverie, 2022.
The first perpetuations of gender-based violence are what we do to ourselves in response to expectations of the gender-binary. In the binary home of masculinity, it is the violence done by cis-gendered males with femininity in their being, who seek to obliterate it in themselves in order to be read as legitimate men (Vaid-Menon, 2021). My childhood was spent in service of this, cleaving off parts of myself to be seen with legitimacy and to feel safe. I became a body and spirit untethered.
Stitching Endpoints. Cheverie, 2022.
Now, disrupting the aesthetic of one binary endpoint expression with representations of the other, I lay down a sartorial path as a gesture toward a third space for being (Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006). For me, the making itself becomes my own contributive echo to matrilineal rhythm, which quiets my spiraling mind enough to listen. I become an apprentice to cotton—to Granny’s stories; to my own form—drawing severed threads forward in a sartorial offering of home for the soft animal of my being who had long been needing one (Oliver, 2014).
This is non-binary poiesis: sacred acts of creation that lay down pathways for our collective coming home to wholeness in queer body and being. As I feel the fabric-flow of each piece around me, I am reminded that for trans and non-binary people, art becomes a reclamative wayfinding (Davis, 2009). We make to reclaim the severed parts of ourselves that were laid down to survive in a binary framework that collapses the three-dimensionality of our wholeness.
In a topography cairn-marked by severance, I am retying threaded pathways of knowing toward a mended kinship with my own divine femininity. While it always existed in the original masculinity of my body, it took sartorial paths in matrilineal echo to (re)member. Nights at the sewing machine helped me to coming home to a queerness away from the binary—to (re)embody my wholeness and become alive again.
Processes: Cheverie, 2022; used with permission.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
