““Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal.”
“In the antigarden represented by the desert, the question accompanying the poet like her shadow under the sun is: Who am I to be so alone? Who am I if I am not with another? The demand for another is always mute but piercing. All these texts ask for another and all the poets ask for another language, even for a foreign language perhaps, because the essence of poetry is to find strangeness in language.”
— Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
“We sleep in language,” writes Robert Kelly, “if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.”
C’est la terreur du vide qui nous mène tous, et c’est pourquoi il faut se méfier beaucoup des théories qui tendent soit à nier, soit à cacher, soit à franchir le vide : nous sommes trop intéressés à leur succès. Nous combinerions n’importe quoi, vous le savez mais vous ne voulez pas le savoir, nous recourrions aux plus invraisemblables subterfuges (et même les plus honnêtes, les plus hardis d’entre nous) pour éliminer ce vide, d’une façon ou d’une autre. Car le penser n’est pas possible, le vivre non plus : j’en deviens la preuve.
medium-dark blue jeans – the wardrobe basic, imo. they dress up better than light jeans, but can also easily be worn with a casual button-down or a t-shirt.
shorts – casual, comfortable summerwear. I’d start with a pair in black and a pair in khaki. avoid jean shorts. what style of shorts you get depends on personal preference and just how casual you’d like to go. cargo shorts are utilitarian and slightly more suitable for younger butches, I think – in my mind I associate them with high school and college. non-cargo shorts, while still casual by virtue of being shorts, are a little dressier and can be worn with a wider range of shirts. (cargo shorts primarily work with tee shirts.)
shirts
graphic tees – graphic tees are lots of fun, widely available, come in a huge range of sizes, and allow you to express a sense of your own personal style in a way a lot of men’s fashion traditionally hasn’t.
v-neck tees – a little dressier than crew-neck graphic tees, v-neck tees in solid colors are pretty classic and can be worn “up” (with your dark jeans and a blazer) or “down” (with shorts and sandals) with ease. black and grey are good starting colors, and adding in a few jewel or pastel shirts as well gives a lot of versatility.
a white cotton button-down – in my opinion, the white cotton button down is a must-have. for the most versatility, I recommend either a broadcloth or oxford shirt, with a slight personal preference for oxford.
flannel – however you may feel about stereotypes, flannel itself is awesome. it makes great casual wear for fall and winter, comes in a huge range of colors and patterns, and is unbelievably comfortable.
outerwear
navy blazer – worn with your khakis and white button-down, this completes the most formal look available in the basic wardrobe. with your dark jeans and a graphic tee, it makes a more casual outfit look much more intentional and put-together. my preferred blazer-vendor is Uniqlo – they’re much more inexpensive than most, and their men’s sizes run down to an XS, which is something of a rarity.
shoes
brown oxfords/bucks – I’ve had the most luck finding oxfords that look nice, are double-digit rather than triple-digit pricing, and fit well when I’ve shopped at GH Bass in the women’s department. their selection rotates, but there’s a wider range of products at cheaper prices if you look on ebay or other non-direct sources. eastland is a little pricier, but also makes excellent-quality no-frills dress shoes for women.
hi-top converse in a neutral color – my preference is dark grey, but I could imagine owning navy or black converse as well. this is probably my priciest recommendation after the oxfords, but they can last for ages and be worn with almost anything. also, because they’re unisex, it’s much easier to find them in a wide range of sizes than is typical of men’s shoes.
sandals – for wearing with your shorts and tee shirts in the summer! I like the wide straps on men’s rainbows, but havaianas are also an inexpensive, durable option available in a wide range of colors.
accessories
reversible belt – black/brown reversible is the way to go. it saves time, money, and space, and as long as it’s sized right, you can’t tell that it’s reversible. if you’re of smaller height/build, I recommend getting a belt that’s 1″ wide instead of the (admittedly more common) 1.25″ width. you’re the best judge of what works with your body, however, so if the 1″ just looks too thin, size up! (I strongly recommend not going wider than 1.25″, in any event)
a pack of white v-neck undershirts – these are inexpensive and wonderful. wear them as pajamas, or under the button-down and flannel shirts. they keep you from sweating through your shirt as quickly, and in the summer, despite what instinct might suggest, they keep you much cooler. I wish I’d started wearing them years ago.
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what would be in your basic wardrobe? anything you would add? subtract? disagree with? let me know!
if you have questions about what I mean by certain words or phrases, please send me an ask and I’ll be happy to define terms!
In 1915 Gillette created the Milady Décolleté razor,
and to put it on women’s radars he advertised it as an accessory that
was as necessary to buy with a modern dress as a hat or pair of gloves.
“Small and curved to better fit the armpit, the razor was designed
to supplement the sleeveless and sheer sleeved fashions of the period,”
Hertzig confirms. To convince women that buying a razor came part and
parcel with buying the latest fashion, catalogs began to cleverly market
the two products together. For example, anti-underarm hair ads were
appearing “in McCall’s magazine by 1917, and women’s razors and depilatories
showed up in the Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1922, the same year that
company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves,” Anita Renfroe,
author of Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You, explained in her book.
The first advert that ran for the women’s razor was a one-inch square in Harpers Bazaar,
and with that small bit of ad real estate new rules for femininity were
drafted. Shaving wasn’t going to be a passing trend but a new part of
what it meant to be a proper woman in polite society.
After all,
the goal of advertisers and magazine editors wasn’t to meet women’s
needs — it was to create new ones. That was the only way to keep
products moving off of shelves. And with more problems women had to
worry over, the more magazine issues an editor was able to sell. For
example, Cyrus Curtis — the owner of Ladies’ Home Journal — shared in a speech to advertisers, “Do you know why we publish the Ladies’ Home Journal?
The editor thinks it is for the benefit of American women. That is an
illusion…the real reason, the publisher’s reason, is to give you people
who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell
them about your products,” Joan Jacobs Brumberg shared in her book, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls.Magazines were just ads gift wrapped in advice to get women to buy them and their products. And buy them they did.
“Beyond the properly sacred things that constitute the common realm of religion or magic, the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditures (sacred things themselves form part of this whole). This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value. Included are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.)”
“Sept. 1 is my beloved Leslie’s birthday. The gift s/he left us all is a FREE DOWNLOAD of Stone Butch Blues. S/he also asked: ‘Remember me as a revolutionary communist.’” ― Minnie Bruce Pratt on Facebook
Audre Lorde (Black lesbian), June Jordan (Black bisexual woman), Hélène Cixous (Jewish Algerian wlw – I don’t know what she specifically identified as), Amir Khusrow (Indian Sufi mystic poet who had homoerotic themes in some of his poems – obviously “gay” wouldn’t be a term he’d have used but you get me), Rumi (Irani Sufi mystic poet who also had homoerotic themes in some of his poems), Natalie Wee (Chinese queer woman), Danez Smith (a queer, Black nonbinary person), Langston Hughes (Black gay man), Pat Parker (Black lesbian), Nancy Huang (Chinese bisexual woman), Wu Tsao (Chinese lesbian), and Fatima Asghar (South Asian wlw)
medusa-avenging-squad 
