To advocate the abandonment of the binary distinction between male and female in favor of the free play with gender identities obscures the unequal position that women occupy in relation to men in the context of the experimentation with gender markers. While, at first glance, it may appear that women have a greater freedom than men to play with gender identity in fashion, this play is structured by the dominance of the male principle as we have seen. Furthermore, the apparent freedom accorded to women in the realm of fashion belies the fact that there continue to be fewer options open to women than men in most areas of social life. From this perspective, it could be argued that the comparatively greater license given to women, in the realm of dress, to adopt any guise they wish serves as a compensatory mechanism for the lack of options open to them in the other areas of social life.
The postmodern celebration of post-gendered identities in the realm of fashion, then, in a context where economic, political, and cultural inequalities between the sexes remain, steers dangerously close to becoming a legitimizing ideology of patriarchal capitalism rather than providing a radical challenge to it. This is reiterated by Wernick, who writes that "[i]t is one thing for men and women to look and behave more nearly the same in the unencumbered leisure situations typically shown in [fashion] ads; quite another for their economic, cultural and political power to have actually become equal". As well as effacing the social locatedness of the subject, the play with gender in postmodern fashion presents a curiously disembodied view of the subject. In its treatment of gender signifiers as free-floating signifiers that are detached from their association with particular types of bodies, postmodern theorists of fashion perpetuate the mind/body distinction. It is as if the markers of gender have a life of their own, unrelated to the bodies of the individuals who appropriate them, while the body is treated as a tabula rasa, or neutral surface, onto which these signifiers are inscribed. As the relation between the outward "mask" and the body that wears it is entirely arbitrary, it makes no difference whether the body is "male" or "female." Since gender identity is seen as constituted by the mask that one adopts, the nature of the body wearing that guise is no longer considered relevant. The male transvestite is just as much a "woman" as the woman who dons the masque of femininity since there is no self apart from the one forged by our outward appearance. However, as Sweetman points out, clothes are not just semiotic signs whose meaning depends simply on their relation to other signs, but are integrally related to the body that wears them. The body one has is not immaterial in this play with gender signifiers, contrary to what postmodern theorists of fashion might presuppose.
Once the corporeal nature of our experience of wearing clothes is recognized, then it becomes clear that our ability to don whatever guise we desire is not as open-ended or flexible as the postmodern "carnival of signs" suggests. For, associated with the wearing of particular types of clothes is a certain body habitus-a form of comportment or way of holding and moving the body-that is deeply ingrained and not easily modified. As male transvestites are only too well aware, adopting the masque of femininity involves much more than simply putting on women's clothes, but also entails learning the deportment of the body appropriate for this "look." Likewise, Entwistle points to the necessity to pay due heed to the body as a concrete, fleshly entity rather than simply a blank slate on which signs are imprinted. While it is true that the body is mediated by discourse, it is important to realize that it is not simply a discursive construct, but also has a materiality that exceeds this. Following Csordas, Entwistle advocates a shift away from a semiotic/textualist framework to a notion of embodiment and "being in the world," drawn from phenomenology. Central to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is an awareness of the body not as the passive receptor of outside stimuli, but rather, as the medium through which we experience the world. Far from being an inert object, our bodies are the sites through which we articulate our sense of self. However, as Entwistle observes, despite his attention to the corporeality of the body, Merleau-Ponty fails to consider the body as gendered and how this may generate differential experiences of embodiment.
In this respect, he shares with post-structuralist theory its failure to acknowledge how the different physical nature of male and female bodies impacts on the way we experience our being-in-the-world. In order to give due weight to the materiality of the body and its gendered specificity, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that a more adequate way of conceiving of the operations of culture on the body is a model based on the process of etching rather than that of inscription. While the notion of gender as performance is celebrated as a liberation from fixed, essentialist notions of the self, what is occluded by this conception of the self is its dissociation from the body as fleshly, corporeal substance. In spite of her claims to put bodies center stage, Butler neglects to acknowledge the physicality of the body itself as it becomes reduced to an effect of discourse. Though we are certainly not determined by our biology, neither can we totally transcend it into a free-floating carnival of signs.
Our experience of who we are is unavoidably mediated through the physical presence of our bodies, and not to recognize this is to perpetuate the disassociation of the mind from the body, which has been so prevalent in Western culture. In upholding the transgendered body as quintessential, theorists such as Butler perpetuate the denial of gender specificity for which many male theorists of the body have been criticized. Despite the fact that the bodies in the postmodern world of fashion are presented as genderless mannequins, the "sex" of the wearer does still matter and impacts on the way in which clothes are experienced, both by the wearer and by those around them. Thus, for example, as Entwistle points out, while the male business suit serves to "desexualize" the wearer by rendering the body underneath largely "invisible," a similar outfit worn by women produces a different effect. Though the intention here is also to neutralize the sexuality of the wearer, it is still seen as being more erotic than when worn by a man. This is because the bodies of women continue to be seen as more sexual than those of men. There is still a deeply ingrained cultural assumption that men are more capable than women of transcending their bodies to attain a "higher" plane of existence. In its failure to acknowledge the significance of the body as a corporeal entity, the transgendered subject of postmodernity can be seen to be symptomatic of the heightened sense of alienation from the body that we experience today, despite our constant preoccupation with it.
As Arthur and Marilouise Kroker argue, with the growing ubiquity of the virtual world of cyberspace and new biotechnologies that provide prosthetic substitutes for body parts and functions, we increasingly experience ourselves as disembodied subjects. They suggest that our contemporary preoccupation with the body can be seen as a "panic reaction" to our increasing sense of its obsolescence. The proliferation of images of the body in consumer culture masks the disappearance of the "natural" body and its replacement by technological devices. While they write in somewhat hyperbolic terms of the absorption of the body in a simulacra of signs that substitute for the "real," nevertheless, their description is apt for the way the body has been presented by postmodern theorists of fashion as a semiotic playground with seemingly no material limits.
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