Kat and George are delighted to be presenting an oral paper at the Queer Transformations conference, organised by Dr Lizzie Reed, Dr Laura Harris and Dr Avi Boukli at the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology in the University of Southampton, on Tuesday 11th June.
The one-day conference will host talks about the creation and curation of radical and queer transformation stories. Our presentation – titled “Extra-Ordinary Wearables: Archiving queer inventions, radical transformations and speculative sewing” – will discuss the queerness of POP’s research, including drawing from our recently launched Speculative Sewing Inventory and the methodologies behind it.
Here’s our abstract:
Clothing has always been a site of inequality, yet also a powerful tool for change, radical action, and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) democracy. For centuries marginalised peoples have creatively mis/used what they have worn to “fit” social norms, as well as defy and resist socio-political restrictions. In our ERC-funded Politics of Patents (POP) research project, we examine 200 years of global “wearable apparel” patents from 1820–2020 as acts of political resistance, contestation and subversion. Following Sarah Ahmed’s writings about “queer use” and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “misfits”, we explore how lesser-known inventors used new forms of clothing to do unexpected things, resisting and reimagining the ways social restrictions ascribe onto bodies, and in the process, attempting to change the world stitch by stitch. Particularly striking are convertible, multiple, reversible and hidden inventions. These dynamic designs provide options and choice for wearers to claim multiple identities, conceal radical practices, push at conventional boundaries and transgress into new territories of counter-normative world-making. In this paper, we reflect on the queer methodologies POP uses to access, understand and share fragmented, erased or deliberately hidden data. We will discuss “speculative sewing” which involves stitching theory, data and fabric into inventions described in patents and analysing and wearing them as three-dimensional arguments. We discuss the possibilities and challenges of showing, sharing and archiving these dynamic, lively and transforming artefacts. In the spirit of our creative practice, we will show & tell material examples of our research, reconstructions and queer re-imaginings.
Following the conference, we plan to expand on this queer research and ideas in further publications and exciting activities, so stay tuned!
