Body Acts Queer

Sammanfattning: Body Acts Queer is an exploration of the performative and ideological functions of clothes with regard to gender, feminism and queer. It is an artistic, practice-based thesis in the field of fashion and design. The thesis includes three projects: On & Off, If you were a girl I would love you even more and The Club Scene. In these projects I, using text and bodies, work with acts in which clothes have a fundamental role. By exploring bodily experiences of clothes, I investigate the clothes’ performative and ideological functions, with a focus on cultural, social and heteronormative structures.Working with clothing and fashion design from a queer feminist perspective, I transform queer and feminist theory into a creative process. The projects presented in this thesis, together with the discussion, suggest a change in the ways in which bodies act, are perceived and are produced within the fashion field, giving examples of how a queer design practice can be performed. In this thesis, queer design is explored as an inclusive term, containing ideas about clothes and language, the meeting point between fiction and reality and the ability to interpretation and bodily transformations – where desire, bodily experiences and interaction create a change.