Paper Short Abstract:

This paper follows the sartorial stories of queer activists in Copenhagen navigating the tension between expectations of embodying the nation and simultaneously embodying a politicised sexual subjectivity. Un-writing national sartorial aesthetics creates alternative meanings of what it might look like to find belonging through dress.

Paper Abstract:

Ways of dressing are productive grounds for the imagination and creation of national belonging. Since the emergence of the Danish fashion industry in the 1960s, narratives of social cohesion, equality and liberal-mindedness as inherently part of the fabric of modern Danish society have found heightened expression through dress and fashion. Whilst embraced by many, specific aesthetic narratives of what it means to dress in a Danish way are also subject of contestation. Despite their link to positively connotated notions of progress and modernity, these sartorial narratives narrowly define the possibilities and boundaries of what it might mean to be, and to look, Danish and to belong within the national imaginary.

Drawing on wardrobe studies and ethnographic fieldwork, this contribution follows the accounts of queer activists in Copenhagen whose stories about choosing and wearing clothes speak of a tension between the expectations of embodying the nation and simultaneously embodying a politicised sexual subjectivity. Making sense of societal pressures to conform to a certain way of dressing whilst negotiating queer (in)visibility makes queer activists un-write Danish sartorial aesthetics and practices, thereby creating alternative meanings of what it might look like to find belonging through dress.