Abstract

This thesis rethinks queer reading as textile reading as it traces instances where queerness appears as represented through clothes, becoming textile. After demonstrating through historical examples how clothes create meaning and can be subverted in their wearing, the thesis turns to cinema to argue that queer representation appears on screen as a textile coding. The thesis enacts a survey of queer textile representation in cinema’s history, from Morocco (1930) to Queen Christina (1933), Rebecca (1940), and All About Eve (1950), to argue that queerness and sexuality are partly textile constructions. While elevating textiles from their designation to costume and mise-en-scene to a category of signification of their own, the thesis conceives of textiles as signifying spectrally, through coded representation. The third chapter synthesizes textility and spectrality, to question how queer representation, and representation in general, manifests. The thesis offers a textile approach to queer theory: one that synthesizes essentialism and constructionism through the queer visions conjured by textiles. Through an understanding of “style” as a defiant queer practice that can enact change upon the world, the thesis offers new ways of thinking about our identities and their textile constructions. It champions a reading of textiles for meaning, constructing the method of queer textile reading, that it then applies to later films such as Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Personal Shopper (2016), and Barbie (2023), to show the method’s utility throughout film history and today. What also becomes visible in these queer textile readings is the textility and spectrality of the film medium itself: its textile-like qualities, but also its ability to make ghosts appear through the cloth.