Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I

1. No Frills, No-Body, Nobody

1 NO FRILLS, NO-BODY, NOBODY Manuela Fraire The antinaturalistic origin of clothing (which is not a second skin, because it can be put on and taken oƒ ) makes it one of the most significant features of the “symbolic treatment ” necessary for the humanization of the living body. Once reduced to an essentiality that places it in competition with the skin covering the body, often considered the “first clothing” provided by nature, dress runs the risk of betraying its own vocation from the outset. If deprived of accessories, clothing is actually comparable to the human skin but only to that of the newborn baby not yet “humanized” by the maternal gaze and care—a skin that has not yet undergone the symbolic treatment that designates the existence , the vesture of a subject, a subject in which to “in-vest.” “In his Last Judgment, Michelangelo portrayed himself as Saint Bartholomew (the patron saint of tailors), carrying his own skin on the arm,” writes Eugénie LemoineLuccioni , hinting that the skin is exactly what is at stake in the attempt to give the body a symbolic meaning.1 Clothing, therefore, is a second skin only insofar as, like natural skin, it needs to be treated (by language) in order to be rescued from bareness. “It is enough for me to know that the condition of a naked man appears precisely neither very human nor very enviable” (31). Lemoine-Luccioni goes on to comment that Claude LéviStrauss sees clothing as instrumental in the establishment of a social hierarchy because “naked” people do not constitute societies. Without clan colors or other signs of membership in any kind of group, the naked body lacks meaning: it can only acquire meaning , and become human, once it is veiled and/or unveiled (32). The naked man or woman is therefore s/he whose “I” is still not able to wear the markings of his/her own sex, the first radical diƒerence among human beings. In fact, reduced to a bare anatomical feature, the sexual organ is not constituted as a sexual object. This gap is salient to transvestites, as they play on the insu~ciency of their anatomical sex to the point of contradicting it through their dress. Through this synthetic gesture, they represent the blankness of the body itself in its anatomical “bareness.” Thus the endless work of accessorizing the bare body turns it from a meager transient thing into a subject and object of desire “created” by the laws of culture and language and quite unlike any other thing “created” by humans. Like culture and language, the body is realized through the never-ending act of adding and subtracting something to/from its bar- (r)e(n)ness. I D E N T I F I C AT I O N A N D D I S M A N T L E M E N T In many respects, the act of clothing ourselves, and especially the choice of accessories, resembles the endless quest for identity that enables our “I” to engage in its work of selfconstruction , its search for an ideal image and for a legible identity that can actually be recognized by the Other.2 The accessory, because of its function in the construction and recognition of identity, is the signature/mark of a subject doomed to incompleteness, but never quite resigned to it. We inherit this inconsolable state from the very condition of helplessness in which our “I” was born, always searching and always subject to the check imposed on it by the experience of mirroring itself in the Other: an act of juxtaposition and, at the same time, of surrender. The quest for a satisfactory image of the self, which fuels fashion trends, never ceases to undress the body’s bareness and redress it with the desire the “I” searches M A N U E L A F R A I R E / 8 for in the gaze of the Other. It is the gaze of the mother that provides the stuƒ of our desire and also enables the basis for our many identifications with an ideal image of ourselves to which, in the course of our lives, we try to add or subtract that particular feature that is supposed to make a (the) diƒerence. This feature is the precursor of the accessory. In this perspective, clothing ourselves finds its place among the...