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We are pleased to bring you episode 6 of the Revealer podcast: Black Muslim Men’s Fashion.

Happy listening!

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The excerpt below, from Chapter 3, “Accessorizing the Cross,” provides an overlooked perspective on the history of cross jewelry.

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Chanel’s Catholic past, provocative persona, and designer status combined to make her cross jewelry simultaneously fashionable yet tasteful, traditional yet modern, respectful yet playful. This can be seen in one of the most famous Chanel jewelry design motifs. In the 1930s, she hired Fulco Santo Stefano della Cerda, Duke of Verdura, a Sicilian aristocrat, to design with and for her. This collaboration produced one of the most iconic pieces of Chanel jewelry: enameled cuffs featuring Maltese crosses adorned with colorful gems. This cross became one of the hallmarks of Chanel’s jewelry designs and numerous photographs show Chanel wearing the iconic cuffs.

Maltese cross (Photo: Lynn S. Neal)

A distinct variation on the cross shape and symbol, the Maltese iteration nevertheless drew upon the Christian past. In 1126 the Knights Hospitallers of Saint John adopted the Maltese cross as their symbol, identified by its eight points. Some accounts suggest that a tunic bearing the symbol protected the Knights from their enemy’s weapons, while others emphasize that the eight points of the Maltese cross represent the Knight’s eight obligations: “to live in truth, have faith, repent one’s sins, give proof of humility, love justice, be merciful, be sincere and whole-hearted, and to endure persecution.” The Maltese cross shape invoked ideas about Christian virtue and divine protection. The selection of this shape and its spiritual connotations aligned with the ways fashion magazine articles and advertisements emphasized the visual and the symbolic in Christianity, as well as the supernatural powers attributed to sacred objects and fashion products.

In addition, the Chanel-Verdura cuffs provided a fashionable and playful take on this traditional symbol that offered interpretive possibilities. Rather than Knights wearing starkly drawn crosses on their robes or shields, the cuffs sported a decontextualized Maltese cross adorned with numerous precious gems, connoting luxury and sophistication. These characteristics also identified it as a fashion item, rather than a devotional aid. At the same time, though, by preserving the basic outline of the Maltese cross and evoking the shape’s exotic Maltese and Christian history, the cuffs connoted ideas about the object’s potential spiritual power. As a result, the Chanel-Verdura cuffs provided consumers with a sophisticated way to simultaneously exhibit fashion and religion.

Another example of Christian-inspired fashion from Versace with a jeweled image of Mary (Photo: Lynn S. Neal)

In his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin laments arts’ loss of “aura” through its replication, but he also highlights how the reproduction of an art object detaches it from tradition and “meet[s] the beholder . . . in his own particular situation.” In a similar way, the Chanel-Verdura cuff offered potential consumers proximity to and personalization of the meanings (spiritual and cosmopolitan) ascribed to the source—Malta and the Maltese cross. Consumers did not need to be spiritual pilgrims who visited Malta; rather, they could invoke Malta and any potential supernatural powers associated with its cross through purchasing a reproduction and wearing it. As discussed in chapter 2, the pleasure and possibility of such objects resided not in a zero-sum game based on Chanel’s sincerity or the object’s authenticity, but rather in a back-and-forth movement between “illusionism and realism.” Birgit Meyer explains, “As belief becomes thus vested in the image, it becomes hard to distinguish between belief and make-believe, miracles and special effects, or truth and illusion.” The Chanel-Verdura cuffs offered consumers this possibility—an object that could transform their sartorial and spiritual lives.

Fashion columns in the 1930s commented on Chanel’s jewelry designs but said little about the inclusion of this religious symbol. Yet, the cross remained a vital part of her design aesthetic, and Verdura designed numerous variations of the Maltese cuff. Many of these pieces were reproduced in the 1950s, when the House of Chanel reopened after the war. So renowned are these cuffs, that in 1987, when Diana Vreeland, former fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and former editor-in-chief of Vogue, auctioned off her jewelry at Sotheby’s, including four of Chanel’s cuffs, it made the New York Times.

Chanel’s jewelry designs also included styles of crosses that modernized another historic, “traditional,” and “authentic” source. Chanel was inspired by the Byzantine period in Christian history, renowned in fashion for its rich artistic repository. “From the point of view of jewelry, no empire was ever richer in traditions than that of the Byzantines.” One historian notes, “The symbolism of Christianity pervades much Byzantine jewelry, and pendant crosses (some of which also served as reliquaries) were among the earliest and most popular pieces.” Chanel experienced this rich tradition of jewelry and religion on a visit to the Tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. The site, which dates to the fifth century CE, features numerous mosaics of biblical figures, saints, and Christ the Good Shepherd. It inspired Chanel. According to Patrick Mauriés, in Jewelry by Chanel, the impact of this visit “can be seen especially clearly in the great number of crosses . . . which she designed using combinations of pearls and precious stones.”

Cross jewelry (Photo: Lynn S. Neal)

In the 1950s, Chanel hired French jeweler Robert Goossens to work on Byzantine-inspired designs, which meant the use of gold, colored gemstones, and Christian symbols. Given this inspiration, Goossens and Chanel designed numerous cross pendants and brooches, many of which were produced in 1954, when the House reopened. In comparison with the bright and shiny character of the Chanel-Verdura Maltese cross cuff, the Byzantine cross pendants and brooches evince a simpler aesthetic. They use gold and precious gems, but the settings and style reflect their Byzantine inspiration. In one design, from the 1960s, gold, pearl, turquoise, and tourmaline adorn the face of the cross, while a saint is engraved on the reverse. The turquoise stones are rough and uneven, and the gold has a similar, almost primitive, appearance, and the saint on the back adds another layer of simplicity and austerity to this grand piece. Here, again, we see Chanel’s jewelry offer a modern and sophisticated interpretation of a historic and traditional form. Her use of precious gems echoes the grandeur of the Byzantine style and highlights the wealth of the era and the consumer. At the same time, the simplicity of the settings and the inclusion of the saint recall ideas about devotion to and the protection of the divine.

Despite Chanel’s evolving aesthetic, the cross remained a recognizable element of her jewelry designs that fashion journalists highlighted in the 1950s. For example, in a 1957 New York Times article, Phyllis Lee Levin described the latest fashion trend in “Spring Clothes Deserve Medals.” She notes “that the spring suit lapel without a bold jewel will look forlorn.” Levin attributes this trend to the work of Coco Chanel, “a kind of Queen Mother of costume jewelry.” She explains, “In many cases, the outlines of her wonderful tangles of sapphires and emeralds followed the classic Maltese cross, star and medallion shapes.” More than twenty years later, fashion reporters continued to mention Chanel’s influence in the realm of jewelry, especially her use of the Maltese cross. For example, in 1988 fashion journalist Bernadine Morris characterized the details of designer Yves Saint Laurent’s collection as “an unmistakable homage to Chanel,” as the jewelry adorning his models included Maltese crosses.

Lynn S. Neal is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Wake Forest University. An award-winning teacher of Religious Studies, Neal regularly teaches courses on religion and popular culture, new religious movements, and religion in America. She is the author of Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America and Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction, and the co-editor of Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History, Second Edition.

The post Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America appeared first on The Revealer.

Linn Tonstad wearing a tailored jacket by T.M. Lewin and a graphic-floral collared shirt from Ann Taylor paired with an electric blue paisley tie “bought outside Perugia somewhere.” The charcoal rectangular eyewear offsets her signature magenta lip shade. (Photo: Stacie Joy)

“Perhaps in her stance is a certain kind of prance; perhaps in the energy that saturates her figure, she becomes an assembly. Look at her move: what a movement.”
–Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

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Anyone who is serious about theology or religious asceticism may have their reservations about embracing fashion. Indeed, fashion’s emphasis on novelty, extravagance, and self-obsession seem distractedly opposed to the pursuit of eternal truths, spiritual discipline, and community often associated with religion. Hence the curious looks I get when I mention my research interests at the intersection of religion and fashion. But doesn’t this oppositional view keep our understanding of the sartorial superficial and, similar to other impasses between convention and contemporary life, limit our possibilities for doing religion and theology differently?

With these questions in mind, I sat down for a conversation with Linn Tonstad, Associate Professor of Theology, Religion, and Sexuality at Yale Divinity School. We met via Zoom on a June morning during COVID restrictions. I noticed right away the striking offset of Linn’s magenta lipstick and ivory-colored, wide-framed glasses, both familiar elements of her personal style. I smiled deeply recalling why I had pursued a conversation with her about theology and fashion. I find the tension between surprise and discipline in Linn’s look delightful – a gender-fluid silhouette one day, tailored the next, a well-tied knot foregrounded by contrasting patterns, a meticulous haircut paired with angular eyewear. Linn wears the paradoxes that fashion experts note is necessary between innovation and conformity, intelligibility and dissonance.

While Linn’s writing does not directly address fashion, her sartorial embodiment reflects the ways that academic communities and sanctuaries are trending toward divergence. I propose that these interruptions of dominant aesthetic regimes are a form of revelation, to use theological language, a mode of articulation that strikes at the heart of religious calls to uniformity. Linn is trained in systematics, an approach to theology that requires serious conviction in and methodological coherence with the classical lineage of Christian symbolism, belief, and practice. Linn’s scholarship on the interplay (or lack thereof) between Christian systematic theology and queer theory mirrors the provocative clashes of her embodied aesthetic. I sensed that Linn would have some experience with both inquiring looks and dismissals of her work for a presumed lack of seriousness. I was curious to know if she had thought about connections between these interventions.

Seriousness, survival, and discomfiture
Fashion studies scholar Otto von Busch observes that, “Fashion is a conflict in human beings’ souls as well as in the social settings of the public realm, and our clothes are the conflict-ridden interface between the two.” When I asked Linn about her relationship to sartorial expression, she reflected on the vulnerability of talking about clothes: “I’ve had a strong relationship to sartorial self-expression since I was probably about 16 years old, but there’s been a lot of changes over time too. In the different lives I’ve lived, there have been different selves, in so many directions, and it’s very personal for me to talk about it. It’s unusual for me to talk about something that I actually experience as that personal, which is why I was interested in doing this [interview] in a way. I was like, ‘OK, I think I’m ready to have this conversation.’”

Linn recounted several distinct lives she’s lived with corresponding sartorial regimes. Growing up in Norway, she found the “conformity and homogeneity” of “high-level bourgeois aesthetics…incredibly stultifying.” She described her “conversion to feminism” in college in Southern California as a counter-aesthetic move. “I decided that it was politically important not to be pretty. I moved into this phase of being between a club kid and a goth, where I dyed my hair every imaginable color. I was threatened with suspension from two different religious colleges for how I dressed.” Linn enjoyed observing people experience the extreme disjunction between her appearance and her intellectual interests and fluency. “As was described in the defense of me in one of these cases of threatened suspension, ‘She may look like she dances for a living, but she doesn’t.’ I found it both personally generative and politically important at the time. And then I went to grad school, right, as one does.”

Linn wearing an asymmetrical coat by Army of Me, pants by Pal Offner, and Dr. Martens. The upper lash design on the eyewear, the purple fanny pack worn across the body, and the gloss finish on her shoes and bag all speak to Linn’s taste for gender play and surprising details. (Photo from Linn Tonstad’s personal archive)

In graduate school at Yale, Linn put on a high-femme style marked by stiletto heels, pencil skirts, and a curvy shape. “Changing my style as I did then felt like a question of survival, a needing to recalibrate the relationship between what I looked like and how I felt about what I did.” Linn’s femme aesthetic marked her ambivalence to the homosocial masculinity of theology as a discipline (“queer in a context where there was very little of that”), while also displaying her familiarity with the rules of the gender game. The ambivalent familiarity of her high-femme look was mirrored by her honesty about the “discomfiture” between systematic theology, feminism, and queer theory in her first book God and Difference. “Even now, a decade into my postgraduate career, I still get to sit around listening to people tell me how they really liked the sort of serious bits of the first book, but why is all that other stuff in there? And I also knew that because of that concern with continuity and intelligibility in systematics that if I wanted to survive in that discipline, I would have to show that I could play the game.”

The game here refers to the rules of systematic theology, which are to treat the symbols of the Christian faith with sufficient seriousness and to use them correctly. The aim of God and Difference is to show the failures of Christian thinking about God, gender, and sexuality through both a skillful handling of systematics and serious consideration of feminist and queer interpolations. As Linn writes, “This book is therefore also a critique of how getting the trinity right (e.g., speaking and praying Father rightly) becomes a pious cudgel protecting the wielder from seriously engaging the questions and concerns raised by those relegated to the pile of tares left to rot outside the church door.” Much of the broader discipline of theology remains unreceptive to this critique. With a tone of certainty, Linn said, “I am not the person who wrote that book anymore. I won’t write another one of the same kind and that has something to do with change, with what happens when you push a discipline as far as you think it can go, and then it simply refuses to go there.”

This discomfiture is made visible in contrast to the uniform of the theological academy. Linn and I commiserated over the standard issue attire at professional conferences. She recalled a photo-op at a conference a few months before the shutdown. “I’m standing there with five men who are all literally wearing the exact same outfit, the blue suit, brown shoes, and then the slightly patterned shirt underneath. Some of [the shirts] had smaller checks and some of them had larger checks, but that was the only difference. And they were different ages, different seniority, different races, five men, five exact same outfits and then me and that experience is an experience where there’s a way in which the body seems to disappear. Race makes a difference here, of course, but there’s a way in which the body seems to disappear for them. And it doesn’t for others.”

Doing theology differently
What if the change of outfits inherent to our lives could open our eyes to the changes that religious systems endure to survive, a realization that allows for what queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid named “a continuous process of serious doubting” rather than an obstinate fidelity to matchy-matchy systematic coherence? Marcella Althaus-Reid, a key conversation partner in Linn’s work, spoke frequently about attire as revelation. Linn mused about Althaus-Reid that, “Everybody remembers the theology without underwear. Everybody remembers lifting the skirts of Jesus. Everybody remembers going to gay bars with rosaries in your pocket.” For those not familiar with queer theology, what matters here is the methodological disruption of these material interlocutions in Althaus-Reid’s writing. One example, “doing theology without underwear,” treats the embodied experience and expressions of the lemon vendors (code for sex workers) in Buenos Aires as revelatory. Clothing (or lack thereof) reveals the particular and embodied ways that people imagine, relate to, and inhabit God. In turn, these material utterances reveal God’s preference for the disenfranchised, the exiled, and divine delight in deviance and nonconformity, what Althaus-Reid calls “indececency.” With these incarnational turns, Althaus-Reid affectively shifts the location of theological agency and authority from the capital-C-Church to the street.

Linn in a David Road jumpsuit and silver Kenneth Cole boots. Graphic eyewear complements the Annie Hémond Hotte painting in the backdrop. (Photo from Linn Tonstad’s personal archive)

Linn notes the methodological importance of these moves, but she is not convinced by other scholars’ attempts to reinvent Althaus-Reid’s approach. “The way that it’s taken up, it just becomes a repetition of the anecdote or another debate over the sort of ethics of the theology without underwear imagery, the lemon vendors, how exploitive is this and how does it relate to Afro-indigeneity. And those are all legitimate questions, but I have seen relatively little writing still that tries to do another version of what she’s doing there.”

Linn laments this mimicry and how it relates to other challenges in the field and in her own work. She mulled over embodiment as an impossible subject for humanities scholars. “In the ways that we write about it, we utterly deny everything that we’re saying. Because the moment we write about the body, we have already reified it and made it external to ourselves in ways that are really, really hard to overcome. I’m thinking a lot about this in my current work and not successfully resolving it at all. Like, how would you have to write if you wanted to write the body? One of the points about the body and fashion in that regard, is that it isn’t just how we know each other. It’s the what of knowing each other.”

When I asked Linn what she is wearing lately, her response necessitated disclosing what she is doing with her body and how what she is doing matters for responding differently to current dilemmas in theology. “In recent years in my personal life I have more and more this sort of uniform of raving, of techno, like loose clothing, the Docs [Dr. Marten boots], you know, black pants, and sort of cloaks.” Street scenes from Linn’s social media feed flashed in my memory, one in particular where she takes a wide stance, head tilted. She’s wearing a long, fluid, dark-colored coat with an asymmetrical closure and hemline, and white chunky boots. I remember feeling how righteous she looked, how her stance became her, so obviously herself. “I’ve been trying to start writing about dancing because that’s been such an important part of my life until shutdown of course happened.” Linn confides, “I don’t know if it’s going to work.”

Linn lounging in a black jumpsuit by David Road and white Dr. Martens. Accessories include a black ring Linn found at a vintage store in Melbourne and a sparkly plastic ring from Claire’s circa “many many years ago.” Styling intermingles soft and hard elements – ivory glasses, heavy metal chain, floral fan, dark nail polish, loose fabric, and lace-bound footwear. (Photo from Linn Tonstad’s personal archive)

She is skeptical of “standard straight confessional kinds of storytelling” like the disclosures of identity made in response to Althaus-Reid and Eve Sedgwick’s observation that queer has to be said in the first person. Nonetheless, her dancing life is becoming a genre-bending space of experimentation in Linn’s writing life. She asks herself, “What are other kinds of stories that you could tell?” And this question opens up a different field of experience for her and potentially for theology. “One of the things you contribute to a really good dance floor is visually, the visual interestingness of you.” For Linn, the dance floor counters standardization and imperatives to check identity boxes. “The very best dance floors will have an incredible array of moments that are clearly chosen, both to enhance self-expression and to enrichen. To make it sometimes literally more colorful, what everybody is experiencing in dance floors that are made simply by everybody being themselves real hard, right, which is the best kind of dance floor. I don’t know how to write about that for theology, like I’m trying, but it feels incredibly clunky and hard. Also necessary, I think.”

This necessity is not self-indulgent. Linn reflected on what is at stake when theologians and institutions fail to pay attention to “how bodies encounter each other” and “the way bodies move through space differently.” For her, the repeated claims that “injustice is bad” and “racism is against God’s will” are insufficient responses to racialized violence, as are recourse to established theological solutions. One example she gave is the tendency of Christian theologians who propose liturgy (rites of Christian initiation, formation, and worship) as a way to break the habits of racism. This solution falls short considering that liturgy is designed to instill obedience and conformity to a system of divine and clerical supremacy. Her voice rose in exasperation, “It’s like theologians are determined to prove that Christianity is a lie. They’re determined because they will not give on some of these questions. The doubling down and the ways that the unseriousness with which these problems get treated, usually under the veneer of seriousness, right? It’s like, ‘We are taking this problem seriously. We are establishing the commission to talk about this, that, and the other.’ All of that is evasion.”

As Linn sees it, knowing and changing “how bodies move through space or are forbidden to move through space” is imperative to redress racialized violence in the classroom, in the hallways of the university, in policing, in the geographic demarcations and colonial practices in New Haven, Connecticut where she teaches. “How do we change the way we feel? How do we change the way we interact in an embodied life? Those questions aren’t answered at all.”

“Everybody being themselves real hard”
Fashion, dance, and other embodied genres have the potential to open us to our own stories, to our wounds of resistance and conformity, and our movements to make life more livable for ourselves and others. As Linn reflected, “It’s interesting to have different selves in different periods and see how they work in the context of a work life where it’s important for students to see that you can survive without, I mean, I don’t want my students to give up as much as I did. I want their lives, their trajectories to be less stifling than I experienced grad school as.” What to wear, then, is a serious concern. In present conditions, what to wear can be the difference between securing a livelihood or experiencing professional excommunication, the difference between being taken seriously or being shot for trespassing.

Linn in a David Road jumpsuit and silver Kenneth Cole boots. The reds in the Avery Z. Nelson painting in the background catch on Linn’s magenta lip color and draw attention to her multilayered facial expression, head tilt, and stance. (Photo from Linn Tonstad’s archive)

In optimal conditions, what to wear can, as fashion studies scholar Elizabeth Wilson observes, make a new cultural order out of the contingent, decorative, and futile. Or as Linn suggests, “The best dance floor isn’t the one that’s just harmony. Everybody doing the same thing. The best dance floor is one where there’s real divergence and even conflict to some extent. I like the unexpected combination. I like the intractable conflict, but it has to be acknowledged as a conflict. It can’t just be sublimated into. There needs to be a willingness to act as if we thought there was something at stake.”

My conversation with Linn, at the very least, attests to the power of dress to disclose the seams between personal and intellectual convictions. Optimally, more serious attention to the intractable conflict between the contingency of fashion and the obstinacy of theology may supply visual interestingness and unexpected delight to systems in need of change. So while the uniforms grip their cudgels, the queer contingent laces up their boots, reapplies their lipstick, and dances to that deep break beat, knowing their lives depend on it.

Jeanine Viau is an Associate Lecturer of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post “Everybody Being Themselves Real Hard” – A Serious Conversation about Theology and Fashion with Linn Tonstad appeared first on The Revealer.

New Yorker cartoon featuring God with a long beard

“Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shall thou mar the corners of thy beard.”
–Leviticus 19:27

“[Those] who have stamped their character on history – Egyptians, Indians, Jews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Turks, Scandinavians, Slavs – were furnished with an abundant growth of this natural covering….their hardiest efforts were contemporaneous with the existence of their beards.”
–Thomas S. Gowing, The Philosophy of Beards (1854)

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For more than a century an imposing granite bas-relief sculpture has stood on the grounds of the University of Geneva, over thirty feet tall and stretching three hundred feet along a leafy quad, depicting stern golem-like representations of ten figures central to the most austere manifestation of the Protestant Reformation. The International Monument to the Reformation was designed by a Swiss architectural firm to commemorate John Calvin’s quadricentenary in 1909, and ironically carved by the French sculptor Paul Landowski, most famous for Rio De Janeiro’s monumental and very Catholic Christ the Redeemer. The central panel of Landowski’s Reformation presents Calvin, his deputies William Farel and Theodor Beza, as well as John Knox, the Scottish founder of the Presbyterian Church. While all four men are slightly variable in appearance – the cut of a robe here, the stature of a figure there – they’re largely interchangeable. With their robes, skullcaps, and clutched Bibles looking nothing so much like occult grimoires, these Reformation theologians remind one of wizards. This is in large part due to their long, hefty, sculpted, tapered, and elaborate beards. Monumental beards warrant monumental sculptures, it would seem.

Following Henry VIII’s death in 1547, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer grew a long beard, the formerly clean-shaven priest supposedly donning whiskers in mourning for his king, but to critics it appeared to be a clear a sign of sympathy with those more radical reformers on the continent. For Cranmer, being a Protestant meant being bearded. If Cranmer was looking for inspirations among the ministers of Europe, there was no shortage. In addition to Calvin, Farel, Beza, and Knox with their tangled face-jeremiads rebuking the clean-shaven priests of the Roman Catholic Church, there were, to grab an assortment of prominent names, Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, or Heinrich Bullinger (variously bearded and non-bearded throughout their lives). Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in The Reformation: A History that as the schism progressed, reformers donned beards to make “a theological point that clergy were not a caste separate from the laity,” and that conveniently a “full beard would make them look like everyone’s picture of an Old Testament prophet.” There were, of course, exceptions to this rule – many of the earliest Lutherans remained clean-shaven, including Martin Luther (though in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1532 portrait he has a scattering of fashionable stubble). And while the beard became a sartorial choice of reformers, the fashion caught on among leaders of the Catholic Church as well with, among other pontiffs, Pope Clement VII, sporting a beard every bit worthy of a Puritan divine.

In a portrait of Cranmer housed at Lambeth Palace and made by an anonymous artist around 1560, the reformer is resplendent in his full hirsutism. Bedecked in his priestly white stole and black vestments, the wizened Cranmer looks out wearily over his long, cleft, white beard. The heft of his whiskers seemingly equivalent to the weight that sits upon his ecclesiastical shoulders – a serious man with a serious beard. Now, compare that to a portrait of a contemporary of Cranmer’s, held at the National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland and also made by an anonymous artist, this one a few decades after the painting held at Lambeth. Both share certain conventions of northern Renaissance portraiture; the proportions of the figures and how they occupy their frames are the same, their centered gazes are the same, the scripts in the corner announcing their subjects’ identities are the same, the inchoate background darkness out of which they emerge is the same. Even the beards are of an equivalent impressiveness, the subject of the Wroclaw portrait sporting one the same length as Cranmer’s. The Wroclaw portrait isn’t of a Protestant reformer, however, but rather of Helena Antonia, a bearded woman who was the court dwarf of Maria of Austria, the Holy Roman Empress.

Helena Antonia

If Cranmer’s beard was intended to signify his stateliness, then Antonia’s portrait was painted for a different purpose. Where Cranmer’s beard is configured as natural and virile, Antonia’s is aberrant and other; where Cranmer’s facial hair signifies his masculinity, Antonia’s is supposed to demonstrate a disorder in conventional gender. When a viewer looks at Cranmer, he gazes out, but the spectator is compelled to gaze at Antonia. Though a member of the Imperial court, Antonia was of a familiar cultural type, the person whose features are coded as abnormal and who is held up for the condescension and derision of their audience. Writing about the nineteenth-century carnival shows, which adapted European aristocracy’s court jesters and dwarves for public consumption, literary scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson claims in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body that the “freak is an object of simultaneous horror and fascination because… the freak is an ambiguous being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life.” Facial hair is a simple anatomical reality for many – of all genders, ethnicities, nationalities, and religious backgrounds. A beard, however, becomes a cultural construct, and the “bearded lady” regularly signifies transgression. The literal reality of Cranmer and Antonia’s beards are identical, but it’s that equivalence which makes the later deviant in the eyes of the viewer. Who is allowed to have a beard is never a neutral question, and across cultures and traditions the answer is normally “Not women.” Such a binary opposition relies on the understanding that beards are to suggest masculinity, and the lack of one, femininity, so that a bearded woman undermines the duality. Thus Antonia becomes an object of derision, mockery, and spectacle, while Cranmer remains a figure of respect.

Antonia is, admittedly, an extreme example, and yet the principle remains the same more broadly – in most of Western culture beards are for men, even if a woman is capable of growing one. And so a depilatory industry has developed to force a cultural conformity upon humans, one which bodies in their magnificent diversity don’t naturally recognize. For the Protestant reformers, according to MacCulloch, beards “provide an example in patriarchal masculinity,” grown so as to emphasize, “that their male sexuality was no different from that of laymen.” The exhibition of Antonia has a very different purpose. Beards are thus claimed not just by the patriarchs, but also by the patriarchy. Such cultural regulation is intimately tied to religion; how could it not be? Just as language, dress, and diet, even in ostensibly secular contexts, can be tied back to sacred categories, so too is the issue of facial hair, from who is allowed to wear a beard, to what that beard should look like. Beards are associated with, among other traditions, Judaism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, Sikhism, Rastafarianism, and early Mormonism (though prohibited today), and rules governing beards can be wide-ranging. As the most prominent of phenotypical secondary sexual characteristics associated with maleness, the beard can’t help but imply certain connotations. But as Antonia and Cranmer’s examples show us, it’s never that simple.

For all that beards are used to signify membership among a particular faith, and for all that people often imagine even God as being bearded, it’s just as true that being ritually shorn of facial hair often has its own associations with the sacred. There are bearded Hasidic rabbis and clean-shaven Buddhist monks; Amish farmers with their chinstrap beards and Jainist initiates plucking their faces bare. Facial hair, and its lack, can both be forms of drag, true to philosopher Judith Butler’s contention in Gender Trouble that “identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” A beard can mean many things, and sometimes God uses a Gillette. Not even Jesus is always bearded, as is the case with some early Byzantine depictions of him as smooth and androgynous as Apollo. Whether a denomination embraces the beard or not, the presence and reality of male facial hair is a zone of contention over how masculinity is perceived and who gets to lay claim to its title. When it comes to traditional conceptions of what people understand as men’s bodies, only the penis has been endowed with more significance as a site for potential anatomical holy war, but it’s (usually) less visible than a beard.

Historian Christopher Oldstone-Moore explains in Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair that as religions “formulate specific values and norms, they deploy hair… to proclaim these ideals to the world. When disputes arise about contrasting models of masculinity, different treatments of facial hair may indicate where one’s loyalties lie.” As during the Reformation, where Cranmer’s prodigious late-life beard signaled his loyalty to the hotter variety of Protestant, or when a Haredi Jew’s beard is a rejection of Jewish assimilation to Christian cultures. The point isn’t that beards represent some particular thing, rather that they simply represent something — wisdom and wildness, ecstasy and staidness, virility and age — it depends on individual context. Whiskers also signify something about the sacred – be they an Orthodox priest’s mighty follicles or a Rasta’s dread-locked beard – though, again, that something is variable. Even for secular modern faiths, from political ideologies to consumerist enthusiasms (which are often just as religious), beards are still laden with significance (and often in similar ways).

In domains as wide-ranging as philosophy, politics, and popular culture, the beard remains a site of disagreement. An enterprising intellectual historian could do worse than to trace the ways philosophical systems are reflected in an era’s facial hair, positing some kind of relationship between base and stubble-structure, if you will. Look at the eighteenth-century: the Enlightenment consciously rejecting all of those wizard-like Reformation beards, as if superstitious Christianity could be scraped away with a straight edge. The philosophes of Enlightenment salons preferred the clean look of classical Rome, a parsimonious face reflecting a rational philosophy. In contrast to the Renaissance and the Reformation, not a single major Enlightenment thinker had a beard. Not John Locke or Benedict Spinoza, Wilhelm Gottfried Leibnitz or David Hume, George Berkeley or Immanuel Kant. Not Voltaire or Rousseau. Rene Descartes did have a goatee, but it made him appear more like Frank Zappa than the prophet Elijah.

Separate from philosophy, we ought also to examine the beard in politics. The U.S. presidents serve as an example to the waxing and waning of beard popularity, and as an illustration of semiotics of male facial hair, which even in the ostensibly secular Oval Office finds its origin in the theological, no matter how obscured. The first American presidents, inheritors of Enlightenment salons (and barbershops), embraced the same fresh, clean look. The first follicle-enhanced president was John Quincy Adams, who along with his mutton chops was elected in 1825, well into the beard-friendly Romantic era. Another great beard would await the election of Abraham Lincoln (Martin van Buren notwithstanding), with a renaissance of bearded presidents following traitorous Andrew Johnson’s clean-shaven interregnum. From U.S. Grant until Teddy Roosevelt, every American president had some sort of facial hair with the exception of William McKinley (and they shot him). Some of those presidents had relatively staid facial hair, like James Garfield’s sober handlebar, or Grant’s clipped beard that made him look like a liberal economics professor, while others, like Rutherford B. Hayes and James Garfield’s had downright rabbinical beards. After Teddy Roosevelt, no other president would sport one (though, in failure, Al Gore grew a righteous depression beard).

Cultural historians have probed why the nineteenth-century saw a proliferation of mighty beards, all of those Civil War officers that looked less like they were West Point graduates than Old Testament characters, and the answer is multifaceted. The enduring influence of Romantic Sturm und Drang with its valorization of “the natural man” was manifested in America by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, when beards from Brigham Young to John Brown took on an epic caste. For those of a radical political perspective, the bohemian beards of the European revolutionaries of 1848, like Italian partisan Giuseppe Garibaldi’s, provided another impetus. From such radical strands would be woven conventional style, for as Oldstone-Moore notes “When respectable men no longer feared hairy radicals, they no longer feared hair and were free to avail themselves of its possibilities… Beards lost their political meaning and became instead tools to restore notions of patriarchy and manly dignity,” so that President Hayes and Walt Whitman could sport the same style, even while the former rejected the splendor of the barbaric yawp.

Such a cultural politics of the beard endures. For much of the twentieth-century to be clean-shaven was to be the square, conservative upholder of the status quo. By contrast the beard was the provenance of the hippie, beatnik, and freak, a countercultural declaration rejecting American uniformity. More recently, conservatives have heartily reclaimed the beard for themselves, taking it from Allen Ginsberg and giving it over to former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senator Ted Cruz (the latter of whom actually looked good, as distressingly reported by both Esquire and Slate). The beard isn’t the provenance of the Yippie anymore, but now that of the militia member; it’s sported not by beat poets, but by MAGA zealots with Gadsden flags and Punisher skull patches. A dark irony in this though, as much of the exclusionary Islamophobic rhetoric that intensified after 9/11 centered on the facial hair of Muslim men, with harassment and hate crimes often focusing on men who appeared to be Muslim because of their beards (as well as attacks on bearded men who belonged to other religious traditions, such as Sikhism). The bearded fascists who mock and attack Muslim men for also having beards aren’t hypocrites; they’re authoritarians reveling in the sadism of arbitrary power. Their point has never been that men shouldn’t have beards, but that they’ve decided certain people shouldn’t have them – namely those whose religious difference requires them precisely to grow a beard. The xenophobic racists declare, “Beards for me and not for you.” As Adam Bonenberger and Adam Weinstein argued in The New Republic, “the wholesale injection of facial hair into the American mainstream by veterans, law enforcement, and conservatives also fuels a familiar joyful cultural urge toward dominion and power.”

Strung between hipsters and the Tea Party, one wonders if God even wants His beard anymore. God is of course the big lacunae in any discussion about beards and faith, since the deity is so often imagined as bearded, from the Sistine Chapel to William Blake, cartoons in The New Yorker to The Simpsons. Such a question is facetious – God never had a beard, or He simultaneously has and doesn’t have one. Theology is beyond the realm of mere semiotics. When the kabbalists posed questions about the length of God’s beard, they never intended their questions to be taken literally, nor should depictions of a hirsute creator made by Michelangelo be seen as intending to reflect a reality. Beards endlessly defer their meanings, though God (or “God”) is a signifier forever looking for a signified. Facial hair would appear to be a bit more straightforward than the Godhead, a follicular symbol of shifting significance, yet forever associated with definitions of masculinity, however it’s constituted.

Conchita Wurst

Yet if a beard is to truly gesture towards the transcendent, it is necessary to destroy that arbitrary binary which posits beards as a marker of manhood. God’s face must erase all distinctions and oppositions, so that God appears more like the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst. A representative at the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, Wurst’s appearance is a direct rejoinder to the traditional masculine associations of the beard. With her slender frame and delicate features Wurst would read to many viewers as feminine, and yet she combines her appearance with a closely cropped, dark, thick beard. Such is the ultimate revenge of the bearded woman, the longtime spectacle of freak shows and carnivals, the mockery of gender rebellion triumphantly restated in the unabashed transcendence of Wurst’s beauty. Perhaps in our continuing millennium, Antonia will be seen as equally sacred as Cranmer. Because Wurst appears nothing so much like a depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the very face of God.

Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions, and appears regularly at several different sites. His most recent book is Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance’s Radicalism.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post How Long is God’s Beard? appeared first on The Revealer.

Above image: Idris Abdul-Zahir, an Imam in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Hannah Yoom). Main article thumbnail image: Mobalaji Akintunde in a photoshoot for Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s “The Style/Muslim Dandy Project.” (Photo by Evan Brown).

Walking down West 116^th Street in Harlem is one of my favorite activities. As I carry my large haul of wax print scarves and maxi skirts that I bought from the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market, an open-air market filled primarily with West African and Black American vendors, old-heads in kufis and track suits, young men in smart suits, and middle-aged men wearing boubous that billow with the wind catch my attention. They offer me smiles and friendly “salaams” and go about their day. This is what Black Islam looks like in the United States and what I have been studying for the past seven years. Yet, from media representations, you would think Black Muslim men and their diverse fashion sense did not exist.

Men who look like the ones I interact with in Harlem, Philadelphia, and Chicago do not make it onto the silver screen as the representatives of Islam; that is almost exclusively reserved for non-Black Arab men with beards and thobes. In the United States, Islam is often depicted as a foreign religion and Muslims are the ultimate “Other.” Black Muslims, especially those who descend from enslaved Africans throw a wrench in this narrative. For many cultural producers, it is easier to erase Black Muslims and their cultural and sartorial diversity than to provide an inclusive representation of Islam in the United States. Black Muslims push back against this erasure that happens in the media, as well as in their everyday lives from the mosques to the streets by using fashion.

Halima Aden

Research on fashion often centers on women’s dress practices. In part, this is because fashion is gendered, primarily considered a women’s domain. This is especially true when discussing Muslims’ dress practices. Much media attention has been paid to the hijab, which is positioned as the most visible symbol of Islam. These discussions often focus on Muslim women’s motivations for dressing modestly and on interpretations of religious texts. Popular media accounts of Muslim women’s dress tend to lean towards Orientalist depictions of the hijab, primarily focusing on descriptions of dress and comparisons with other religions, and even before and after pictures with former hijabis. The rise of covered Muslim mainstream models like Halima Aden and Kadija Diawara has led to more nuanced conversations among journalists and scholars about modesty, women’s fashion, and ethnicity. However, much work is left to be done to explore Muslim men’s dress practices.

In what follows, I provide an overview of three dress practices that I observed while conducting research for my forthcoming book, Fashioning Black Islam: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the American Ummah, in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. All three cities have large Black Muslim populations and have played a central role in the spread of Islam in the United States. Contemporary Black Muslim communities in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York can be traced back to the early 1920s with the arrival of Ahmadiyya missionaries, the emergence of Black new religious movements including the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Nation of Islam, and the growth of Black Sunni communities. While bowties, beards, and boubous can be found outside of these locales, these three cities helped popularize these styles in America.

While suits, beards, and tunic robes like boubous are worn by Black non-Muslims and non-Black Muslims, these styles play an important role in creating and maintaining Black Muslim men’s religio-racial identity. While these dress and adornment practices did not all originate from Black people, as cultural studies scholar Robin G. Kelley observes, there is a Black way of doing things. The story of Black Muslim men’s fashion reflects the various migration and immigration patterns and theological plurality that makes the American Muslim community one of the most diverse in the world.

Bowties
In 2019 in Chicago, I attended Saviour’s Day, an annual event hosted by the Louis Farrakhan-led Nation of Islam (NOI) that commemorates the birth of W.D. Fard Muhammad, the founder of the organization. I was showered with “As-salam alaikums, my sister” by Black men in sharp suits in browns, blues, and greys, a mix of solid colors and pinstripes. Their stylish ties and bowties matched their pocket squares. Most had tapered haircuts and clean-shaven faces, save for a few well-groomed mustaches. To an outsider, the men probably looked like they were on their way to a business conference, rather than a religious event. Nothing they wore could be easily read by non-Muslims as “Islamic” except their lapel pins, which included a red crescent moon and the phrase “In the name of Allah.” While few if any of these men would self-identify with the term, “Muslim dandy,” a term anthropologist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer introduced me to that describes their styles as a “sign of heterosexual masculine maturity”.

Muslim dandyism should not be understood as a mere appropriation of white middle-class aesthetics. Rather, as Africana studies scholar Monica L. Miller writes, dandyism is a signifying practice, “a strategy of survival and transcendence.” For members of the Nation of Islam, the suit is a physical representation of their membership in the organization and their spiritual transformation from one of the “living dead” to a Muslim. Founded in Detroit in 1930, the Nation of Islam sought to provide Black people with a new sense of self that challenged white supremacist representations of Blackness. For Black men, this meant challenging images of them as lazy, hypersexual, feminine, and poor providers or protectors of Black women.

Many of the Nation’s pioneers were poor and working-class Southern migrants and Caribbean immigrants. They existed outside of both white expectations of masculinity and Black middle-class norms. For men in the Nation of Islam, a well-tailored suit became a disciplining tool that signaled to others that they are “civilized” and reminded them to act “civilized,” which meant avoiding taboo activities like smoking and gambling, practicing proper gender segregation, and being willing to defend Muslim women. The Nation of Islam used the term “civilized” to describe their original state before colonization and enslavement. It reflects the ways the Nation of Islam appropriated and reworked white supremacist logics, where Black people are reimagined as at the top of the racial hierarchy. Through wearing suits and bowties, male members distanced themselves from racist images of rural poverty and criminality linked to Black urban culture so they could embrace Black respectability. Today, the suit and bowtie remain important aspects of the Nation of Islam’s image. Along with selling the Nation of Islam’s official journal, Final Call, wearing suits is an important fishing, or recruitment, tool because it provides men with a visual example of new social, political, and religious possibilities.

Beards
While beards can be found throughout various Muslim communities in the United States, Philadelphia stands as one of the homes of the “Sunnah beard” because of its rich cultural influence in Black America among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. One of the most famous wearers of the Sunnah beard, also known as the Philly beard, is rapper Freeway. The rapper wears a beard because he believes it is Sunnah, the ways of Prophet Muhammad, who according to Tradition had a long beard. As Islamic studies scholar Amanullah De Sondy notes, early Muslims positioned beards as a means of communicating masculinity and heterosexuality. The Qur’an is silent on the subject, but several hadiths provide details about men’s facial hair.

A hadith collected by Al-Bukhari narrated by Ibn Umar states that Muhammad said, “Cut the moustaches short and leave the beard.” The Philly beard tends to follow this, with wearers keeping a low moustache (or no moustache at all) and a full beard. Philly beard wearers often comb out their beards to lengthen them. Barber Atif Oberlton explains what makes the Philly beard different from other styles: “Really, a Philly Beard is just made up of the fullness and the thickness and the hair that they had come down and the way that it hangs. It’s extra thick where it hangs down.” As Brian L. Coleman notes, class plays a role in determining who is more likely to wear it and connect it to religious belief. He found that middle-class Black converts were less likely to wear beards than working class men.

The Philly beard is also a popular style outside of Black Muslim communities and is worn by several Black non-Muslim celebrities including Lebron James and Rick Ross. Often, the only way one can tell which Philly beard wearer is a Muslim is to wait for him to offer “salaams.” One explanation for the popularity of the Philly beard is the relationship between Islam, hip hop, and Blackness dating back to its origins in the South Bronx in the 1970s. The Last Poets, who are considered a “precursor to the hip hop emcee,” were formed on Malcolm X’s birthday three years after his assassination and were either Muslim or heavily influenced by Black Islam. As Hisham Aidi points out, in Philadelphia Black Islam’s relationship to music extends to jazz, soul, and R&B, thereby spreading Muslims’ cultural influence to a wider audience. Journalist Corey Townes argues that outside of hip hop, the Philly beard spread to Black non-Muslims as a result of mass incarceration. Incarcerated men were introduced to Islam and interacted with Muslims, some of whom wore long well-groomed beards. Even if they chose not to convert, many Black men picked up the style and the practice stuck. Like suits and bowties, beards are a form of Black (Muslim) cool. Regardless of the wearers’ religious background, the Philly beard represents Black masculinity, maturity, and individuality.

Boubou
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ended the racist immigration quota system that limited the number of immigrants from outside of Western Europe. This led to increased immigration of Muslims from Asia and Africa. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many West Africans from Francophone countries emigrated to Harlem, which is known as a Black cultural center and has a long history of Black Islam. West African immigrants’ arrival in Harlem led to increased inter-ethnic dialogue, and at times tension, about Africa and Blackness among immigrants and older Black communities.

Walking down 116th Street in Harlem, men wearing boubous are as common a sight as joggers and suits, especially on and around Shaykh Amadou Bamba Day, which reflects the ethnic and religious diversity of Harlem. The boubou is a long ankle-length loose-fitting robe that is both everyday and formal wear and can be found throughout West Africa, Central Africa, and their respective diasporas. While boubous are worn by all genders, there are subtle differences: men’s boubous often have a V-neck and matching pants and shirt. Fashion studies scholar Leslie Rabine writes, “When stiffly starched and draped over the body, the boubou creates for its wearer the appearance of a stately, elegant carriage with majestic height and presence.”

For members of the Sufi Muslim order Mourides, a group founded by Shakyh Amadou Bamba in Senegal in 1883, wearing a boubou provides a means of asserting a distinct religious identity in a secular space where there are competing definitions of Muslimness and Blackness. The boubou sartorially differentiates Senegalese Muslims from their Black American, Caribbean, and Latinx counterparts. The boubou’s presence on the streets of Harlem temporarily transforms the space into a Sufi Senegalese environment and plays a key role in creating “Little Senegal” on West 116^th Street. Like the Nation of Islam’s bowtie and suit, the boubou also represents a challenge to what I call “hegemonic Islam,” which privileges Arab cultural practices as the most authentic. Hegemonic Islam also extends to dress.

While the American Muslim community is perhaps one of the most diverse in the world, with no one race or ethnicity representing a majority, some groups are privileged over others: primarily Arabs and to a lesser extent, South Asians. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer argues that some Muslims embrace what she calls “the politics of pious respectability,” believing that the more Islamic knowledge they gain, the more a Muslim will aesthetically shift towards the “Islamic East” where “authentic” Islam resides. Embracing an imagined Islamic East often means sartorially rejecting Blackness. Yet, according to the Tradition in Prophet Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon he insisted that “No Arab has any superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab.” For Senegalese Mouride men, wearing a boubou on the streets of Harlem communicates that their Blackness, Africanness, and Muslimness are interconnected.

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As someone who studies fashion and Islam, one of my favorite hadiths is “Allah is beautiful, and he loves beauty.” This extends to men. To be clean and well-groomed is a religious expectation for all Muslims with the means to do so. How this is practiced varies based on race, ethnicity, age, and location. In their own ways, each style – bowties, beards, and boubous – also embodies Black cultural norms of looking good and wanting “to see and be seen.” For Black Muslim men, their style choices reflect their racial, religious, and political identities.

Like their female counterparts, Black Muslim men must navigate both white supremacist and Arab-centric assumptions about gender, race, and religion where Black Muslimness is often positioned as less authentically Muslim. Their clothing and natural bodily adornments become an important way for them to push back against their erasure and marginalization. At the same time, for Black Muslims, looking good is not solely about resisting white or Arab-Muslim gazes. It is also an expression of Black creativity and cool.

Kayla Renée Wheeler is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Xavier University. She is an expert in contemporary Black Islam and is currently writing a book on the history of Black Muslim fashion in the United States beginning in the 1930s.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Bowties, Beards, and Boubous: Black Muslim Men’s Fashion in the United States appeared first on The Revealer.

A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence walks in the 2017 Stonewall Pride Parade in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Amid the flurry of participants and floats in Ohio’s 2017 Stonewall Columbus Pride parade, one person caught my attention: a man dressed in drag and a headpiece that resembled a Roman Catholic nun’s coronet. Slowly processing down North High Street in a sundress and glitter-covered beard, he used a pink-gloved hand to give a royal wave to throngs of people on either side of the road.

When I learned the Revealer would be publishing a special issue on religion and fashion, I immediately flashed back to this individual, who, I’d since found out, was a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters – an international order of queer activists who playfully dress in the spirit of Catholic nuns and serve the community – seemed like a natural story to pursue. Their distinctive attire would make for a vibrant photo essay. I envisioned meeting the Sisters at public events, speaking with them about their ideas of fashion and religion, and taking their portraits.

Then March 2020 arrived, and with it, the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person gatherings were canceled, and the Sisters, like many Americans, went into isolation. A photo essay about them seemed like a moot point. However, the Sisters have since adapted their social activism to the age of social distancing, in many ways expanding possibilities for community outreach and fashion.

Founded in San Francisco in 1979, shortly before the AIDS crisis emerged, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have “operated in the midst of a pandemic for the past 40 years,” explained Sister Purrr Do of the Indiana Crossroads Sisters, who, like many, goes by a witty or sexually suggestive name and uses female gender pronouns.

“This is our space,” she said. “We not only understand what to do in regards to service . . . when we show up, when we are visible, [we], through being present, are a reflection of beauty and joy.”

Fashion has been integral to the Sisters from the outset. The order began as a public performance by gay activists who were both reacting to the hyper-masculine “Castro Clone” look popular in San Francisco’s 1970s gay community and influenced by a growing local gay theater and dance scene. At the time, groups like the Cockettes were “flaunting the conventions of gender by mixing markers such as beards and dresses” and using white pancake makeup and glitter, recounts Melissa Wilcox in her book Queer Nuns. Feeling bored on Easter weekend in 1979, Ken Bunch (the co-founder of a drag troupe known for performing pom-pom routines in retired Catholic nuns’ habits), a former Catholic named Fred Brungard, and another friend decided to “terrorize the town” by dressing up in the nuns’ habits and makeup. They realized the shock and attention their looks elicited could be channeled toward social change. Not long thereafter, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and their unique style, were born. As of 2016, according to Wilcox, the Sisters were active in 22 American states and 12 countries, often through specific “houses,” or communities.

Portrait of Sister Anna Mae Ceres at a socially distanced, outdoor storytime event hosted by the Cincinnati Sisters in Ohio on June 20, 2020. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Portrait of Sister MSG at a socially distanced, outdoor storytime event hosted by the Cincinnati Sisters in Ohio on June 20, 2020. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Donning endless, playful interpretations of Catholic nuns’ habits, colorful accessories, and makeup, the Sisters blend the “familiar tropes of drag queen and female religious renunciant,” writes Wilcox, and engage in something she terms “serious parody.” They parody a religious institution that has historically opposed and oppressed the LGBTQ community while also demonstrating their interpretation of what it means to work as nuns: spreading joy, expiating guilt, exposing bigotry, championing human rights, and assisting the vulnerable and marginalized. The Sisters’ humorous, flamboyant appearance captures attention for these social causes, helps them engage with the public, and provides a protective layer of anonymity.

“You could think of us as a modern-day jester in some capacity,” Sister Purrr Do said. “We are these clown nuns, but we have the ability to speak truth to power in a way that many people may not be able to do.”

Sisters’ styles tend to vary, and no two Sisters look exactly alike. Some manifest – the term for getting dressed and made up, and assuming the persona of a Sister – in “high nun” fashion, wearing black robes and veils, said Sister Anna Mae Ceres (pronounced series), a member of the Cincinnati Sisters in Ohio. There is even a Sisters charity event called Project Nunway put on by houses across the country that highlights a variety of high-fashion looks.

Anna Mae herself manifests as characters from the anime series Sailor Moon, and finds that dressing in this manner makes it easier for her to engage with younger audiences. Other Sisters prefer a simpler look: Wearing rosy clown cheeks, a floral-patterned dress, and a veil wrapped behind her head, Sister Freida Fondleus of the Kentucky Fried Sisters in Lexington, Kentucky, describes herself as an “approachable clown.” Part of the founding Sister community in San Francisco, Sister Tilda NexTime takes approximately four hours to manifest and uses water-based paints to replicate works of art, such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night, on her face.

“My idea is to be a walking piece of art that brings joy to people,” she said. “I really love doing that.”

Several portraits from the Instagram account of Sister Tilda NexTime, a member of the San Francisco Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who says she manifests with the intent of being “a walking piece of art that brings joy to people.” (Photo: Lauren Pond)

A Zoom call portrait of Sister Anna Mae Ceres, of the Cincinnati Sisters, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anna Mae commonly manifests as characters from Sailor Moon. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

A screenshot portrait of Ken Tagious, a gender-fluid Brother from the Kentucky Fried Sisters, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ken Tagious often manifests based on a feeling, aiming to express raw emotion and provoke questions about beauty. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

A screenshot portrait of Sister Freida Fondleus of the Kentucky Fried Sisters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Freida Fondleus says she commonly manifests as a friendly, outgoing, “approachable clown.” (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Sisters are quick to note that attire and make-up do not make the Sister; actions do. And these are many: Often, you’ll see manifested Sisters protesting for LGBTQ rights and countering antagonistic street evangelists; you’ll also find them advocating for immigrants and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Many Sisters have personal ministries they cultivate, such as providing resources for the homeless or support for individuals struggling with mental illness.

Then there are crises like pandemics. In the 1980s, as AIDS stigmatized and devastated the queer community, including members of the order itself, the Sisters engaged in advocacy, including a “stop the violence” campaign to address rising homophobic hate crimes. They also hosted some of the first fundraisers for people suffering financially as a result of the disease. Sisters are perhaps best known for their ongoing efforts to provide HIV education and sexual health resources, such as Play Fair! – a “hip, sexy, funny guide to safer sex,” Wilcox notes, “designed for gay men, by gay men.” The guide is distributed free of charge, sometimes with condoms and lube.

Amid the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sisters are likewise working to keep people healthy and support those impacted by the novel virus. Fashion continues to be a platform for this outreach. Notably, many Sisters are now incorporating masks into their ensembles, using fabric colors and patterns both as stylistic accents and to send a public health message.

“You can show people, if we can wear this over beards and makeup and all kinds of stuff, you can wear a mask as well,” Sister Tilda NexTime said.

At a socially distanced children’s storytime event led by the Cincinnati Sisters in June, Sister Anna Mae Ceres wore a black cloth mask lined with red, complementing her black dress and hot pink eye shadow and coronet. Earlier in the spring, she offered an online mask-making tutorial and encouraged PPE donations to healthcare workers; she and Sisters elsewhere have also sewn and sold masks, with proceeds benefiting charitable organizations.

Sister Arya Sirius reads a children’s book held by Sister MSG while Sister Anna Mae Ceres looks on during a socially distanced, outdoor storytime event led by the Cincinnati Sisters on June 20, 2020. Held in partnership with Downbound Books, the event raised money for Black Trans Femmes in the Arts. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Cincinnati Sisters Anna Mae Ceres (left) and MSG (right) talk and look through children’s books before the storytime event in Cincinnati on June 20, 2020. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Sister Arya Sirius holds her child at the Cincinnati Sisters’ storytime event in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 20, 2020. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

“I mean, who doesn’t want to wear a rainbow mask with puppy paw prints?” Anna Mae said, noting some of her other fun purchases: fabric with cow print patterns, as well as fabric with patterns from the Lion King and the Nightmare Before Christmas.

Since the pandemic began, Sisters have increasingly brought their distinctive appearances online, using digital fashion to entertain the public and buoy spirits at a distressing time. One common activity is applying makeup live on social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. As of May 2020, Anna Mae estimated that she’d “painted up” more than 20 times virtually, usually taking about 45 minutes each time. The Cincinnati Sisters also produced a video compilation inspired by TikTok’s viral #DontRush Challenge, capturing each person’s transformation from their “home attire” to their Sister attire. And in early April, a group of Cincinnati Sisters applied makeup during a public Zoom call, which was streamed on YouTube. Amid conversation and witty banter, they applied grease paint and eyeliner; some donned coronets. Audience members posted comments throughout the process.

“Thanks for doing this,” one person wrote in the live comment feed of the YouTube video. “Y’all have me laughing harder than I have all week.”

Occasions like this give the public a “glimpse behind the veil,” said Sister Purrr Do, who, until the pandemic, had rarely applied makeup online, but now loves the process. “In small-town Indiana, when our friends in the community tune in to watch us, they’re really intrigued at how we make this transformation happen . . . When they see our Sister selves, it is like seeing a magical clown creature in the wild.”

The Cincinnati Sisters apply makeup and socialize during a public Zoom call on April 10, 2020. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

Sisters are also manifesting for digital events – both online versions of events that typically occur in person, and virtual events created specifically to assist, entertain, and uplift people during the pandemic. Through their Facebook pages, some Sister houses are hosting virtual drag, talent, and magic shows. Sister Freida Fondleus, still dressed as the “approachable clown,” has held virtual versions of her regular storytime sessions – which, focusing on poetry and literature by queer authors, advance her personal mission that “our stories are important.” Although most 2020 in-person Pride events were canceled or postponed, online festivals like “Chill In and Proud” sprang up in their stead, with Sisters participating.

Keeping with the Sisters’ tradition of fundraising, some of these Sister events have harnessed fashion to raise money for people suffering the effects of the pandemic’s economic downturn. For instance, the San Francisco Sisters’ annual Easter Hunky Jesus Contest – wherein participants dress as irreverent interpretations of Jesus and Mary – took place live on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitch, with proceeds donated to the Queer Nightlife Fund, an initiative supporting queer nightlife workers who have lost income.

Other Sisters have used these digital appearances specifically to support people of color and condemn the systemic racism that the pandemic has laid bare. The Cincinnati Sisters’ June variety show – featuring, among other acts, Sister Kim Boocha playing the kazoo in pearls and a colorful floral coronet, and lip-sync routines by drag queens P. H. Dee and Lala St. James – solicited donations for the Black Trans Protester Emergency Fund.

Screenshots of several acts from the Cincinnati Sisters’ June 2020 digital variety show, which raised money for the Black Trans Protester Emergency Fund. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

The Kentucky Fried Sisters host a virtual “Blessed Bingo” game on June 21, 2020. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

During the Kentucky Fried Sisters’ “Blessed Bingo: Pride Edition” event, Sister Freida Fondleus shared Black LGBTQ history after each round of the game. And on Juneteenth, manifested members of the Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence held a somber Zoom candlelight vigil wherein they read the names of Black Americans recently killed by police.

“Law enforcement agencies across the country have failed to provide citizens with even basic information about the lives they have taken,” said Sister Burna Cross – a Black Sister wearing a black veil, clear gemstones, and a painted handlebar moustache – shortly before the name-reading began. Sister Electra-Complex, her head covered in sweeping black coronet, continued: “We do this as avatars for healing.”

The Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence hosted an online vigil on June 19, 2020 for Black Americans recently killed by police. (Photo: Lauren Pond)

One concern in transitioning to this and other forms of digital “dragtivism,” as it were, is the lack of in-person interaction between the Sisters and the people who need their help: the homeless, queer people facing hatred and bigotry in rural America, and transgender youth, among others.

“For me, I’m like, am I still reaching who I need to reach and serving the community in the way I feel I need to be doing it?” said Ken Tagious, of the Kentucky Fried Sisters, who identifies as a gender-fluid Brother, rather than a Sister. “That’s a tough question and a tough answer.”

Additionally, for Sisters who normally draw their inspiration from in-person events, the transition to these online appearances has been a challenge – even a barrier to their usual activism, Sister Anna Mae Ceres explained. “There are some Sisters right now who don’t feel like they can manifest, because they just don’t have that energy,” she said.

But most of the Sisters I interviewed expressed optimism – even gratitude that the pandemic has forced the shift to online outreach. In bringing Sister fashion to digital platforms, and in encouraging the development of websites and a stronger social media presence, the pandemic has necessarily ushered their houses into the digitally networked era. Establishing a virtual presence has enabled Sisters to interact more with each other, build a larger following for the order – nationally and globally – and consider how they can use technology to advance their outreach when the pandemic eventually subsides.

“There are people that follow the Sisters because of the way we look,” Sister Tara NuHole, of the Indiana Crossroads Sisters, said. “We get so many follows and likes and shares because of just the way we are presenting ourselves. Luckily, the bonus feature that comes with that is our message gets shared, too.”

Some are just grateful for the comforts of getting dressed and made up at home. “If you want the real truth,” Sister Purrr Do said, “for the last three months, I have manifested and not worn pants the entire time. As long as the camera is trained from here up, that’s the only thing that’s got to be pretty.”

Lauren Pond is a documentary artist whose work explores the intersection of religion, culture, and human experience. She is the Multimedia Producer for the American Religious Sounds Project and published her first book, Test Of Faith, in 2017.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Queer Nuns and Digital Dragtivism in the Age of COVID-19 appeared first on The Revealer.

Since the CDC began recommending the use of face masks, many of the daily reports of non-compliance have shown the connection between the logic of America exceptionalism and refusing to wear a face mask. Take Jennifer Kaye’s takeout tirade in North Carolina in July. She refused to wear a mask and was caught on video yelling, “We don’t cover our faces in America. They don’t control us. We’re Americans.” Kaye might have had in mind the surgical masks commonly worn in Asia during flu season. Or she might have been thinking about the niqab, a form of face veiling practiced by some Muslim women where the nose and mouth are covered. In either case, Kaye was clear that if we cover our faces, we become the other she so vehemently disparages.

A woman in a niqab

Some mask deniers are explicit with their Islamophobia, using the visual similarity of the niqab and face masks as a reason not to wear the latter. A post to Facebook on July 10 listed confirmed cases of COVID-19 in countries with large Muslim populations alongside a photo of women in niqabs. “Worn face coverings their entire life… and still reported to have COVID-19,” the post reads. “Think America Think!” In many of the countries listed (like Turkey and India) few Muslim women wear niqabs and, of course, no men do. Besides, a niqab is not designed to prevent viral transmission. It is not airtight, and Mosques now ask women to wear a mask underneath a niqab. But the association of the post is clear: face masks remind us of Muslim face veils.

I routinely see the negative stereotypes of niqabs applied to COVID masks, including the perception that they are a sign of submission to men. A recent study of 2,459 people living in the U.S. found that men are less likely to wear a face mask than women because they believe it is “a sign of weakness” and “not cool.” Just last month Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who has been credited with shooting Osama bin Laden, tweeted “I’m not a pussy” alongside a photo of him smiling unmasked on a full commercial flight. Yet another sign that toxic masculinity kills.

To be sure, mask refusers are more likely to be politically conservative. And yet even among my circle of liberal friends I have noticed a reluctancy to cover when we are together. Running errands, we all mask up. But when socializing, some discard their masks. Too many of us have internalized the belief that face covering is anti-social and something “we” don’t do. Even worst, the difference in our practices of covering in public versus among groups of friends implies we think the risk of contracting COVID-19 is only from strangers, which reinforces the idea that there is an “us” and some dangerous “other.”

As someone who writes and teaches about the ethics of clothing, I believe the current public health emergency contains an important learning opportunity. We could more fully understand and embrace COVID masks if we took the time to understand the motivations of people who cover their faces for religious reasons.

For example, Muslim women wear a niqab as a sartorial nod to a vision of the common good. Of course the visions of the common good implied by a niqab and a COVID mask are different. A niqab communicates one’s belief in the importance of sexual modesty and gender segregation. A COVID mask communicates the importance of preventing viral transmission through personal responsibility during a pandemic. In both cases, the way people cover (or don’t) helps express what the community believes a good society entails.

COVID masks are a reminder that we are living through strange and difficult times. When everyone wears them they remind us that we are in this together. A COVID mask is a symbol of our shared human experience and one benefit of mask wearing might be a sense of belonging.

Another lesson for wearing COVID masks we can glean from religious covering is that our sartorial choices can morally change us. Muslim women who wear a niqab commonly do so to cultivate a particular virtue—often modesty—and thus to become a certain sort of person. From this perspective, a person’s thoughts and values change because of their clothing choices. Covering one’s face (or head, or shoulders) out of modesty becomes a daily habit, and this habit can make one into a more modest person who may start to see dressing immodesty as unnatural or wrong.

The question then becomes: how will COVID masks change us? The answer depends on our intentions. If we wear our COVID mask to protect others, it becomes a gesture of care and we will be inclined to use it even in front of friends. It also means that wearing face masks over time will encourage us to cultivate the virtues of compassion and kindness. On the other hand, if we wear masks out of fear and self-preservation, and only when we are required to by others, the practice will make us more anxious, afraid, and angry. The meaning we assign to our masks matters. It will determine who we become.

The perspective of the COVID mask as a source of care for others is the one I am trying to instill in my 12-year old daughter. We wear masks even when others do not, I tell her, not because we are cautious or fearful, and not just to follow the rules. We wear our masks to make visible that our community’s health is important to us. What I know from studying the role of clothing and the cultivation of character is that by wearing a mask in this way, she will also become a more caring person.

Anna Piela, a scholar of religion who studies the niqab, shared in a recent article that some of the women she has interviewed think COVID masks are “making public life in the niqab much more pleasant.” I hope that is true, but lasting change won’t occur without a more sustained effort to combat gendered Islamophobia. We have seen in France, for instance, communities can simultaneously ban niqabs and require COVID masks.

If religious coverings can help us better understand the ethical implications of our COVID masks, the opposite might be true as well. As we become more familiar with covering our faces it may help debunk the myths that facial coverings are a security threat, and instead help us see how items like a niqab are about communicating social values and cultivating personal character. And that could make being Muslim much safer.

Liz Bucar is a Professor of Religion at Northeastern University and author of the award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press 2017). Her public-facing work has appeared in The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, and Teen Vogue. You can follow her on Twitter at @BucarLiz.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Islamophobia and Americans’ Problems with Face Masks appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers

Five years ago, in July 2015, Fortune magazine declared in a headline that Muslim women were the “next big untapped fashion market.” To the apparent surprise of Fortune’s audience, Muslims spend billions on clothing each year. Multinational retail corporations quickly took note. H&M produced an advertising campaign that featured a veiled Muslim woman. Zara and Tommy Hilfiger introduced “modest” clothing lines to target Muslim shoppers. While this was new terrain for these corporate retailers, Muslim-owned clothing companies like Haute Hijab and viral-video producers like the Mipsterz (a play on the term “Muslim Hipsters”) had been promoting cutting-edge fashion for years. And Muslims on social media had been creating and sharing fashion-forward styles long before Fortune took note. Indeed, for anyone paying attention, the merger of religion and fashion was hardly a new trend.

Whether it is the proliferation of cross necklaces for Christians, hand-woven saris for Hindu women, fur hats for Hasidic men, or brightly-colored silk veils for Muslim women, clothing matters greatly in many religious communities. For this reason, I am pleased to bring you the Revealer’s special issue on religion and fashion.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Far from superfluous, fashion reveals much about people and society. Clothing can provide insights into socioeconomic issues, gender expectations, racial politics of respectability, and people’s religious beliefs. For many of us, our clothing choices are circumscribed and policed by employers, family, and strangers. This is one reason why transgender women face heightened risks of physical violence. Far too many people oppose their sartorial presentation and use violence to send a message about what they consider appropriate dress. It is also why veiled Muslim women and Sikh men in turbans experience disproportionately higher rates of hate crimes in the United States and Western Europe. Fashion is not simply about trends. Fashion is about lives, deaths, power, privilege, who matters most in society, and how people use clothing to demand cultural change.

The articles in this special issue explore the merger of religion and fashion during the coronavirus pandemic, why race matters when thinking about religion and dress, and what clothing can reveal about people’s religious convictions. The issue opens with Liz Bucar’s “Islamophobia and Americans’ Problems with Face Masks,” where she argues that opposition to Muslim women wearing veils contributes to people’s resistance to embrace masks during the pandemic. Next, in “Queer Nuns and Digital Dragtivism in the Age of COVID-19,” photojournalist Lauren Pond explores how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an international order of queer activists, has transformed their ministry during the pandemic to continue their social justice work for Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ equality.

Two articles in our special issue look specifically at religion and men’s fashion. In “Bowties, Beards, and Boubous: Black Muslim Men’s Fashion in the United States” Kayla Wheeler examines how Black Muslim men’s clothing reflects their religious beliefs and how their styles have influenced the broader culture. Next, in “How Long is God’s Beard?,” Ed Simon reflects on the history that links beards with religious masculinity.

The special issue also contains two articles that consider Christianity and fashion. In “Everybody Being Themselves Real Hard,” Jeanine Viau interviews theologian Linn Tonstad about the ways her fashion choices reflect her theological views on gender, race, respectability, and God. And in an excerpt from her book Religion in Vogue, Lynn Neal explores Coco Chanel’s famous cross jewelry and accessories.

Our special issue also features the sixth episode of the Revealer podcast: “Black Muslim Men’s Fashion.” Kayla Wheeler joins us to expand on her article from this issue, discuss the increased media, corporate, and retail attention on Muslims, and reflect on how some Black Muslims use fashion to send a message about their religious priorities. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

As we continue to face the pandemic’s dangers, spiraling unemployment, police violence against Black Americans, and the possibility of a contested presidential election, we can easily forget how our routine, daily choices about what we wear can matter greatly. But t-shirts can send a political message. Hats of a certain red hue can invoke disgust. Makeup on a boy can announce his fabulousness. And the veil on a Muslim woman can proclaim her pride in her religious identity. I hope the articles in this special issue open your eyes to what fashion can reveal about society and illuminate the ways your aesthetic choices can help revolutionize our world.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Special Issue: Religion and Fashion appeared first on The Revealer.