The suit suits whom? : lesbian gender, female masculinity, and women-in-suits

L. Rifkin

This paper is an excerpt from a larger cultural study that reads the figure of a woman wearing a suit with pants as a "text" that functions discursively to reveal the production of our sex/gender/desire system. There I argue that the woman-in-a-suit isolates the power of the heterosystem and offers a subject position for making visible, contesting, and producing new meanings and relations of power. Here, I use the contemporary cultural figure of a woman-in-a-suit as a testing ground for asking questions about how current conceptualizations of lesbian gender and female masculinity affect and prescribe our reading of women ranging in genders and sexualities.[Copies are available from: Haworth Document Delivery Center. The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580, USA]