Feminist scholars have long critiqued the fashion industry's ultra-thin beauty standards as harmful to women. Combining data from three qualitative studies of women's clothing retailers-of bras, plus-size clothing, and bridal wear-we shift the analytical focus away from glamorized media images toward the seemingly mundane realm of clothing size standards, examining how women encounter, understand, and navigate these standards in their daily lives. We conceptualize clothing size standards as "floating signifiers," given their lack of consistency within and across brands and the extent to which women engage in identity work and body work in relation to them. our findings indicate that the instability of these unregulated standards allows some women-particularly those with bodies located closest to the boundaries between size categories-to claim conformity to body ideals and to access some of the associated psychological, social, and material privileges. however, even as individual women may benefit by distancing themselves from stigmatized size categories, this pattern renders women's body acceptance tenuous while simultaneously reinforcing hierarchies among women based on body size and shape.

Through an empirical analysis of YouTube videos, blogs, and interviews, this article explores how partners experience intimacy and desire in relation to trans men's body modifications. Building on Salamon's conception of trans bodies as emerging within relations of desire, I argue that partners' experiences of trans men's bodies are crucially shaped by their intimate bonds with trans men as people, rather than reducible to generic parts. Partners continue to experience trans men as essentially the same people through gender transition, despite fears that testosterone might alter their personalities. Their intimate bonds with trans men also open up space for new relations of desire to emerge, including attraction to bodily changes they might otherwise find unattractive. These partnerships work to expand ideas about which bodies can be desired as male or masculine, and undercut the literalness of sexual identity labels. Thus, the lived realities of gender transition, as they materialize within this context, challenge hegemonic conceptions of gender, sexuality, and desire.

No abstract

No abstract