turned onto pockets bc of a very mundane encounter with a pair of my own trousers

like them, fit well, made me look butch (I thought) but for one thing – no pockets
tell-tale gender
niggle – what did it matter, anyone can wear anything, the politics of pockets so dumb anyway
but it hounded me – reading Leslie Feinburg describe hir love for butches – ‘the defensive defiance of her stance, one hand jammed into her trouser pocket, her head cocked to the side’
this fixation on the material, on something that isn’t the actual thing, focused on something the place in the garment that the body isn’t
(which isn’t to say that my desire for a pocket is desire for penis, sometimes its just desire for a pocket – and what genitalia is actually more like a pocket…)
(also this is a really clumsy reference and I cringe telling you this)
this somehow captures something of what the pocket means / began to mean for me in relation to Le Guin --> by being interested in pockets I was being interested in things sideways, displacing interest
pockets exist in this displaced, sideways space --> they are a part of another object that has another job, something grafted onto something else, existing at a perpendicular angle to the seams … [trail off]


I wasn’t going to go into the politics of pockets but I changed my mind
I told someone I know in a reading group that I was writing about pockets and they emailed me the next day about a symposium that their friend had taken part in, and also a link to a podcast on design history
they signed off the email with the words ‘more soon!’ which I thought was nice because there’s always more to be said and done and I want to know when we can be doing it and hoping its as soon as possible
anyway the host of the podcast said that pockets were really about who has access to the tools they need, who can walk thru the world comfortably and securely (preparedness, confidence, mobility in public)
there was quote from a woman describing her son (?) who could carry the ‘sceptre of dominion by the right of his pockets’ and I thought this is exactly what Ursula le Guin wanted to avoid
the pocket makes the tool part of us – internalises them
women’s clothes have no pockets because at some point in the late 18C (I’m being coy, acting like I don’t know the history and didn’t listen carefully to the podcast – it was after the French Rev – think of Jane Austen) clothes began to cling too much to the female body to allow for them
and I don’t think it’s a coincidence then that when the architect and proponent of rational, modernist dress Bernard Rudofsky wanted to criticise the extravagance of contemporary tailoring (this was in 1940s) he turned to the baroque pantomime of pockets
Rudofsky believed that our own attraction to absurd clothing and bodily fashion could be connected to an ancient fascination with human monsters and anatomical anomalies --> ‘we ourselves, feeling sometimes neglected by Nature, try with the help of clothes to look like real monsters’
other people have said that we might know the perfect world through its pocketlessness --> in a Utopia no need to carry money to buy things or keys to lock things up

I think there’s a connection here about class, leisure, gender but I’m too tired to make it