Gender bender

It is filed here as an expression term, and the practice is closer to the centre of the word than the label is. Gender bending makes no claim about what a person's gender is, so a gender bender may be Cisgender, Transgender or Non-binary, and the word answers none of that.

How gender bending became a practice

Wikipedia traces the political root of the idea to the movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the principle that the personal is political. Christopher Lonc set the motive out plainly in his 1974 article Genderfuck and Its Delights: to mock the roles handed to women and to men, to show how far from normal he could be, and to ridicule what he called the whole cosmology of restrictive sex roles.

The method is exaggeration. Parody overstates a convention until it reads as a convention rather than as nature, which is why gender bending so often works by overdoing femininity or masculinity rather than by avoiding both. Cross-dressing and deliberate androgyny both do it, and so does behaviour: Wikipedia gives the example of somebody female-bodied being pointedly assertive and undomestic in order to test the idea that femininity is essential.

What genderfuck added to the word

Bending the expected roles is also called genderfuck, a word long in gay vernacular that began to appear in print in the 1970s. The definition Sheidlower quotes comes from L. Humphreys' 1972 book Out of the Closets, where gender fuck is a form of extended guerilla theatre. Rolling Stone applied it to the glam rock look in August 1972, describing full make-up and beards worn with dresses and pumps.

That is a sharper word than gender bender, and it is the one the practice was named with first. No dictionary on file dates the phrase gender bender itself.

Why the noun can land as an insult

Merriam-Webster marks the personal sense informal and sometimes disparaging or offensive, which is the difference between a description somebody claims and one applied from outside. Wiktionary's senses are built around dressing in the clothes of another sex or in clothes that make gender ambiguous, and it adds a third, drawn from fantasy writing, for a character able to change their physical sex. That last one belongs to a genre rather than to anybody's life.

Where gender bending shows up now

Fashion institutions treat it as a subject. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts mounted an exhibition called Gender Bending Fashion, which set out women's garments recut for men and men's recut for women, designs made deliberately ambiguous, and agender pieces intended for anybody.

Drag is the most visible form, though not every drag performance is doing the same thing: Rupp and colleagues asked in 2010 how a performer's own gender and sexuality shape, and are shaped by, what happens in the act. Individual figures carry the word too. Wikipedia names Prince for an androgynous look and for wearing women's clothes, and notes that Eddie Izzard spoke openly about cross-dressing as early as 1992.