Fashion's Working Girls:Complicating Accounts of Solidarity in Trans Women's Oral Histories of Retail Work

The paper will use the 2023 issue of Viscose journal “Trans + Fashion” as a case study for how the field of fashion can provide a space for examining historical and contemporary accounts of queer and trans solidarity. Using Marika Cifor's and Heather Love’s framing of queer and trans archives as relational, interactive entities,<br/>the paper will first discuss the ways in which the issue engaged with archives on different levels: intellectual, creative as well as affective. It will then focus on one specific contribution, originally published in 2020 in Pinko magazine, which includes three accounts of retail work and labour organising from the Trans Oral History Project in New York City. Mobilising a Marxist understanding of trans social reproduction and labour, the presentation will identify and evaluate the successes and failures of inter-community solidarity that emerge through these accounts. In<br/>doing so, the discussion will not only make a case for valuing fashion as a field to conceptualise queer and trans solidarity, but also to argue for the centrality of labour over identity in scholarly examinations of practices of inter-community solidarity.