Chest-Binding Practices for Trans and Nonbinary Individuals within Different Spatiotemporalities: Redefining the Meanings of Space, Place, and Time

Styling-fashioning-dressing, which involves embodied and material articulations of style, is one way that trans and nonbinary individuals negotiate, produce, and perform their gender identities. Chest binding is a practice that involves compressing chest tissue to achieve a flattened esthetic. In this paper, we examined the spatiotemporal production of chest binding-that is, we considered bodies, space, and time as mutually constitutive and explored the when and where of why people choose to bind their chest. We created and administered a comprehensive 120-item cross-sectional questionnaire that included demographic, open-ended, closed-ended, Likert-type scale, and multiple-choice questions. In total, 61 usable survey responses were collected and analyzed. The participants' nuanced experiences offered insight into new ways to conceptualize the public, private, and secret self-model, particularly for trans and nonbinary individuals who are assigned female at birth. We offer a new interpretative model, Dress Snarl, that incorporates different spaces and dress types. Of great importance is the inclusion of garments that continuously cross space, time, and place but remain intimate and typically invisible to the public. It is within this intimate space we theorize and interpret and binder and binding practices.

Automated summary

This paper examines the spatiotemporal production of chest binding and explores the reasons behind people's choices of when and where to bind their chest. A cross-sectional questionnaire was created and administered, and 61 usable survey responses were analyzed. The participants' experiences offered insight into new ways to conceptualize the public, private, and secret self-model, particularly for trans and nonbinary individuals who are assigned female at birth.