Re-Dressing Race and Gender: The Performance and Politics of Eldridge Cleaver’s Pants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Paris in 1975 Eldridge Cleaver, exiled revolutionary African American activist, former Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, appeared in photographs and newspaper articles wearing, and discussing, pants he had designed. The major innovation in Cleaver’s pants was a redesigned crotch: instead of the usual button and zip front opening, his pants featured a soft panel with a protuberant fabric appendage into which Cleaver intended the wearer’s penis to fit. Why did Cleaver channel his intelligence and creativity into menswear at that moment? How did Cleaver’s penis-positive pants design resonate in 1975 with black politics and gender politics? And why am I, a queer transgendered man, writing about these pants? Through this article I hope to contribute to a discussion in fashion studies about the materiality of bodies and the role of self-fashioning, particularly for those living in resistance to dominant codes of gender and race. I situate and analyze Cleaver’s pants in a broad context of the postwar politics of dressing and redressing race and gender in the United States, with references to a longer American history, as well as to a global context of clothing in a postcolonial era. The pants, in both their design and in the act of being worn, materialize acts of raced and gendered insurrection, but in a web of historical power relations that privilege whiteness and cisgender masculinity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".