ABSTRACT
The bodily wounds inflicted on Jesus signal a humiliation held to be divine. This was an axiom that influenced the teachings of the first Church theorist, the apostle Paul; especially as he oversaw the transformation of religious outcasts into the regulated Body of Christ. Forget for a moment that Christ's crucifixion is a drama set to cloth: the mocking of Jesus with a gorgeous purple robe, the rending of the temple veil at the point of death, the Romans dividing and gambling for Christ's clothes. Clothing, rather, is bold revelation, a splendid inversion, a cover turning inside out: it reveals the category of a person's genitals it purports to cover. On every woman's sweater, a vaginal wound. In The Well of Loneliness, strutting, deflating, tearing cloth and shedding tears are the central clothemes, the pillars of loneliness, one might say, all of which resurface in Stone Butch Blues to a similar logic but different effect.
