ABSTRACT
My life story draws its shape from the perpetual motion of dressing and undressing; the pull of my wrists on the elastic waistband of a slip worn at the request of my great-grandmother for whom it was necessary that I mask my parting legs as I walked in and out of church; the awkward angling of elbows required to zip and unzip the back of my schoolteacher-gray dress; insistent fingers jabbing bobby-pins through a tulle veil on my wedding day; and most recently, the nervous clicking of fetish-high heels against a strip club stage as they step out of bridal white panties. I have worn many versions of female sexuality, both good and bad, passive and flagrant. In fact, I choose to exist in the space among various states of undress, my body the border across which covering and dis-covering gender identity takes place. I am a seam, a mobile hem-line drifting below and above the knees of girlhood. In refusing to be one kind of girl or another, passing instead among borderlands, I hold open the ideological frameworks that define womanhood in such varying social domains as strip clubs and universities. By remaining ever in motion, dressing and undressing, I am able to maintain contact with my body and control its presentation; and in the space between clasping and unclasping, the impossibility of female sexual agency is suspended. Unstill in the undressing, I resist what tries to pin me down.
