Through the eyes of the dominant culture, queerness is uniquely material: unembodied, worn.  Queerness is attributed to symbols of adornment, including one's own body. 

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Drawing on elements of Hal Fischer’s 1977 “Gay Semiotics,” Hanky-Panky exposes the impossibility of denying embodied queer experience.  By posing gay bodies as literal dress, the wearer is deprived of their agency and an identity imposed upon them, highlighting the irony inherent to the dominant culture’s understanding.  

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John Berger said “nudity is a form of dress:” to be naked is for oneself, to be nude, for another. (Ways of Seeing, 1972)  Manifested literally, nudity as dress poses a mirror – an incitement to question conceptions of fixed identity and explore the boundaries between individuality and socialization.  Reclaimed, these worn bodies become a declaration of defiance: a rejection of imposed identity and an insistence on propriety over personhood.