# Delafose, ‘(Trans)Feminine History’, 2022 > [!cite] > Delafose, Ev. ‘(Trans)Feminine History: A History of Feminine (De)Normalization’. *Fashion Studies*, vol. 4, no. 1 (2022), pp. 1–27. https://doi.org/10.38055/FS040106. > [!abstract] > This essay focuses on fatness and trans femininity as lenses through which to detail and analyze particular histories of the politics of bodies and desirability. This work articulates the links between thinness and femininity within an Anglo-American system of desirability, predicated on a psychosocial formation of abjection. The essay articulates the relationship between cisfeminine and transfeminine aesthetics, particularly as this manifests in what can be termed as the “politics of passing.” Ballroom culture—particularly its New York City iteration—and its history become a case study granting a particular theoretical analysis of transfeminine aesthetics in history. This essay also asserts throughout that transfeminine aesthetics rely heavily on systems of desirability that inform the systems of gender normativity. Simultaneously, this research argues that transfeminine aesthetics are distinct from cisnormality, actively producing new forms of subversive gendering. --- ‘Passing, in all its complexities, holds many possibilities for trans women and femmes, and historically, as a political and economic endeavour, passing served to construct a particularly complex method of being—one that is rife with abjection and protection.’ [[Delafose, ‘(Trans)Feminine History’, 2022|(Delafose 2022, 8)]] ^6c21ef ‘Sabrina Strings in *Fearing the Black Body* presents a case for the subtitle of her book: the racial origins of fatphobia. This recognition of anti-Blackness as the crux of anti-fatness serves as a crucial starting point for contemplating how anti-Blackness functions as a crux for Western Euro-American systems of (un)desirability. Strings maps the development of the fetish for thinness on the “rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism.”’ [[Delafose, ‘(Trans)Feminine History’, 2022|(Delafose 2022, 3)]] ^8bd419 ‘Marianne Thesander writes in *The Feminine Ideal* that the beingness of Womanhood and the performance of Femininity are not particular birthrights. Therefore, women and performers of femininity must dutifully learn and produce this beingness and these performances in order to be legible as women, particularly in a cultural context which historically and contemporarily surveils the body and its iterations of objects and abjects.’ [[Delafose, ‘(Trans)Feminine History’, 2022|(Delafose 2022, 7)]] ^5ec9e8