Project
Un/tied

Project Team
Evie Johnny Ruddy, Writer, Carleton University
Tracey Lebedovich, Art Director/Designer
Nicholas Klassen, Producer
Jasmine Pullukatt, Project Manager
Lauren Zbarsky, Photographer

Project URL
https://www.untied.shoes/

Project Reviewer
Cynthia Wang, California State University Los Angeles

Project Overview

Evie Johnny Ruddy

As a small trans masculine person, I struggle to find shoes that fit me. I wear a size 6 in so-called “women’s” shoes, and I often leave malls and stores feeling defeated as the style of shoes that affirms my gender rarely comes in my size. The ability to access gender-affirming shoes, clothing, and services can be vital to a person’s mental health and well-being, but such access is sometimes denied to people who defy the gender norms that are so entrenched in cis-normative mainstream fashion. 

In 2018, I collaborated with the National Film Board of Canada to create Un/tied, an interactive web-based documentary that explores my trans non-binary identity through footwear. We aimed to create awareness and understanding among a liberal cisgender audience that takes the ability to access gender-affirming shoes and clothing for granted. We also wanted to inspire clothing-store owners to stop gendering their products and start offering shoes and clothes to all people in all sizes.  

In an attempt to reach an audience that is not familiar with trans experiences, we chose to design Un/tied as a mock online shoe store. We developed a logo and tag line — “Classic shoes, unconventional story” — and marketed the Un/tied brand through paid ads on social media. We employed trickery so that when users clicked on one of the ads, they believed they were going to an actual online store to browse a collection of shoes that was for sale. However, once the user arrives at the site and selects either men’s or women’s shoes, the ruse is revealed as shoes for all genders appear along with anecdotes about my experience navigating the gender binary. 

Upon realizing that Un/tied is not a store, “shoppers” are hopefully enticed by the stories, photography, and interactivity to continue exploring the site. Art director and designer Tracey Lebedovich designed the wireframes after auditing online shoe stores to identify UI features that could be recreated in Un/tied. Photographer Lauren Zbarsky used both a digital and vintage 1980s-era pocket flash film camera to shoot photos of models and I re-enacting scenes from my life. Web developer We the Collective built the site using HTML5.

To playfully subvert and challenge gender norms, Un/tied features cheeky taglines poking fun at gendered marketing and allows users to select shoe sizes, add shoes to a shopping bag, and proceed to the checkout, where they will find a genderqueer tax added to the price to reflect “additional costs – such as tailoring or custom orders – borne by people whose bodies violate sizing norms.” Un/tied strives to both emulate the challenges I face and offer a glimpse into how the fashion industry could change. For example, while some of the shoes are available in limited sizes, the Un/tied brand uses a gender-neutral sizing chart. 

In 2020, Un/tied was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award in Interactive Media and won a Digital Dozen Award from the Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab. Since making this project, I’ve been reflecting on creating trans art specifically for non-trans audiences. In centering a cisgender audience and mimicking conventional shoe sites, we deliberately required users to choose either men or women before “shopping.” As a result, I as a non-binary person cannot enter my own project. Although this reflects the project’s intended goal to reach a non-trans audience, unintended harm is recreated when a non-binary user comes to the site and tries to enter but can’t. I have been using Un/tied as a teaching tool to discuss the role of an imagined audience in shaping the narratives we craft and the design of digital humanities projects. I often ask myself, “What could this project have looked like had it been conceptualized through a t4t lens?”

Project Review

Cynthia Wang

Un/tied is a digital project/immersive story/life history by Evie Johnny Ruddy that parodies an online shoe store. Through a digital interface that mirrors a typical e-store, Ruddy takes us on a journey that incorporates videos, images, and texts in a narrative that reflects the stages of their life as they navigate gender presentation in a world that insists on a binary. From the very first instance of opening the site, we are confronted with a video of a normatively feminine woman and a normatively masculine man, and the decision to visit the “women” or “men” shop. The choice is actually fittingly a false one, as clicking on either side will take you to the same page that displays the shoe collection, subtly rupturing the framing of the gender binary, and symbolizing the author’s (and by extension, our) struggle with having to choose (and conform to) one gender or the other. The shoes themselves, some gender conforming, but others not, give space to queer expressions of fashion. Indeed, the interactiveness of the site places users in a position to reflect upon their own gender identity, having to initially “choose” a gender, then being led into a space that challenges the fact that we have to make a choice to begin with.

This well-constructed site has an interface that mimics normative online shopping experiences and consists of nine distinct products. Each one includes labels that further provide commentary on the shoe itself, like “gender conforming,” “swagger inducing,” and “authority resistant,” while the description of each depicts a stage in Evie Johnny Ruddy’s life story, and the way they have navigated gender through shoes. The user has the option of choosing shoe size, adding each product to a shopping cart, viewing the shopping cart, and checking out. Upon checkout, the user is confronted with a page that explains the site’s hope is to “keep this story in mind next time you’re shopping or making any decision that forces you into a choice between male and female.” I would be curious how the project might be expanded to consider and include narratives of queer individuals with intersectional identities as well.

At the core, this site is a beautifully rendered story about Evie Johnny Ruddy’s personal journey (in both English and French) navigating queerness in a cisgendered and heteronormative, while also becoming a point of connection for those of us who are queer and struggle with the gender binaries of fashion. This project nicely dovetails into current conversations that examine spaces to queer mainstream fashion (Carbone, 2021; Brajato, 2023), which tends to reinforce the gender binary, as a pain point in queer expression. It also compels us to reflect on the impact of online consumerism, and the ways in which even online spaces, which have been spaces for queer representation, community discourse, and identity modulation (Miller, 2017; Duguay, 2022), in the shape of online fashion stores, still serve to reinforce gender binaries. At the same time, the project itself creates an online space to subvert and resist these normative dynamics.

References

Brajato, N. (2023). Questioning masculinity and the gender binary in fashion: The case of Glenn Martens at Y/Project. Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities, 4(1).

Carbone, C. (2021). Trans* inclusivity in fashion retail: Disrupting the gender binary with queer perspectives. Clothing Cultures, 7(1), 23-34.

Duguay, S. (2022). Personal but not private: Queer women, sexuality, and identity modulation on digital platforms. Oxford University Press. 

Miller, R. A. (2017). “My voice is definitely strongest in online communities”: Students using social media for queer and disability identity-making. Journal of College Student Development, 58(4), 509-525.