Threads of resistance: fashion, gender nonconformity, and cultural deviance in Ghana

Abstract

This study interrogates the lived experience of gender-nonconforming individuals and observers in Ghana. Utilizing a dual-perspective qualitative design from 30 participants, the research moves beyond a descriptive account of stigma to distill the phenomenological essences of sartorial deviance within a culturally conservative landscape. Through in-depth, multilingual interviews with both wearers and observers, the study unmasks two distinct, yet intersecting, mechanisms of social policing: moral pathologization, which equates non-normative dress with spiritual or mental possession, and sartorial trivialization, which dismisses gender fluidity as attention-seeking to neutralize its subversive potential. The findings reveal that for the wearer, being labelled is essentially a state of perpetual visibility and spatial precarity, in which the public ‘Gaze’ serves as a horizontal monitoring device. This leads to a fragmented identity where individuals must strategically navigate safe urban bubbles versus hostile traditionalist spaces. Theoretically, the study extends Becker’s Labeling Theory by demonstrating how communal moral entrepreneurship functions as a potent informal legal system. Rather than offering generic advocacy, the study concludes that addressing these systemic labels requires a shift from tolerance to a decategorization of the dressed body, proposing specific interventions in gender-sensitivity training that challenge the triple-lock of religious and traditionalist scripts governing Ghanaian public life.