Queering Silicones

This chapter begins with a history of how silicone shaped West Coast strip culture and the “topless craze” that emerged in the mid-1960s. It follows silicone as a technology of shaping women’s bodies across different actors, networks, and communities in the United States, while exploring themes of agency and access. Silicone’s visceral materiality, supposed inertness, and the immediacy of its fluid injection into the body forever changed the landscape of body-shaping practices and cosmetic surgery. However, implantable silicones proved challenging for the FDA to categorize: Was the silicone material a liquid (drug) or an object (prosthetic)? The chapter explores how injectable silicones could operate outside traditional medical structures and led to an underground market for silicone injections accessible to trans feminine, queer, and sex worker communities. Ultimately, the chapter argues that silicone, fluid and other in its material identity, was a means for simultaneously complicating and upholding gender norms.