Gertrude Stein

Halloween has arrived! If you're still scrambling for a last-minute costume to wear out tonight, put down the "sexy cat" getup—Adventures in Feministory is here to help! Here are five costume ideas from the past year in Feministories, all guaranteed to make for great Halloweenwear (and you don't even need a pushup bra to pull them off). Click on the links after the jump to learn all about these women (and get info to enhance your costume)!

Recently, two ladies openly flaunting their hand-holding in front of a security guard were told they couldn’t hold hands in the museum they were walking through. Because, of course, the affection queer people show to each other in public is considered to be much more sexualized and lurid than the same behavior between two straight people. The sick punchline to this story is that they were walking through an exhibit devoted to the lesbian writer Gertrude Stein, in the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. It is staggering to imagine the high-octane, uncut, military-grade heterosexual privilege a person has to possess to enter an exhibit devoted to Gertrude Stein and start sloshing around their heterosqueamishness. I can’t imagine being able to enter a space without first getting a read on the room to determine how to modulate my behavior, my affect, my voice, my inflection, my stance. I cannot fathom barging into a new space (the museum outsources their security guards) I’ve never been to before and trying to police other people’s behavior.