This qualitative study explores how women, nonbinary, and trans individuals define their identities in relation to contemporary fashion. To gather insights about the connection between fashion choices and the expression of complex identity categories, four 45-minute long interviews were conducted and transcribed using Otter.ai software. A two-stage coding approach was used to analyze the data, and the findings suggest that people intentionally use their clothing to communicate aspects of their identities to others. In particular, the study found that clothing helps individuals learn, perform, and embody their gender. Intersectional feminist theory argues that oppressed identity categories combine to create unique experiences for people who belong to marginalized groups, including those related to gender, race, and sexual orientation. The results of this study contribute to the discussion of intersectionality by highlighting the ways in which people are empowered by fashion to both express and celebrate their identities, as well as to challenge oppressive societal norms. The unique combination of traits to make a different lived experience creates a new and improved understanding of who the person is and the different ways they express their activities.

Research demonstrates that the contemporary global food system is unsustainable, and moreover, because some groups carry the burden of that unsustainability more than others, it is unjust. While some threads of food activism in the United States have attempted to respond to these structural based inequalities--primarily those of race, ethnicity, and social class--overall, very little domestic activism has focused on issues of gender. As feminist scholarship makes clear, however, a food movement "gender gap" does not mean that gender is irrelevant to food experiences, social activism, or agricultural sustainability. Building on a framework of feminist food studies, food justice activism, and feminist social movement theory, this dissertation makes the case for "(en)gendering" the domestic alternative food activist movement, first by demonstrating how gender shapes experiences within food movement spaces, and second, by exploring the impact that an absence of gender awareness has on the individual, community, and organizational levels of the movement. Employing a feminist-informed hybrid of grounded theory and social movement research methods, field research for this dissertation was conducted in community gardens located in Seattle, Washington and Phoenix, Arizona during the summers of 2011 and 2012. With the assistance of NVivo qualitative data analysis software, field notes and twenty-one key-informant interviews were analyzed, as were the discourses found in the publically available marketing materials and policies of domestic food justice organizations. This study's findings at the individual and community level are hopeful, suggesting that when men are involved in food movement work, they become more aware of food-based gender inequalities and more supportive of women's leadership opportunities. Additionally, at the organizational level, this study also finds that where food sovereignty is influencing domestic activism, gender is beginning to enter the discussion. The project concludes with policy recommendations for both community gardening and food justice organizations and the detailing of a new concept of "feminist food justice", with the end goal of preventing the food movement from undermining its own potential to secure a "real alternative" to corporate industrial agriculture.