Fashioning The Body Politic

Download or read book Fashioning the Body Politic written by Wendy Parkins and published by Berg Publishers. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an afterword by Roger Griffin.Fashion is often thought of as a matter of personal taste, completely unconnected with the public domain of political life and citizenship. Overturning this perspective, this absorbing book reveals that, from the French Revolution to post-revolutionary China, fashion has played a significant role in political participation and protest. Fashioning the Body Politic challenges the perception of helpless fashion victims, subject to manipulation by consumerism and the fashion industry, and shows how, in a range of historical and national contexts, certain styles of dress and display were significant for both men and women's political participation and the formation of their identities as citizens.How did 'dressing up' in a variety of ways allow suffragette women to perform unconventional forms of political protest? In what ways did the uniforms of scouts and guides function to erect gender, racial and religious boundaries? Following the ban on traditional clothing in Imperial Russia, how did Russians appropriate European fashions and ethnic costumes to fashion new identities for themselves? Using these and a wealth of other case studies, Fashioning the Body Politic offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between men, women and fashion and shows that the political domain has always been permeated with the cultural practices of dress, display and bodily performance.

Download or read book Fashioning the Body Politic written by Wendy Parkins and published by Berg 3pl. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fashion is often thought of as a matter of personal taste, completely unconnected with the public domain of political life and citizenship. This book reveals that fashion has played a significant role in political participation and protest.

Download or read book Fashioning Africa written by Jean Allman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a close connection between the clothes we wear and our political expression. In 'Fashioning Africa' an international group of anthropologists, historians and art historians bring rich and diverse perspectives to this fascinating topic.

Download or read book Dressing Global Bodies written by Beverly Lemire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dressing Global Bodies addresses the complex politics of dress and fashion from a global perspective spanning four centuries, tying the early global to more contemporary times, to reveal clothing practice as a key cultural phenomenon and mechanism of defining one’s identity. This collection of essays explores how garments reflect the hierarchies of value, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. Apparel is now recognized for its seminal role in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements and for its role in personal and collective expression. Patterns of exchange and commerce are discussed by contributing authors to analyse powerful and diverse colonial and postcolonial practices. This volume rejects assumptions surrounding a purportedly all-powerful Western metropolitan fashion system and instead aims to emphasize how diverse populations seized agency through the fashioning of dress. Dressing Global Bodies contributes to a growing scholarship considering gender and race, place and politics through the close critical analysis of dress and fashion; it is an indispensable volume for students of history and especially those interested in fashion, textiles, material culture and the body across a wide time frame.

Download or read book Thinking Through Fashion written by Agnès Rocamora and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one s ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers ideas. This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies."

Download or read book The Politics of the Body written by Alison Phipps and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 FWSA Book Prize The body is a site of impassioned, fraught and complex debate in the West today. In one political moment, left-wingers, academics and feminists have defended powerful men accused of sex crimes, positioned topless pictures in the tabloids as empowering, and opposed them for sexualizing breasts and undermining their natural function. At the same time they have been criticized by extreme-right groups for ignoring honour killings and other culture-based forms of violence against women. How can we make sense of this varied terrain? In this important and challenging new book, Alison Phipps constructs a political sociology of womens bodies around key debates: sexual violence, gender and Islam, sex work and motherhood. Her analysis uncovers dubious rhetorics and paradoxical allegiances, and contextualizes these within the powerful coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative frameworks. She explores how feminism can be caricatured and vilified at both ends of the political spectrum, arguing that Western feminisms are now faced with complex problems of positioning in a world where gender often comes second to other political priorities. This book provides a welcome investigation into Western politics around womens bodies, and will be particularly useful to scholars and upper-level students of sociology, political science, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in how bodies become politicized.

Download or read book Fashioning Fat written by Amanda M. Czerniawski and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two and a half years, Amanda Czerniawski was a sociologist turned plus-size model. Journeying into a world where, as a size 10, she was not considered an average body type, but rather, for the fashion industry, “plus-sized,” Czerniawski studied the standards of work and image production in the plus-sized model industry. Fashioning Fat takes us through a model’s day-to-day activities, first at open calls at modeling agencies and then through the fashion shows and photo shoots. Czerniawski also interviewed 35 plus-size models about their lives in the world of fashion, bringing to life the strange contradictions of being an object of non-idealized beauty. Fashioning Fat shows us that the mission of many of these models is to challenge our standards of beauty that privilege the thin body; they show us that fat can be sexy. Many plus-size models do often succeed in overcoming years of self-loathing and shame over their bodies, yet, as Czerniawski shows, these women are not the ones in charge of beauty’s construction or dissemination. At the corporate level, the fashion industry perpetuates their objectification. Plus-size models must conform to an image created by fashion’s tastemakers, as their bodies must fit within narrowly defined parameters of size and shape—an experience not too different from that of straight-sized models. Ultimately, plus-size models find that they are still molding their bodies to fit an image instead of molding an image of beauty to fit their bodies. A much-needed behind-the-scenes look at this growing industry, Fashioning Fat is a fascinating, unique, and important contribution to our understanding of beauty.