Call for Papers: Feminism, Fashion and Flair: Confronting Hegemony with Style (8/15/08)
We are soliciting academic papers for an anthology on feminism and fashion. Fashion is a powerful way we express our politics, personalities, and preferences for who and how we love. Yet fashion can also repress freedom and sexual expression. Fashion encourages profound creativity, rebellion, and defiant self-definition while simultaneously controlling and disciplining the body. Fashion signals resistance to sexual morés and it can also promote a problematic consumer culture. Fashion creates collective identity, but also constrains individual voice. In other words, fashion contains the paradoxical potential for pleasure and subjugation, expression and conformity.
This book explores the productive tensions generated by fashion and style. We are interested in essays that take up questions of gender with special attention to race, class, sexuality, age, and ethnicity. This collection blends theory and pop culture analysis in exciting ways, focusing on contemporary trends and controversies.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• Theories of agency, style, and the presentation of self
• Performing identity: race, class, gender and sexuality through style
• Consumerist pleasure and anxiety
• Fashion production in the context of global capital and trade
• Bois, grrls, trannies and styles of queerness
• Hardcore, metro, punk, and khakis: constructing masculinities through fashion
• Body art and ethnic appropriations
• Debates in plastic surgery and re-fashioning the body
• Class identity and decorating domestic space
• Feminist fashion: debates over style and politics
• The ethics of green production and marketing
• Everyday pornography and fashion fetish
• Virtual style and online identities
• Material culture and craft in a postmodern world
• Slumming and radical chic: tensions of authenticity and irony
• Vintage and thrift fashion: nostalgia and class signifiers
• DIY Style: fashion off the corporate grid
Deadline for abstracts is August 15, 2008.
Format for abstracts: Word document, double-spaced, between 300 and 500 words. Include contact information and short bio.
Send to: FashionBook1@yahoo.com
Shira Tarrant
Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies Department
California State University, Long Beach
and
Marjorie Jolles
Assistant Professor, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Roosevelt University