Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend

Description

This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments—how dress creates, disrupts, and transcends gender—the essays investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing. The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: Creating Gender 1. Bifurcated Garments and Divided Skirts: Redrawing the Boundaries of the Sartorial Feminine in Late Victorian Culture 2. ‘Hard and Straight’: The Creation of Nineteenth-Century Masculinity through Corsetry 3. Mirror Epiphany: Transpersons’ Use of Dress to Create and Sustain Their Affirmed Gender Identities 4. Withering Heights: High Heels and Hegemonic Masculinity Part 2: Disrupting Gender 5. Cute Men in Contemporary Japan 6. The Politicization of Fashion in Virtual Queer Spaces: A Case Study of Saint Harridan, One of the Pioneering Queer Fashion Brands in the Twenty-First Century 7. ‘She Was Not a Girly Girl’: Athletic Apparel, Female Masculinity and the Endorsement of Difference 8. Gender More: An Intersectional Perspective on Men’s Transgression of the Gender Dress Binary 9. In-vest-ed Meaning: Gender Ambiguity in Costume Collections Part 3: Transcending Gender 10. The Politics of the Neutral: Rad Hourani’s Unisex Vision 11. Shirting Identities: Negotiating Gender Identity through the Dress Shirt 12. Why Don’t I Wear Skirts? Politics, Economy, Society and History 13. Critical Mascara: On Fabulousness, Creativity and the End of Gender 14. Clothes (Un)make the (Wo)man – Ungendering Fashion (2015)? Notes on Contributors Index Back Cover