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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 chapters 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.
'At the heart of this book is a desire to expose how gender binaries have defined self-presentation for centuries and the impact these practices have had in the development of the fashion industry in western-centric areas. The book also accounts for how we have challenged (or crossed) boundaries and how we must continue challenging, disrupting and transcending the identity oppression created by the strict social structures imposed on many of us in terms of gender identity. This is not the first time the field of fashion studies questions these binaries, but this volume is an excellent resource adding new material and new perspectives corresponding to the global and changing zeitgeist of gender identities. [...] While a more global perspective would be welcomed, this new collection is essential reading in fashion and gender – understood as the social and political understanding and construction of bodies as based on cultural norms and not on biological features. [...] The road to destabilize and transcend the long-established gender binary system is a long one. The essays in this reader relate some successful stories and outline possibilities for a future that may allow us to fully cross gender boundaries.'
Introduction
Section One: Creating Gender
- ‘Bifurcated Garments and Divided Skirts: Redrawing the Boundaries of the Sartorial Feminine in Late Victorian Culture’ – Kimberly Wahl
- ‘“Hard and Straight”: The Creation of Nineteenth Century Masculine Subjectivity through Corsetry’ – Alanna McKnight
- ‘Mirror Epiphany: Transpersons’ Use of Dress to Create and Sustain Their Affirmed Gender Identities’ – Jory M. Catalpa and Jenifer K. McGuire
- ‘Withering Heights: High Heels and Hegemonic Masculinity’ – Elizabeth Semmelhack
Section Two: Disrupting Gender
- ‘Cute Men in Contemporary Japan’ – Toby Slade
- ‘The Politicisation of Fashion in Virtual Queer Spaces: A Case Study of Saint Harridan one of the Pioneering Queer Fashion Brands in the Twenty-First Century’ – Kelly Reddy-Best
- ‘She Was Not A Girly Girl: Athletic Apparel, Female Masculinity, and the Endorsement of Difference’ – Christina Bush
- ‘Gender More: An Intersectional Perspective on Men's Transgression of the Gender Dress Binary’ – Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly
- ‘In-vest-ed Meaning: Gender Ambiguity in Costume Collections’ – Katie Baker Jones and Jean L. Parsons
Section Three: Transcending Gender
- ‘The Politics of the Neutral: Rad Hourani’s Unisex Vision’ – Rebecca Halliday
- ‘Shirting Identities: Negotiating Gender Identity through the Dress Shirt’ – Valerie Rangel
- ‘Why Don’t I Wear Skirts? Understanding Dress Behaviour through Historical Contexts’ – Jung Ha-Brookshire
- ‘Critical Mascara: On Fabulousness, Creativity and the End of Gender’ – madison moore
- ‘Clothes (Un)make the (Wo)man – Un-gendering Fashion (2015?)’ – Hazel Clark and Leena-Maija Rossi