This week’s readings take us from the arguments of second wave feminists who critiqued the fashion-beauty myth as patriarchal inscriptions on the female body, to writers from the late 80’s and 90s who seek to articulate specifically female pleasures in beautifying the body. I particularly appreciate Young’s article, “Women Recovering Our Clothes” for her attempt to break away from the limiting perspective that women who took pleasure in fashion and beauty did so because they had uncritically imbibed the patriarchal pleasures of the male gaze. As she writes, rather beautifully, “If I simply affirm this, I must admit that for me there is no subjectivity that is not his, that there is no specifically female pleasure I take in clothes” (202). This statement, for me sums all my difficulties with last week’s readings particularly by Brownmiller and Bartky – necessary as they were in that highly political period in which such militancy was called for to consolidate the momentum necessary for the women’s rights movement. To disavow legitimate feminine pleasures in beautifying and adorning the body is to ignore genuine female pleasures, whether or not these have some basis in making one’s own body an object of male desire.
Indeed, as Young writes, “the subversion of patriarchy…requires that women speak our desire, not as it has been formed in the interests of men but from and for ourselves” (203). She looks for an approach to feminism which departs from the militancy of earlier forms and moves towards acknowledging and taking seriously the desires and pleasures of the subject in question themselves – women. Though I would add that the distinction Young makes between men versus women pleasures are not always clear cut and in fact, merge in complex and often indistinguishable ways (an idea I need to think about more before putting it down), I appreciate her efforts to make space within feminist criticism for women’s pleasures in clothing. She identifies these as touch, bonding, and fantasy.
The notion of fantasy and role-playing is particularly interesting and is also taken up in Rabine’s article. Rabine notes how fashion erases the boundary between the “private escape of fantasy and public intercourse” (63) and she sees the pleasure of looking at the images of fashionable women in fashion magazines as “one part of a continuum with the pleasure of re-creating the body and the pleasure of masquerade”. Which reminds me of an idea that was gestured at in the Bartky article last week which I wished she had pursued further. At the bottom of page 43 she notes how we need to expand our ideas of beauty which, “will allow and even encourage fantasy and play in self-ornamentation”. Could fashion as play and as whimsy be empowering and liberating? The ability to play with fluid identities, as Young describes is liberating because it subverts a world in which rationality supports domination (209). In addition, Rabine describes the notion of fantasy and play through fashion as a means of working through male vision and desire, without it being controlling.
Fashion also allows women to play with multiple and ever shifting representations of femininity and female identity without being dictated by them. Indeed, the fun in fashion is being able to slip into imagined multiple identities not in a frivolous manner but one which is reflexive about ones own femininity. Some designer collections evoke these moments of play. Louis Vuitton’s wasp-waisted silhouette of Fall 2010 evoked (yet again) constrained yet excessive 50’s femininity, in which part of the pleasure lies in the “liberated” modern woman’s ability to play with the image of the archetypal housewife. In the image above, the models are absorbed in their own reflections, possibly out of narcissism, but also possibly out of fascination with their performance of archetypal 50's femininity. I love vintage because (aside from it being cheaper than regular labels) being able to put on an item from the 50s or the 70s lets me “perform”, at least in my head, a vision of different ideas of femininity over the decades and referencing them against my own notions of it. A similar pleasure is found when I’m doing costume changes backstage for dance concerts – jazz shoes and a dress or Nike high-tops and sweatpants evoke a very different performance. And as Young writes, these role-plays do not leave one with a sense of dismay at one’s inevitable “failure” to attain the fantasy because “in such fantasy we do not seek to be somebody else. Fantasizing is not wishing, hoping, or planning; it has no future” (208). In fact, it problematises and lays bare the constructed and artificial nature of feminity itself.
Well, I suppose what I’m getting at after all this rambling is that notions of femininity are not stable, nor do they, as argued in Brownmiller and Bartky, always embody an idealized endpoint in a process of continuous self-renovation. Sometimes, it is just enough to play with the many ways in which femininity is performed and represented – problematically or otherwise – through fashion.
Nadine
Indeed, as Young writes, “the subversion of patriarchy…requires that women speak our desire, not as it has been formed in the interests of men but from and for ourselves” (203). She looks for an approach to feminism which departs from the militancy of earlier forms and moves towards acknowledging and taking seriously the desires and pleasures of the subject in question themselves – women. Though I would add that the distinction Young makes between men versus women pleasures are not always clear cut and in fact, merge in complex and often indistinguishable ways (an idea I need to think about more before putting it down), I appreciate her efforts to make space within feminist criticism for women’s pleasures in clothing. She identifies these as touch, bonding, and fantasy.
The notion of fantasy and role-playing is particularly interesting and is also taken up in Rabine’s article. Rabine notes how fashion erases the boundary between the “private escape of fantasy and public intercourse” (63) and she sees the pleasure of looking at the images of fashionable women in fashion magazines as “one part of a continuum with the pleasure of re-creating the body and the pleasure of masquerade”. Which reminds me of an idea that was gestured at in the Bartky article last week which I wished she had pursued further. At the bottom of page 43 she notes how we need to expand our ideas of beauty which, “will allow and even encourage fantasy and play in self-ornamentation”. Could fashion as play and as whimsy be empowering and liberating? The ability to play with fluid identities, as Young describes is liberating because it subverts a world in which rationality supports domination (209). In addition, Rabine describes the notion of fantasy and play through fashion as a means of working through male vision and desire, without it being controlling.
Fashion also allows women to play with multiple and ever shifting representations of femininity and female identity without being dictated by them. Indeed, the fun in fashion is being able to slip into imagined multiple identities not in a frivolous manner but one which is reflexive about ones own femininity. Some designer collections evoke these moments of play. Louis Vuitton’s wasp-waisted silhouette of Fall 2010 evoked (yet again) constrained yet excessive 50’s femininity, in which part of the pleasure lies in the “liberated” modern woman’s ability to play with the image of the archetypal housewife. In the image above, the models are absorbed in their own reflections, possibly out of narcissism, but also possibly out of fascination with their performance of archetypal 50's femininity. I love vintage because (aside from it being cheaper than regular labels) being able to put on an item from the 50s or the 70s lets me “perform”, at least in my head, a vision of different ideas of femininity over the decades and referencing them against my own notions of it. A similar pleasure is found when I’m doing costume changes backstage for dance concerts – jazz shoes and a dress or Nike high-tops and sweatpants evoke a very different performance. And as Young writes, these role-plays do not leave one with a sense of dismay at one’s inevitable “failure” to attain the fantasy because “in such fantasy we do not seek to be somebody else. Fantasizing is not wishing, hoping, or planning; it has no future” (208). In fact, it problematises and lays bare the constructed and artificial nature of feminity itself.
Well, I suppose what I’m getting at after all this rambling is that notions of femininity are not stable, nor do they, as argued in Brownmiller and Bartky, always embody an idealized endpoint in a process of continuous self-renovation. Sometimes, it is just enough to play with the many ways in which femininity is performed and represented – problematically or otherwise – through fashion.
Nadine
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