Fashion & Feminism: Frances Varian

Here are a couple of paragraphs from "Lighten Up, It's Just Fashion: How to Be a Gorgeous Revolutionary," an essay by Frances Varian that I've given my freshman writing class to read for tomorrow's class:

...we do not have to die by our own hands. We do not have to grieve for the death of our dreams. If you cannot walk yourself to the movies at night for fear of what will happen to you, you are not free. If you cannot wear whatever makes you feel alive for fear of repercussion, you are not free. If you cannot allow your spirit to soar because you have never been told it is your inalienable right to be moved by something beautiful, however you define beauty, you are not free. It takes courage to reach for freedom and it requires strength to fight for an authentic life, but both require far less energy than a fear-based existence.
[...]
The intrinsic artistic merit of fashion is not diminished because the world of fashion can be unsafe for women. . . . What is not up for interpretation is the desperate condition that women face globally. If we do not find a way to bridge our differences and reach for each other, we are likely to face even more disastrous realities. The first step to thinking outside of the box is to step outside it, and for most women that means claiming beauty, claiming ownership, and claiming personal freedom. The battle lines were drawn before any of us were born, and up until now we have not been able to sustain any kind of unified resistance. I can't guarantee you a safe and easy outcome if you fight, but I can promise I'll be standing next to you. If we have to go down, we might as well go down together and looking fucking fabulous.

This speaks quite convincingly to the empowering and potential of fashion and to its ability to coexist with feminist ideals. Varian does acknowledge elsewhere in the essay that the relationship between beauty, feminism, and the lives and experiences of individual women can be quite complex, but she refuses to compromise her love for beauty or her passion for a feminist movement that works to uplift all women.

Fashion & Feminist Theory

For those of you who may not know, I'm studying for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams in English. One of my exams will be in feminist theory, so not only am I reading lots and lots of feminist theory right now (particularly focused on contemporary feminist theories of the body and associated science studies) but I am also always looking for ways in which my feminist theory reading can be made relevant to other parts of my life.

Like fashion.

I'll be writing more soon about my personal relation to both fashion and feminism as well as about the connections between fashion and feminism more generally in the future, but for now, here's a short but fascinating tidbit from today's reading.

This afternoon I was reading Sandra Harding's The Science Question in Feminism and came across this description of the way gender roles have been constructed and perceived through clothing:

Lillian Faderman writes that what to modern eyes would be regarded as relatively amateurish efforts at cross-dressing, at transvestism, were rarely detected prior to the popularization of Freudian theories and androgynous clothing styles. Dress was taken as a clear indicator of sex: "If a woman craved freedom in a pre-unisex fashion era, when people believed that one's garments unquestionably told one's sex and there was no need to scrutinize facial features and muscle structure to discern gender, she might attempt to pass as a man."

In other words, before the lines between mens' and womens' clothes were blurred even as much as they are now, people identified the gender of others in passing not by making constant judgments of their hairstyles, body types, level of makeup, or bone structure but by simply looking at their clothes. Dress? Woman. Pants? Man. Simple.

This is a great reminder of the fact that what seems natural to most of us now (e.g., the assumed ability and necessity to immediately judge someone's sex or gender by their physical attributes) is not at all natural. Sex and gender have in the past not been defined so clearly as absolute elements of one's individual identity but instead (at least in part) as an assumed costume or role.

What would our world be like if we still read gender in this way?