Cut, Layer, Break, Fold: Fashioning Gendered Difference, 1970s to the Present (original) (raw)

Postmodern fashion: a 'free-floating carnival of signs'?

While there were specific attributes associated with fashion in a modern setting, the use and meaning of certain garments is highly debated among scholars classifying contemporary society as postmodern. This essay will critically analyse the statements and theories established on modern and postmodern societies to clarify whether fashion in a postmodern setting can be considered free of referring to any external social referent. By analysing of the use and purpose of Japanese high school uniforms, I will ultimately argue that fashion and clothing should be regarded as anything but meaningless in a contemporary setting.

Postmodernism and Popular Culture

The British Journal of Sociology, 1995

Cultural studies started life as a radical political project, establishing the cultural centrality of everyday life and of popular culture. In a postmodern world where old certainties are undermined and identities fragmented, the way forward for those working with popular culture has become less clear. In contrast to more pessimistic readings of the possibilities of postmodernity, Postmodernism and Popular Culture engages with postmodernity as a space for social change and political transformation. Ranging widely over cultural theory and popular culture, Angela McRobbie engages with everyday life as an eclectic and invigorating interplay of different cultures and identities. She discusses new ways of thinking developed with the advent of postmodernism, from the 'New Times' debate to political strategies after the disintegration of western Marxism. She assesses the contribution of key figures in cultural and postimperial theory-Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak-and surveys the invigorating landscape of today's youth and popular culture, from secondhand fashion to the rave scene, and from moral panics to teenage magazines. McRobbie argues throughout for a commitment to cultural studies as an 'undisciplined' discipline, reforming and reinventing itself as circumstances demand; for the importance of ethnographic and empirical work; and for the need for feminists to continually ask questions about the meaning of feminist theory in a postmodern society.

Contemporary Post-postmodernism: Transfiguring the Imperfect Human Body

I argue that contemporary artists and their audiences focus on the unidealized, human body to move beyond the conceptual seriousness and vigorous deconstructing of the postmodern period into a constructivist cultural phenomenon identified as postpostmodernism. I have classified the featured artists as transfiguration artists: those who change the Western canon so as to glorify or exalt marginalized body types such as the aged, pregnant, adolescent, and abject; artists who personally change in outward form or appearance to espouse "other"-ed identities; and, artists who wish to transform global viewpoints by incorporating the audience and thereby encouraging constructivist collaborative elaboration, as influenced by Jean Piaget's theories. These artists clearly follow the post-postmodernist agenda to destabilize traditional social conventions that stem from the hierarchy of the Western canon. I frame this within the larger issue of globalization and the desire to accept all reality constructions and interpretations of reality as valid and truthful.

Contemporary Fashion Imaginary. Deconstructing Gender

2020

Argued by Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction is a critical practice of reading and rewriting meanings: it aims to the decomposition of linguistic systems, by unveiling the function of oppositional categories. Integrating the Judith Butler deconstructive approach to gender identity and its performativity, the essay explores the mechanisms of social determining processes over subjects, defining to which extent fashion participates in gender intelligibility and projection of Self within the society. Along the analysis of Zanaughtti and Knight’s fashion film Disrupt, Distort, Disguise, the paper inquires provocative queering practices that reject any fixed, essential way of being man or woman . According to Butler’s studies, it unfolds the very fallacy of ‘gender’ noun, its binarity and hierarchical order: gender is a continuous process of citation and alteration, and it is all about doing . As in the movie, such imitative structure is implicitly revealed by Cross-Dressing performances: a ...

On the Postmodern Age, edited by Martina Sauer [special Issue Art Style 6, 2020]

2020

We live in the age of postmodernism. What does that mean? With this call for essays, we asked for proposals for a better understanding. At the same time, we were looking for posts that show how the arts have processed and are still processing the change from the modern to the postmodern selfconception of man, which has been described by philosophy since the 1950s to today. This special issue thus demonstrates how architects, designers and artists have reacted to the new socio-politically relevant concepts of postmodernism with a new kind of flatness, diversity and ambiguity in contrast to the identitarian concepts of modernism. What is striking is that the new designs were hardly understood and the reactions to them were characterized by a certain blurriness and uncertainty, which ultimately culminated in the winged term “anything goes.” Yet even today, adherence to this negatively evaluated dictum actually hides the critical aspects of postmodern philosophy and the arts’ reactions to it, which recognized the limitation of individuality through socio-political paternalism and found an answer first in the rejection, then in the diversification of the individual. It was not until the 1990s that the critical and ethically relevant aspects that challenged active engagement with social constraints began to gain importance in the arts. Against the background of the ambivalent history of postmodernism in the visual arts, the uncertainty in dealing with their designs was already evident in the very prominent exhibition on contemporary architecture at the MoMA in New York in 1988, which was organized by Philip Johnson. It could not really explain what was actually meant by “Deconstructivist Architecture,” as Simone Kraft makes clear. It is Arianna Fantuzzi who shows the neuralgic point of the transition from modernism to postmodernism by comparing self-portraits of artists from the 1990s. With the variety of possible roles that each person can adopt, the designs of postmodernism are thus characterized by the withdrawal of a unique identity. This phenomenon can also be described as Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen does in his historical overview, stating that after an affirmative opportunistic attitude toward sign systems in the 1980s, the arts only took on critical traits in the 1990s. In other words, as soon as the challenge was taken up to find its own, more critical path against paternalistic social standards, the situation changed. In line with this critical approach, Anna Kristensson argues that designers have a duty to choose an open and fair course toward the users, not to manipulate them in the interest of sales, and customers must face the reality of aesthetics and not be misled by supposedly clear advertising. It is Iris Laner, in her examination of postmodern theory and the work of Jeff Wall, who shows how alternative perspectives on our world are tested – permeable to the viewer, not only through the aesthetic, but also through epistemological and ethical gravity. Finally, I expressed myself in a similar way. The possibility of deconstructing our conventional understanding of reality, as postmodern theory made clear and as the artist Karin Kneffel shows, opens the possibility of freeing us from social pre-determinations. The magazine’s editor-in-chief also wrote an essay on the changing world of the arts and Jeff Koons. To conclude, this special issue on postmodernism clearly shows that in the long run, postmodernism Illustrates a completely new view of the world and our being in it. We can no longer hide behind predetermined standardizations. Thus, with the term “anything goes,” postmodernism opens a path of liberation from supposedly individual, but socially normed standards. In a new way, we are all called upon to consider not only our own share in shaping reality, but also that of the stakeholders, and to assume responsibility. Martina Sauer Senior Editor

Performing the erotic: (re)presenting the body in popular culture

2019

In 1995, Mitchell suggested that spheres of public culture, and the academies that study them, are in the midst of a 'pictorial turn' which entails thinking about images in digital communication and mass multimedia as forms of life. In the study reported in this thesis, a critical semiotic analysis of mainstream, moving images that are designed, performed, mediated, and repeatable was conducted. The study focuses on the role of social constructs of gender, race, and class (along with size, age, and ability) in the ordering processes of society which are, in turn, sustained and reproduced by the (re)presentation of eroticised bodies in visual media in the twentyfirst century. The study is informed by the premise that rapid technological advancements, the deregulation of media industries, and ongoing convergence possibilities have made the availability and accessibility of mass media on numerous (personal) devices commonplace in modern life but not in the form of traditional media that deliver data or content to an audience. Rather, media now take the form of interactive communication and participatory culture. A critical semiotic analysis of the images used in the study, as well as an analysis of the relevant literature, confirmed this hypothesis with further insights that, in the contemporary era, the cultural constructions and political materialities of bodies, as well as normative understandings of beauty, desirability, and value, all congregate around questions of representation and global homologies. By way of synthesis, the study argues that the dynamics of 'virtuality' in the digital age are altering traditional demarcations of space, place, time, and community and have paved the way for formations of global cultures that are, at the same time, informative, expedient, empowering, homogenising, prescriptive, and imperialising. Global cultures are recognised as discursive formations that people can only reason about from within. With that v limitation in mind, the study sketches the contours of a critical tool that the emergent imaginary critical consumer might be able to utilise. As one positions oneself within this imaginary, it becomes possible to treat the relation between consumer and commodity as dialectical. As a consequence of these analyses, the study expands the theory and application range of linguistic and cognitive metaphors by applying them specifically to modes of aestheticisation and performance of the erotic in contemporary visual media. The study uses metaphor theory to identify discursive markers on bodies at the surface (or representational level) that produce performative frames which sustain orderings of body prototypes (at the ideological level). These framings and orderings are critiqued as trading in ideologies and stereotypes that have long been in sociocultural production and circulation. The analyses of images and scripts show them to be sensationalist; however, they are not new, despite being presented as such in the expanding inundation of visual entertainment worldwide. The study argues that such orderings engage in a reiterable exchange of already circulating social and cultural capital in which not everyone may participate with equal opportunity and agency and some, not at all. Such forms of capital are primarily distributed as a means to generate more economic capital in an age where commodification and consumption, not the public good, are of central importance in human activity and action.