This book explores how fashion can systemically transcend binary gender distinctions, such as through the practices of designers expressing gender on their own terms.
The volume Crossing Gender Boundaries, edited by Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry (2020) examines how legal, policy-making and social boundaries have maintained gender dichotomies and how they can be disrupted and transcended through dress.
As Reilly and Barry (2020) suggest in their introduction, dress can be used to categorize and identify people as men and women, while creating associations with masculinity and femininity. This indicates that sex and gender are socially and culturally constructed. This publication, thus, explores how the largely Western binary distinction between men and women can be expanded to include the diverse range of gender embodiments and understandings, such as in dress and the fashion system.
Various chapters of this volume examine the significance of dress and fashion for creating and transcending binary gender distinctions. The studies it comprises represent diverse case studies that explore how dress constructs gender as a situated, appearance- and performance-mediated bodily practice. The panoramic overview of historical and contemporary examples in which gender boundaries maintained or crossed through dress and fashion also guides the structure of this book.
Its different parts collect chapters whose authors examine gender via phenomenology, visual analysis, and interviews, while covering the time periods of the sixteenth century, nineteenth century and the current period in Britain, Canada, Japan, and the United States among others. This collection of contributions highlights diverse understandings of gender in dress as a tool to validate the male/female and masculine/feminine binary oppositions and to disrupt and transform these.
This book aims, therefore, to explore how dress can both constrain and liberate gender expression. Through different examples, it highlights how dress and gender are mutually constructive. As the Western concept of gender becomes challenged, redefined and reexamined, this timely volume examines gender- and dress-related issues, while highlighting how gender can be created, disrupted and transcended using fashion clothing, personal style and fashion accessories.
By Pablo Markin
Featured Image Credits: Natalie Binder. Godey’s Fashions for March 1870. Uploaded February 17, 2010 via Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution., November 7, 2014 | © Courtesy of Lauren Coleman/Flickr.
Reference
Reilly, Andrew, and Ben Barry, eds. Crossing Gender Boundaries. Intellect, 2020. Accessed April 30, 2020. https://openresearchlibrary.org.
This post is based on the following article: Pablo Markin, "Gender Dichotomies, Dress-Related Practices and the Fashion Industry," in Open Research Community, 18/05/2020, https://openresearch.community/users/342784-pablo-markin/posts/gender-dichotomies-dress-related-practices-and-the-fashion-industry.