Fashion: New Feminist Essays

Inspired by a rapidly changing fashion landscape, Fashion: New Feminist Essays offers historical and contemporary studies that reveal the relationships between fashion with gender, sexuality, race, and age.

Fashion is a rich terrain for feminist scholars in the twenty-first century. Explicit engagements with feminist and queer politics, critical interventions by industry outsiders across digital platforms, diversifying images of stylish bodies, and ongoing discussions of the ethics and sustainability of fashion production: all of these point to an urgent need to reappraise the relationship of fashion to feminism and other justice-seeking movements. The essays in this collection take up fashion as a feminist critical tool that uniquely holds together the lived and represented body with larger cultural structures. Contributors unearth surprising new lines of connection between gender, sexuality, race, age, and religion in their relationship to capitalism, both historically and in the present.

Bringing together established and emerging scholars, and perspectives from gender studies, history, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies, Fashion: New Feminist Essays traces the far-reaching impact of this most feminized of forms, underscoring the significance of fashion studies for understanding the politics of culture. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Feminist Studies journal.

Ilya Parkins is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Canada. She specializes in feminist theory, mass culture, fashion, and femininities.

Maryanne Dever is co-editor of Australian Feminist Studies and has published widely on feminist literary and cultural studies. Her previous Routledge edited collections include Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research (2018). She works in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.