Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking

275 Pages·2020·3.654 MB·English

by  Jacki Willson (editor)

REVISITING THE GAZE
Series Editors: Reina Lewis & Elizabeth Wilson
Advisory Board: Christopher Breward, Hazel Clark, Joanne Entwistle, Caroline
Evans, Susan Kaiser, Angela McRobbie, Hiroshi Narumi, Peter McNeil, Özlem
Sandikci, Simona Segre Reinach
Dress Cultures aims to foster innovative theoretical and methodological
frameworks to understand how and why we dress, exploring the connections
between clothing, commerce and creativity in global contexts.
Published:
Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Niche Fashion Magazines:
Contemporary Dutch Fashion Changing the Shape of Fashion
edited by Anneke Smelik by Ane Lynge-Jorlen
Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Styling South Asian Youth Cultures:
Leisure and Fashion in Post War Fashion, Media and Society
Britain edited by Lipi Begum, Rohit K.
by Geraldine Biddle-Perry Dasgupta and Reina Lewis
Experimental Fashion: Performance Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to
Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body Key Theorists
by Francesca Granata edited by Agnès Rocamora and
Anneke Smelik
Fashion in European Art: Dress and
Identity, Politics and the Body, Veiling in Fashion: Space and the
1775–1925 Hijab in Minority Communities
edited by Justine De Young by Anna-Mari Almila
Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and
Styles in the Transglobal Landscape Culture in a Chinese Diaspora
edited by Wessie Ling and Simona by Cheryl Sim
Segre Reinach
Fashioning Indie: Popular Fashion,
Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Music and Gender in the Twenty-First
Mediating Faith Century
edited by Reina Lewis by Rachel Lifter
Reina Lewis: [email protected]
Elizabeth Wilson: [email protected]
REVISITING THE GAZE
THE FASHIONED BODY AND THE
POLITICS OF LOOKING
Edited by
Morna Laing and Jacki Willson
BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo
are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2020
Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Morna Laing and Jacki Willson, 2020
Individual chapters © Their Authors, 2020
Morna Laing and Jacki Willson have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.
Both editors have contributed equally to this project and the order of their
names is alphabetical per publishing convention.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute
an extension of this copyright page.
Series design by BRILL
Cover image © Matteo De Santis. Edited by Laura Perrucci.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5421-6
ePDF: 978-1-3501-5422-3
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CONTENTS
List of figures vii
Notes on the editors viii
Notes on the contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction Morna Laing and Jacki Willson 1
PART I Looking: The optic and the haptic
2 Double acts: Oscillating between optical and haptic
visuality in a digital age Mo Throp and Maria Walsh 35
3 The ambient gaze: Sensory atmosphere and the
dressed body Sara Chong Kwan 55
4 The veiled body: The alienated system of ‘looking’ in
post-revolutionary Iran (1979–present) Azadeh Fatehrad 77

PART II Looking through neoliberalism
5 Becoming in the eyes of others: The relational gaze in
boudoir photography Ilya Parkins 101
6 The dissecting gaze: Fashioned bodies on social
networking sites Dawn Woolley 123
7 Making Lemonade?: Beyoncé’s pregnancies and the
postfeminist media gaze Maureen Lehto Brewster 147
Contents
PART III Looking at the ‘other’
8 Looking fat in a slender world: The dialectic of seeing and
becoming in Jen Davis’s Eleven Years Lauren Downing Peters 175
9 Re-reading the queer female gaze in the 1990s: Spectatorship,
fashion and the duality of identification and desire
Catherine Baker 199
10 Killer looks: Marlene McCarty’s Murder Girls Rosa Nogués 227
Index 253
vi
FIGURES
1 Quilla Constance, Pukijam (2015) 48
2 Lucy Clout, Shrugging Offing (2013) 50
3 Azadeh Fatehrad, Departure Series, C-type Print, Tehran (2015) 77
4 F-Magazine, Paris (1979) 84
5 Looking at the Pool through a Fixed Window (1928) 90
6 Jen Davis, Pressure Point (2002) 179
7 Jen Davis, Ascension (2002) 186
8 Jen Davis, Conforming (2002) 187
9 Jen Davis, Untitled No. 24 (2007) 191
10 Justine Frischmann and Elastica (1995) 209
11 Leonardo DiCaprio at the Romeo and Juliet Premiere (1996) 210
12 Marlene McCarty, Marlene Olive – June 21, 1976 (1995–7) 228
13 Marlene McCarty, Marlene Olive, Collage (1994–6) 236
14 Marlene McCarty, M26 Marlene Olive – June 22, 1975 (2004) 242
NOTES ON THE EDITORS
Morna Laing is Assistant Professor in Fashion Studies at The New School,
Parsons Paris, France. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts
London, UK, and her current research interests include feminism, fashion
media and the culture of sustainability. Her first monograph is entitled
Picturing the Woman-Child: Fashion, Feminism and the Female Gaze and will
be published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2020. Her writing has appeared
in journals such as Fashion Theory, Sexualities and Critical Studies in Fashion
and Beauty. She is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK.
Jacki Willson is an academic fellow in Performance and Culture in the
School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds,
UK. She has written two monographs – The Happy Stripper: Pleasure and
Politics of the New Burlesque (2008) and Being Gorgeous: Sexuality and the
Pleasures of the Visual (2015). She is currently working on her third book,
Fashioning the Reproductive Body: Cultural Activism and the Bio-woman. Her
most recent articles have appeared in the journals Porn Studies and Critical
Studies in Fashion and Beauty. She specializes in feminist approaches to the
costumed body, performance and resistance focusing specifically on gender
and sexual politics.
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Catherine Baker is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century History at the
University of Hull, UK. Her most recent books are Race and the Yugoslav
Region: Postsocialist, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? (2018) and the edited
volume Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment
in International Politics (2020). Her most recent articles have appeared in
Feminist Media Studies, Contemporary European History and elsewhere.
She specializes in queer and postcolonial approaches to popular culture,
nationalism and conflict, especially with reference to the post-Yugoslav
region and the politics of how individuals and groups narrate the past.
Maureen Lehto Brewster is a doctoral student in International
Merchandising at the University of Georgia, United States. Her research
interests include celebrity and influencer culture, social media, gender
and the body. She holds a Master’s degree in Fashion Studies from Parsons
School of Design. Her writing has appeared in The International Journal of
Fashion Studies; Fashion, Style and Popular Culture; Journal of Design and
Culture; and The Iconic. She has also been featured on Buzzfeed News, The
Business of Fashion and Women’s Wear Daily. You can follow her work on
Instagram at @soldbycelebs.
Sara Chong Kwan is Lecturer in Fashion Cultures and Histories (FCH)
at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK, and
coordinates final year FCH work in the Design school. Her research
interests focus around the sensory and embodied dimensions of dress. She
has convened a number of conferences, notably the ‘Fashion and the Senses
Symposium’ at London College of Fashion. She has also co-edited a journal
special edition on ‘Fashion and Memory’ in Critical Studies in Fashion and
Beauty 5/2 and contributed to the Sage Encyclopedia of Research Methods.
In her previous career Sara studied Menswear Design at Central St Martins,
University of the Arts London, before co-owning an independent designer
clothing store in Brighton.
Azadeh Fatehrad is Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curating at the
University of Leeds, UK, and affiliated researcher at The Artists’ Writings and