LST 210 - Fashioning Identity: Fashion, Society, and the Self (3)

Who decides what we wear? How do ideas of beauty and fashionability reinforce oppressive structures; or, how might fashion allow us to resist the political and social structures within which we live? This course will explore how ideas about apparel, beauty, and power have intertwined in England and America from the Renaissance through the present day. We will begin with representations of fashion in English ballads and on the stage, examine the weaponizing of cosmetics and whiteness in portraits of Elizabeth I, and discuss 17th century ideas about androgyny and fashion in English pamphlet culture. We will then consider the politics of disguise and accessories in the long eighteenth century, the relationship between satire, fashion, and women’s writing in this period, and beauty standards in 19th century America. And we’ll finally turn to contemporary analyses of fashionable performance and political identity, placing texts by cultural theorists and sociologists alongside fraught garmented performances in politics and popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our inquiries will allow us to explore the power of garments, disguise, cosmetics, and the beautiful body across texts and visual media from a variety of disciplines and historical moments and think about how these ideas still haunt us today.