WSQ (Women's Studies Quarterly) Call for Papers: Fashion
Guest Editors: Eugenia Paulicelli & Betsy Wissinger
Fashion is an economic and social force, a culture industry, a global
powerhouse, a political statement. Fashion can simultaneously express
freedom and constriction, be both democratic and totalitarian; both
repress and liberate the body and gender roles. Transformation and
affect are at its heart. Fashion is a universal form of human
expression that transgresses boundaries of gender/race/class/
embodiment/culture/nation. Fashion ignites passions, produces colossal
waste, demands ruthless exclusion, inspires hysterical devotion.
Bubbling up and filtering down, fashion mixes high and low, sultry and
strong, ancient ritual and cutting edge technology.
A thorough study of the history of fashion in its symbolic, creative
and coercive faces shows how it has been crucial in the construction
of national identities in fascist regimes or in processes of
decolonization, such as in India, or in the remapping of the world
economy, including China, India and Brazil. Fashion is closely tied to
industrial, technological and economic developments and is at the
center of cultural activity and change. In today’s globalized world,
the fashion and textile industry are key factors to understand the
profound transformations occurring in cities, nations and regions the
world over.
Underling all the recent scholarly attention that has been given to
fashion is the intent of stripping it of its apparent light and
frivolous reputation, and replacing it with a serious scholarly
investigation that seeks to uncover the many complex layers that its
surface conceals. The study of fashion, costume and dress has involved
a series of disciplines, and has expanded their boundaries.
Is fashion a women’s issue? Inherently gendered, based on female
bodily display, taking fashion seriously demands exploring the limits
of gender and embodiment. Pushing that envelope reveals how fashion
can question pre-established notions of gender, aesthetics and
behavior. How do we understand masculinity in relation to dress and
fashion? We invite exploration of fashion, clothing and adornment
through plays of androgyny, from dandyism to lesbian chic. Seeing
through clothes to the politics of power they materialize draws
fashion into debates concerning identity, selfhood, sustainability,
subjectivity, representation, and virtuality. How does the fashioned
body trouble the boundaries between lived and represented, driving
toward new phenomenological conceptions? How do the globe spanning
trends of fashion reshape experiences of self and locale, and bring
new relations of time and space? How has fashion in the blogosphere
affected technologies of self, and produced new relations between
bodies and city-scapes all over the world? How does fashion mediate
the body? How do these mediations feed through text, film, the
Internet and beyond?
Always in flux, never static, fashion’s fast pace often defies and
disrupts the discipline-bound analytics of traditional scholarship. In
this special issue of WSQ we seek scholarship that pushes the
boundaries between dyadic conceptions of art and commerce, technology
and the body, nature and culture, aesthetics and politics, reality and
representation.
We invite a rethinking of the traditional organization of disciplines
within the social sciences and the humanities to include the impact of
fashion within their contexts and welcome academic papers from a wide
range of approaches, including theory, empirical research, literature,
art, history, design, media and film studies, cultural studies,
performance studies, women’s and gender studies, psychology,
sociology, semiotics, and anthropology, as well as creative prose,
poetry, artwork, memoir and biography. Suggested topics include, but
are not limited to:
Fashion cities in literature, cinema, the arts
Fashion and digital technology
Sustainability and ecofashion: how can we make sustainability a
fashionable choice?
Fashion shows, models, and the work of producing fashion
Fashion Capitals
Fashion and philosophy
Fashion, policy, and gentrification
Fashion tourism
Fashion and religion
Fashion and feminism
Fashion and masculinity
Fashion and fat
Cross-dressing
Drag Queens
The closet
The street
The runway
Stars
Shopping
Fast Fashion
Luxury Brands
Fashion designers/Fashion Design
Fashion and museums
New York Garment District, Yesterday, today and tomorrow
Fashion and Migration
Fashion and sweatshops
Fashion East/West
Blogs and their effect on fashion
Clothing as a second skin
Anti-fashion
Transgression/transgender/ transformation/ transcendence
Department Stores
Fashion Photography
Fashion Films
If submitting academic work, please send articles by March 15, 2012 to
the guest editors, Eugenia Paulicelli and Betsy Wissinger at [log in to unmask]
. Please send complete articles, not abstracts. Submission should not
exceed 20 double spaced, 12 point font pages and should comply with
the formatting guidelines at http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines
.
Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor, Kathleen
Ossip, at [log in to unmask] by March 15, 2012. Please review
previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer
before submitting poems. Please note that poetry submissions may be
held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable
if the poetry editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere.
We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please paste
poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail along with all contact
information.
Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ's fiction/
nonfiction editor, Nicole Cooley, at [log in to unmask] by
March 15, 2012. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type
of submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that
prose submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous
submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately
of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been
previously published. Please provide all contact information in the
body of the e-mail.
Art submissions should be sent to Margot Bouman at [log in to unmask] by
March 15, 2012. After art is reviewed and accepted, accepted art must
be sent to the journal's managing editor on a CD that includes all
artwork of 300 DPI or greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger.
These files should be saved as individual JPEGS or TIFFS.
Amy Herzog
Associate Professor of Media Studies
Coordinator of the Film Studies Program
Queens College, CUNY
Faculty of Theater and Film Studies
The Graduate Center, CUNY
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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org
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