The Aesthetics of Mainstream Androgyny: A Feminist Analysis of a Fashion Trend

Since 2010, androgyny has entered the mainstream to become one of the most widespread trends in Western fashion. Contemporary androgynous fashion is generally regarded as giving a new positive visibility to alternative identities, and signalling their wider acceptance. But what is its significance for our understanding of gender relations and living configurations of gender and sexuality? And how does it affect ordinary people's relationship with style in everyday life? Combining feminist theory and an aesthetics that contrasts Kantian notions of beauty to bridge matters of ideology and affect, my research investigates the sociological implications of this phenomenon. My thesis explores in what ways the new androgyny, apparently harmless and even radical, paradoxically reinforces traditional gender roles, and legitimatises particular kinds of femininity over others also in terms of class, sexuality and ethnicity. It interrogates whether this trend, and by extension contemporary mainstream fashion in general, can oppose traditional values, and investigates the relationship between the aesthetic sphere and socio-cultural inequality. In response to classical theories of fashion, and filling a gap in contemporary ones, my study also focuses on social class, now often overlooked, in the analysis of style. These questions are examined from a twofold perspective: first I investigate representation to identify ideological patterns of legitimation and de-legitimation arising from fashion intermediaries' portrayal of the trend. I then look at how this visual material becomes an object of affective engagement, and analyse emotional responses to the aesthetics. To do this, I employ a mixture of traditional methods, such as semiotics and discourse analysis, and experimental ones, like the collection of creative ethnographic data. I explore the particular aesthetics associated with the androgyny trend and consider how it is configured by the different fashion intermediaries, what its presence online entails, and what is its relationship with the wider public and their everyday negotiations of identity

El cómic es cosa seria. El cómic como mediación para la enseñanza en la educación superior Caso Universidad Nacional, Universidad de Medellín y Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana

El problema planteado en esta investigación es estudiar el posible uso del cómiccomo mediación para la enseñanza en la educación superior. Su objetivo es establecerlas condiciones y características que debe tener el cómic para enseñar. El trabajoconsidera una muestra referenciada de informantes, y se desarrolla por medio deobservaciones, entrevistas en profundidad, redacción de diarios de campo y estudio defuentes documentales. Las principales conclusiones son que el cómic tiene potencialdidáctico, que ha sido poco utilizado para enseñar, y que las instituciones de educaciónsuperior deben propiciar su uso, e investigar para validar este potencial. Se plantea unapropuesta didáctica para fomentar la utilización del cómic en la educación superior.Los tres proponentes de esta investigación son docentes y utilizan la imagen en suslabores educativas

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton

The Influence of Manga on the Graphic Novel

This material has been published in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Stephen E. Tabachnick. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University PressProviding a range of cogent examples, this chapter describes the influences of the Manga genre of comics strip on the Graphic Novel genre, over the last 35 years, considering the functions of domestication, foreignisation and transmedia on readers, markets and forms

The Aestheticisation of Feminism: A Case Study of Feminist Instagram Aesthetics

The sphere of aesthetics has come to play an increasingly crucial role in today’s world, shaping every aspect of our contemporary culture and everyday life, from our practices of consumption, to the way we use the internet and our whole lifestyles. In this regard, it is especially interesting to examine to what extent and to what effect this phenomenon has also spread to socio-political areas which have traditionally little to do with art and beauty. With this article, I will explore the phenomenon of contemporary aestheticisation, from the perspective of the feminist movement. More specifically, I will focus on the impact of the digitalisation of contemporary culture and everyday life on the relationship between aesthetics and feminism, paying particular attention to practices linked to the sphere of fashion and art. I will begin to investigate the contemporary phenomenon of aestheticisation while addressing the following questions: What role does the digital realm play in the aestheticisation of feminism? How can we define today's intertwined connection between feminism and the creative and cultural industries? And, to what extent can digital feminist aesthetics remain radical while engaging with mainstream creative scenes? In order to keep a well-defined focus, I will concentrate on the case of feminist aesthetics on Instagram and the phenomenon of Instagram feminism