Agendas, Horizons, and the Canadian Introductory Reader: A Review Essay

AbstractThis essay reviews three Canadian Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies readers, asking what they might reveal about the investments and values that animate teaching in Gender and Women’s Studies. It argues that the texts are incommensurable with current theoretical and methodological trends in Gender and Women’s Studies and considers what each offers to the field.RésuméCet essai examine trois recueils de textes canadiens pour le cours d’introduction aux Études sur le genre et les femmes, en se demandant ce qu’ils pourraient révéler au sujet des investissements et des valeurs qui animent l’enseignement dans le domaine des Études sur le genre et les femmes. Il soutient que les textes sont en contraste flagrant avec les tendances théoriques et méthodologiques actuelles des Études sur le genre et les femmes et examine ce que chacun offre à ce domaine

In/Visibility in/of Feminist Theory

Cluster EditorsIlya Parkins is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. She is the author of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity (2012) and the co-editor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (2011). Her research has appeared in such journals as Feminist Review, Australian Feminist Studies, Time and Society, and Biography.Eva C. Karpinski is Associate Professor at the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation (2012) and co-editor of Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard (2013)

Commodity Feminism and Dressing the 'Best Self' on A Practical Wedding

Fashion as a cultural industry, with its interface between self and social, is laden with potential for interventions in systems of power. Yet its changemaking potential is susceptible to co-optation by neoliberal discourses that harness politics with a commodified, perfectible individuality that superficially counteracts hegemony even as it subtly reinforces it. So much is evident in nominally feminist wedding website A Practical Wedding, which provides an alternative media space for people who are marginalized by or politically opposed to the politics and commercial logics of the mainstream wedding industry. While many of its posts critique the ‘wedding industrial complex’ and provide meaningful spaces for queer and feminist people to discuss and plan their weddings, the posts relating to fashion and dress are largely emptied of feminist politics. While these posts gesture towards inclusivity and resistance, by harnessing these messages to commodity feminism and neoliberal concepts of self-perfection, these posts ultimately reinforce the heteropatriarchal messages in the industry that APW is ostensibly trying to resist. This article asks: what is at stake in the blog’s excision of fashion from politics? What insights does this cleavage between apparel and the feminist political scene offer for scholars of feminism’s digital ecosystem

A moda no MASP de Pietro Maria Bardi (1947-1987)

O objetivo deste artigo é evidenciar a centralidade das ações ligadas à moda e à formação da Seção de Costumes do MASP no projeto de museu e na concepção de arte de Pietro Maria Bardi no período 1947-1987, e como tais ações teriam sido relevantes para a instituição de uma visualidade e uma história para a moda nacional. Demonstra-se como a trajetória de P. M. Bardi na Itália, ou seja, sua atuação como galerista e comerciante de artes, jornalista, bem como seu contato com a ideologia e as ações do Regime Fascista no campo das artes e da moda, influenciou diretamente suas ações em relação ao design de moda. Essas ideias e experiências foram fundamentais para direcionar sua atuação no MASP e, em especial suas iniciativas na área do design. Nota-se ainda como a atuação de Bardi no campo do design de moda foi também influenciada pelas ideias propagadas pela Bauhaus e Le Corbusier, assim como por seu olhar estrangeiro, que acaba por levá-lo a recuperar, nas referentes iniciativas, as tradições e a cultura brasileiras, gerando uma produção que dialoga com o modernismo brasileiro, uma vez que usa a experiência internacional para valorizar o nacional

Early Twentieth-century Fashion Designer Life Writing

In her article Early Twentieth-century Fashion Designer Life Writing, Ilya Parkins examines memoirs of major modernist fashion designers in the, finding that the genre is characterized by a strong geographic cleavage between France and America, overlain by perceptions of epistemic difference. She compares Elsa Schiaparelli\u27s and Paul Poiret\u27s work, finding that despite their differences, the opposition between France as a locale of abstract knowledge and America as a site of empiricism allows them to claim, as French designers, a certain privilege in a profession characterized by an unresolvable tension between art and commerce. The encroachment of American industrial models in their industry, however, threatens their episteme and ultimately their senses of self. Designer memoirs are poignant archives of melancholy, a condition deriving from nostalgia at the perceived loss of an aesthetic orientation and way of life, and intelligible as a response to fashion\u27s uneasy encounter between aesthetics and industry

Territórios de saber e nostalgia na escrita de memória de designers de moda modernos

Como Caroline Evans nota em uma discussão sobre as manequins americanas contratadas pelo designer francês Jean Patou em 1924, na moda “o modelo da padronização e a estética industrial eram comumente percebidas como americanas” (EVANS, 2008, p. 250). O artigo de Evans (2008, p. 261) traça “tensões na modernidade do início do século XX: entre criatividade e negócio, entre França e América e entre o consumo pela elite e a produção de massa”. Ele se apoia no trabalho de Nancy Troy que mostra em seu livro de 2003, Couture Culture, como designers do início do século XX promoviam conceitos de autenticidade em uma batalha frenética para suprimir a lógica interna de cópia e padronização que definia a moda, e como explorar a perceptível oposição entre França e Estados Unidos era uma estratégia importante nesta batalha. Aqui, eu trabalho a partir dos relevantes insights de Troy (2003) e Evans (2008) para destacar o relacionamento tenso entre França e América nos discursos das casas de moda. Entretanto, eu começo pelas articulações autobiográficas dos próprios designers, pois estas abrem novas dimensões – uma epistemológica e uma íntima e psíquica – que nos permitem pensar sobre como o (a) designer está envolvido na manutenção de um discurso de diferenças nacionais – e, ainda, o que o designer pode nos dizer sobre o papel da moda na modernidade. [...

Dressing resistance : Gender, fashion, and culture

Ilya Parkins, Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies discusses issues of gender and resistance expressed through fashion.Arts and Sciences, Irving K. Barber School of (Okanagan)Library, UBCUnreviewedFacultyUndergraduat