Ben Barry
Biographic Data
| ID | 3741852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Barry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Barry |
| SIGNATURE | BEN BARRY |
| AFFILIATIONS | Toronto Metropolitan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5945-4512 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Cripping fashion and desiring disabled bodies: Articulating a disability‐led regime of more‐than‐visual fashion design values
This article explores crip fashion as a disability‐led regime of design values that affirms disability experience as a creative, aesthetic, and political force. Drawing on ethnographic insights from fashion hacking workshops with Disabled people in collaboration with fashion scholars and students, I theorize six design principles that emerge through collaborative engagement with the material and expressive affordances of garments, mannequins, and…
The Hope We Must Make in Fashion Education: Enacting DEI Within Compromised Universities
Over the past decade, U.S. fashion programs have embedded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into public mission statements and curricula. Yet these advances were made within university structures that never fully integrated them, and their precarity has intensified amid sweeping rollbacks of DEI and broader social justice efforts. In this autoethnographic essay, I reflect on my experience in academic leadership in Canada and the United State…
Making Space: Fat Identity, Aesthetic Diversity, and Deliberate Design
This visual essay is a 2023 time capsule of three Fat women in the US who sew their own clothing to meet needs and desires overlooked by the fashion industry. Despite the growth of the plus-size sector, many Fat people lack access to garments that fit well, reflect their identities, and support full participation in social and professional life. Combining wardrobe interviews with participatory photography of the three women’s home sewing studios …
Crip fashion networks: Dress exchanges, hacks and affirmations in disability communities
This article explores how Disabled people develop social, relational and material structures, a framework I call crip fashion networks, to access clothing and cultivate fashion communities in response to their exclusion from the dominant fashion industry. Drawing on five representative narratives from wardrobe interviews with Disabled men and masculine people, I theorize crip fashion networks as systems where Disabled people collectively build al…
Multi-sensory methods: Toward a crip methodology in fashion studies
Cripistemologies are ways of knowing that emerge from the embodied experiences of disabled bodyminds, while multi-sensory methods value knowledge produced through haptic, visual, auditory and other sensory forms. Drawing on these approaches, this article proposes a crip methodology for fashion studies by exploring the value of combining research methods to honour the knowledge of disabled people and their sensory engagement in the world. We refle…
Iran and Israel: Everything Short of War
Iran's attack on Israel on 13–14 April 2024 and Israel's retaliatory strike on Isfahan on 19 April raised the possibility of all-out war between the two states. But there remain critical military and strategic constraints on the ability and motivation of both countries to escalate the conflict. Their armed forces are configured primarily to ensure survival rather than sustain major conflict. Casualty aversion and American hesitancy inhibit Israel…
Intersectionality Gets Fashionably Fat: Arts-Based Approaches to Gender, Fat and Fashion
The authors’ research project, Sizing Up Gender, explored the experiences of thirteen participants at the intersections of gender expression and fat. Through a series of photographs of participants and their garments, the project pushed the boundaries of art, identities, representations, and research. This article seeks to consider the ways in which innovative arts-based practice with a deep focus on justice and anti-oppression can allow for a th…
Self-fashioning Queer/Crip: Stretching and grappling with disability, gender and dress
The convergence of queer studies with disability studies has imagined new possibilities of sexuality, gender and the body, and developed Queer/Crip as a theoretical framework. Queer/Crip scholars map out connections between queer and crip theories by examining how compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness are entangled in the service of normativity. This article uses a Queer/Crip framework to explore how queer, disabled people use…
Re-Making Clothing, Re-Making Worlds: On Crip Fashion Hacking
This article explores how Disabled people's fashion hacking practices re-make worlds by expanding fashion design processes, fostering relationships, and welcoming-in desire for Disability. We share research from the second phase of our project, Cripping Masculinity, where we developed fashion hacking workshops with D/disabled, D/deaf and Mad men and masculine non-binary people. In these workshops, participants worked in collaboration with fashion…
Fattening fabulousness: The joys and risks of troubling gender through fat fashion
Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a differen…
Empowering women wearing plus-size clothing through co-design
The retail landscape includes a vast array of clothing choices, yet style options remain extremely limited for Canadian women in the plus-size category (sizes 14W–40W). Our study empowered women who wear size 20+ by bringing them into the conversation about plus-size apparel design and development. Few studies have identified clothing solutions utilized by plus-size women or how clothing impacts their feelings about themselves, and there is no re…
How to transform fashion education: A manifesto for equity, inclusion and decolonization
Europe’s Defence Requires Offence
To preclude a severely damaged or more likely dissolved NATO, NATO Europe would need the capabilities to fight offensively and to win
Stranger than Fiction: Imagining Our Climate Future
In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates shows why a net-zero world is necessary, and how it might be achieved through fostering demand for and the supply of innovation. He argues that technology, policy and markets must be shaped at the same time, and in the same direction. His technocratic approach ignores (explicitly) climate politics and (implicitly) the second-order consequences (including social disruption and violence) of political a…
Image-Makers in Residence: Sizing Up Gender
Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male Body
At the start of the twenty-first century, three phenomena have converged in men’s fashion: the emergence of the slim-fit silhouette, a svelte fashionable male body, and men’s self-documentation of their clothing and physiques on social media. The nexus of these three forces has not only emphasized men’s dressed bodies but also marginalized and stigmatized men whose bodies do not conform to the current lean or muscular non-disabled fashionable mal…
Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking
Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, recently elected a socially conservative Premier who repealed the progressive sexual education curriculum that teaches about queer and trans relationships and bodies. This election occurs within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and settler homonationalism that oppresses the most vulnerable queer and trans citizens. The paper examines how queer and trans youth in Ontario leverage fashion hackin…
Suited for Success? Suits, Status, and Hybrid Masculinity
This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions-body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity-which allowed us to look at the influence of men's intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in …
Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Practical Drawbacks and Opportunity Costs
It is worth asking whether short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons really serve Pakistan’s interests
(Re)Fashioning Masculinity: Social Identity and Context in Men's Hybrid Masculinities through Dress
Modern Western society has framed fashion in opposition to hegemonic masculinity. However, fashion functions as a principal means by which men's visible gender identities are established as not only different from women but also from other men. This article draws on the concept of hybrid masculinities and on wardrobe interviews with Canadian men across social identities to explore how men enact masculinities through dress. I illustrate three ways…
Gender rebels: Inside the wardrobes of young gay men with subversive style
A constant theme in the history of gay men’s dress has been the hyperbolic performance and radical confusion of masculine and feminine gender codes. This research seeks to understand how gender conventions influence the stylistic motivations and dress practices of contemporary gay men. Guided by the theory of gender performativity, this article presents the sartorial biographies of three urban-residing young gay men in Toronto, Canada, who each c…
Fashionably Fit: Young Men’s Dress Decisions and Appearance Anxieties
This article explores how men’s everyday dress practices and associated social media usage influence their thoughts and feelings about their bodies. Through interviews with 20 young men of diverse ethnicities, body shapes, and sexual orientations, findings reveal that young men’s engagement with fashion and social media merge to create a cultural climate of heightened body consciousness. Contemporary slim-fit clothing trends magnified men’s appea…
Britain’s Difficult War in Iraq
The Chilcot report contains a wealth of evidence and analysis to show that, throughout the Iraq War, Britain was lacking in competent strategic leadership
Selling whose dream? A taxonomy of aspiration in fashion imagery
Scholars and practitioners assume that women aspire to fashion photographs of idealized models. It is unknown, however, what makes a fashion image aspirational because previous researchers have not explored the various dimensions that evoke this concept. In this article, I share the development of a taxonomy that explains the evaluative criteria and image elements that elicit aspiration in fashion photographs based on data gathered in focus group…
Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11
Elite forces raised for especially difficult missions are as old as armies themselves. The British in the Second World War created an eclectic menagerie of units to operate behind enemy lines, incl
(Re)Fashioning Masculinity: Social Identity and Context in Men's Hybrid Masculinities through Dress
Modern Western society has framed fashion in opposition to hegemonic masculinity. However, fashion functions as a principal means by which men's visible gender identities are established as not only different from women but also from other men. This article draws on the concept of hybrid masculinities and on wardrobe interviews with Canadian men across social identities to explore how men enact masculinities through dress. I illustrate three ways…
Suited for Success? Suits, Status, and Hybrid Masculinity
This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions-body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity-which allowed us to look at the influence of men's intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in …
Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male Body
At the start of the twenty-first century, three phenomena have converged in men’s fashion: the emergence of the slim-fit silhouette, a svelte fashionable male body, and men’s self-documentation of their clothing and physiques on social media. The nexus of these three forces has not only emphasized men’s dressed bodies but also marginalized and stigmatized men whose bodies do not conform to the current lean or muscular non-disabled fashionable mal…
Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking
Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, recently elected a socially conservative Premier who repealed the progressive sexual education curriculum that teaches about queer and trans relationships and bodies. This election occurs within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and settler homonationalism that oppresses the most vulnerable queer and trans citizens. The paper examines how queer and trans youth in Ontario leverage fashion hackin…
How to transform fashion education: A manifesto for equity, inclusion and decolonization
Libya's Lessons
On 20 March 2011 French air-strikes destroyed a Gadhafi regime column about to storm Benghazi. Attacks on Libyan air defences followed quickly. Two weeks later, command of the military operation to
Multi-sensory methods: Toward a crip methodology in fashion studies
Cripistemologies are ways of knowing that emerge from the embodied experiences of disabled bodyminds, while multi-sensory methods value knowledge produced through haptic, visual, auditory and other sensory forms. Drawing on these approaches, this article proposes a crip methodology for fashion studies by exploring the value of combining research methods to honour the knowledge of disabled people and their sensory engagement in the world. We refle…
Re-Making Clothing, Re-Making Worlds: On Crip Fashion Hacking
This article explores how Disabled people's fashion hacking practices re-make worlds by expanding fashion design processes, fostering relationships, and welcoming-in desire for Disability. We share research from the second phase of our project, Cripping Masculinity, where we developed fashion hacking workshops with D/disabled, D/deaf and Mad men and masculine non-binary people. In these workshops, participants worked in collaboration with fashion…
Europe’s Defence Requires Offence
To preclude a severely damaged or more likely dissolved NATO, NATO Europe would need the capabilities to fight offensively and to win
Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Practical Drawbacks and Opportunity Costs
It is worth asking whether short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons really serve Pakistan’s interests
Women in Combat
On 24 January US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey announced that ‘we are eliminating the direct ground combat exclusion rule for wo
Libya's Lessons
On 20 March 2011 French air-strikes destroyed a Gadhafi regime column about to storm Benghazi. Attacks on Libyan air defences followed quickly. Two weeks later, command of the military operation to
More Than Muddling Through
Leading from the Front: The Autobiography General Sir Richard Dannatt. London: Bantam Press, 2010. £20.00. 432 pp. During his tenure as the head of the British Army General Sir Richard Dannatt beca
Adapting in War
Williamson Murray's Military Adaptation in War is the best single-volume study of the topic yet written. Notes Safa al-Sheikh and Emma Sky, ‘Iraq Since 2003: Perspectives on a Divided Society’ Survival, vol. 53, no. 4, September 2011, pp. 119–42. General Sir Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force (London: Penguin, 2005). Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: the Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990). Eliot A. Cohen, Su…
Stanley McChrystal, Special Forces and the Wars of 9/11
Elite forces raised for especially difficult missions are as old as armies themselves. The British in the Second World War created an eclectic menagerie of units to operate behind enemy lines, incl
Women in Combat
On 24 January US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey announced that ‘we are eliminating the direct ground combat exclusion rule for wo
Selling whose dream? A taxonomy of aspiration in fashion imagery
Scholars and practitioners assume that women aspire to fashion photographs of idealized models. It is unknown, however, what makes a fashion image aspirational because previous researchers have not explored the various dimensions that evoke this concept. In this article, I share the development of a taxonomy that explains the evaluative criteria and image elements that elicit aspiration in fashion photographs based on data gathered in focus group…
Gender rebels: Inside the wardrobes of young gay men with subversive style
A constant theme in the history of gay men’s dress has been the hyperbolic performance and radical confusion of masculine and feminine gender codes. This research seeks to understand how gender conventions influence the stylistic motivations and dress practices of contemporary gay men. Guided by the theory of gender performativity, this article presents the sartorial biographies of three urban-residing young gay men in Toronto, Canada, who each c…
Fashionably Fit: Young Men’s Dress Decisions and Appearance Anxieties
This article explores how men’s everyday dress practices and associated social media usage influence their thoughts and feelings about their bodies. Through interviews with 20 young men of diverse ethnicities, body shapes, and sexual orientations, findings reveal that young men’s engagement with fashion and social media merge to create a cultural climate of heightened body consciousness. Contemporary slim-fit clothing trends magnified men’s appea…
Britain’s Difficult War in Iraq
The Chilcot report contains a wealth of evidence and analysis to show that, throughout the Iraq War, Britain was lacking in competent strategic leadership
Pakistan’s Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Practical Drawbacks and Opportunity Costs
It is worth asking whether short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons really serve Pakistan’s interests
(Re)Fashioning Masculinity: Social Identity and Context in Men's Hybrid Masculinities through Dress
Modern Western society has framed fashion in opposition to hegemonic masculinity. However, fashion functions as a principal means by which men's visible gender identities are established as not only different from women but also from other men. This article draws on the concept of hybrid masculinities and on wardrobe interviews with Canadian men across social identities to explore how men enact masculinities through dress. I illustrate three ways…
Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male Body
At the start of the twenty-first century, three phenomena have converged in men’s fashion: the emergence of the slim-fit silhouette, a svelte fashionable male body, and men’s self-documentation of their clothing and physiques on social media. The nexus of these three forces has not only emphasized men’s dressed bodies but also marginalized and stigmatized men whose bodies do not conform to the current lean or muscular non-disabled fashionable mal…
Intersectional Interventions into Queer and Trans Liberation: Youth Resistance Against Right-Wing Populism Through Fashion Hacking
Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, recently elected a socially conservative Premier who repealed the progressive sexual education curriculum that teaches about queer and trans relationships and bodies. This election occurs within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and settler homonationalism that oppresses the most vulnerable queer and trans citizens. The paper examines how queer and trans youth in Ontario leverage fashion hackin…
Suited for Success? Suits, Status, and Hybrid Masculinity
This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions-body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity-which allowed us to look at the influence of men's intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in …
Image-Makers in Residence: Sizing Up Gender
Empowering women wearing plus-size clothing through co-design
The retail landscape includes a vast array of clothing choices, yet style options remain extremely limited for Canadian women in the plus-size category (sizes 14W–40W). Our study empowered women who wear size 20+ by bringing them into the conversation about plus-size apparel design and development. Few studies have identified clothing solutions utilized by plus-size women or how clothing impacts their feelings about themselves, and there is no re…
How to transform fashion education: A manifesto for equity, inclusion and decolonization
Europe’s Defence Requires Offence
To preclude a severely damaged or more likely dissolved NATO, NATO Europe would need the capabilities to fight offensively and to win
Stranger than Fiction: Imagining Our Climate Future
In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates shows why a net-zero world is necessary, and how it might be achieved through fostering demand for and the supply of innovation. He argues that technology, policy and markets must be shaped at the same time, and in the same direction. His technocratic approach ignores (explicitly) climate politics and (implicitly) the second-order consequences (including social disruption and violence) of political a…
Fattening fabulousness: The joys and risks of troubling gender through fat fashion
Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a differen…
Intersectionality Gets Fashionably Fat: Arts-Based Approaches to Gender, Fat and Fashion
The authors’ research project, Sizing Up Gender, explored the experiences of thirteen participants at the intersections of gender expression and fat. Through a series of photographs of participants and their garments, the project pushed the boundaries of art, identities, representations, and research. This article seeks to consider the ways in which innovative arts-based practice with a deep focus on justice and anti-oppression can allow for a th…
Self-fashioning Queer/Crip: Stretching and grappling with disability, gender and dress
The convergence of queer studies with disability studies has imagined new possibilities of sexuality, gender and the body, and developed Queer/Crip as a theoretical framework. Queer/Crip scholars map out connections between queer and crip theories by examining how compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness are entangled in the service of normativity. This article uses a Queer/Crip framework to explore how queer, disabled people use…
Re-Making Clothing, Re-Making Worlds: On Crip Fashion Hacking
This article explores how Disabled people's fashion hacking practices re-make worlds by expanding fashion design processes, fostering relationships, and welcoming-in desire for Disability. We share research from the second phase of our project, Cripping Masculinity, where we developed fashion hacking workshops with D/disabled, D/deaf and Mad men and masculine non-binary people. In these workshops, participants worked in collaboration with fashion…
Multi-sensory methods: Toward a crip methodology in fashion studies
Cripistemologies are ways of knowing that emerge from the embodied experiences of disabled bodyminds, while multi-sensory methods value knowledge produced through haptic, visual, auditory and other sensory forms. Drawing on these approaches, this article proposes a crip methodology for fashion studies by exploring the value of combining research methods to honour the knowledge of disabled people and their sensory engagement in the world. We refle…
Iran and Israel: Everything Short of War
Iran's attack on Israel on 13–14 April 2024 and Israel's retaliatory strike on Isfahan on 19 April raised the possibility of all-out war between the two states. But there remain critical military and strategic constraints on the ability and motivation of both countries to escalate the conflict. Their armed forces are configured primarily to ensure survival rather than sustain major conflict. Casualty aversion and American hesitancy inhibit Israel…
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Fashion and Cultural Textiles (13 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Crafts, Textile, and Design (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Clothing (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)