Discourse in clothing

Bibliographic Data

ID12897970
AuthorsGwen Bouvier (0000-0003-1855-4258, Örebro University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume10
Issue3
Pages364-385
Publication date2016-12-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGender and Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1747-6321 • E-ISSN: 1747-633X
PublisherEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/genl.v10i3.32034
OpenAlexW2563214457
LanguageEN
Citations received10

While there have been debates within gender studies on the gendering of the body and of the gendered nature of clothing, this paper shows that multimodality, with its attention to the finer details of communication, can provide a way to help us to think more carefully about how fashion communicates ideas and identities through textile affordances such as form, texture, weight, durability, colour, etc. Taking Hijab fashion in Egypt as a case in point, a multimodal approach is able to reveal how Muslim women use clothing to communicate a number of different discourses simultaneously. These include modesty, religious identity and tradition, on the one hand, and freedom, confidence and modernity, on the other. This analysis allows us both to problematize the monolithic representations of Islamic clothing usually found in Western media, and also to think more carefully about the ways in which clothing both constrains and enables women’s agency

Aesthetics · Affordance · Agency (philosophy · Art · Clothing · Epistemology · Human–computer interaction · Identity (music · Islam · Linguistics · Modernity · Multimodality · Point (geometry · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Public Spaces through Art

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