Guest Editors: Eugenia Paulicelli & Elizabeth 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.
Underlining 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 Elizabeth Wissinger at WSQFashionIssue@gmail.com. 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 WSQpoetry@gmail.com 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 WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com 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 WSQArt@gmail.com 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.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For submissions: WSQFashionIssue@gmail.com, WSQpoetry@gmail.com, WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com
Website: http://www.feministpress.org
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