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In a Manner of Dressing: At the Intersection of Clothing, Colonisation and Christianity
Undressing Dresses
Fashion NON-Victims |
by Rose Margaret A. Galang-Monis
A Second Look at Make-up
You Are Beautiful!
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| Women In Action covers a broad range of issues affecting women globally, but focusing on the particular needs and concerns of women in the Global South, and forwarding a progressive perspective tempered by the experiences of the third world women's movements. |
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Of Hipsters and Hegemonies
Whitening-cream my ass!” my friend Luisa exclaimed as EDSA’s smoggy skyline outside her train window was briefly secluded by the larger-than-life image of the very blonde Hollywood actress Alicia Silverstone, smiling, oblivious to the squalor of the Pasig River on her side and fumes below.
“Her career must be going downhill,” Luisa added “I wonder how much Kamiseta, (a Filipino ready-to-wear label) had to cough up to make her wear those colegiala (college girl) clothes.”
Nearby, also in full outdoor high-grade vinyl splendor, Mandy Moore oozed with sexy innocence. “Want Moore?” The billboard ad teased, after the MTV star got paid a hefty sum for celebrity endorsements by Penshoppe (yet another local clothing line, cashing in on that colonial mentality that refuses to go away).
“How patriotic of us, as usual.” I mutter.
“What would happen if the stylists of Madonna or Britney Spears suddenly decided that the ethnic Pinoy look was hot?” Luisa wondered aloud.
“Imagine all these sacred woven patterns of various tribes chopped up and re-stitched to adorn Madonna or Britney’s bare midriff,” I reply. “The outfit would probably be complemented by the latest pair of trainers (with space-age aero-goop soles, the kind assembled by eighty sweatshop child labourers from this side of the developing world.”
Luisa groans and I shudder to think of hordes of women flocking to the mall to replicate the urban-tribal Madonna/Britney look.
***
Despite other tragic associations, Middle east and oriental fashion design and looks
are bound to be the mega trend for 2002...Inspired by summer’s gypsy look, the ethnic vogue metamorphosed into an array of
ribbons, beads, layers and embroidery.... Influences come from all over the globe;
from chunky Bolivian knits, Native American sheepskin or suede to Mongolian tiered
skirts, we can pretend we’re hardened travellers!
from Style File: Autumn and Winter Fashion 2002
Fashion is the magic wand that transforms the lowly tsinelas (rubber slippers) and sando (sleeveless undershirt) into the more chic hip flip-flops and tanktops. While a certain “in” look may have origins from the other side of the tracks, chances are, some designer label will soon make it look “cool” and sell it for ridiculously high prices as “work wear” or “street wear”—another case of the local being appropriated, mass produced and sold back to the margins as an essential wardrobe piece only to be chucked next season.
An outfit usually becomes chic only when it is fancied by the privileged (usually White/Western/First World), or those who aspire to be. In trying to understand this, I dig up more interesting readings that talk about fashion beyond what is written on glossy pages.
Two years back, in Make magazine, Ananya Mukherja, a sociology teacher at the City University of New York, wrote about her personal issues with the Hindu bindi as a fashion statement in American culture. It was a time when henna tattoos were suddenly cool and Gwen Stefani of the Band No Doubt sported a bindi that looked quirky, new and cute. Yet before that, whenever she wore a bindi, Mukjerja, as well as her mother and other bindi-wearing women in an Indian community, were called “dothead” by New Jersey rednecks (who called themselves the dot-busters). She was also once mocked in Manhattan by a man who called her “Miss India.”
Why is it that a plain red bindi on her plain brown forehead marked her as an outsider but delicate bindis on non-Indian foreheads look interesting? Mukherja reflected, as she criticised the resurgence of ethnic chic and the “Fusion sexy” look: a combination of white skin, American attitude and exotic style:
I know that Indo-chic is a phase for Madonna and for the New York hip scene—that it’s
been picked up and will be put down again. Already a different kind of orientalism is
taking over—that of the vague “Far East”—and maybe soon that will shift to some other
Third World Fascination. Or perhaps, the Third World will stop being fashionable for a
time, again; it is seldom fashionable though, in the eyes of either Third Worlders or First
Worlders, until it is first approved and metamorphosed by people in the West.
Far East fashion indeed arrived, but is all but gone. Suddenly I remember finding a couple of Japanese-themed music videos cool many seasons ago. In those slick and stylish videos, Madonna and Kylie Minogue wore geisha-like kimonos ala-Star Wars Queen Amidala.
I suspect if I deconstruct some of the once-trendy sales-bin items at the back of my closet, (clubwear-top with a mysterious Kanji character and an assortment of cheongsam-like tops), I will come to the conclusion that I was a fashion victim in more ways than one.
As Sharon Kinsella wrote in a paper on globalisation and orientalism:
Oriental-chic in Europe, and Japan-chic in East Asia, (and Asia-chic in Japan!) have
merged.... Though often futuristic in form, Neo-Asian culture also utilises some of the
recurring motifs of old-fashioned, (racist, and romantic) definitions of Oriental people.
Motifs such as ‘passive,’ ‘inscrutable,’ ‘childlike,’ ‘victim-like,’ ‘lacking subjective will,’
‘machine-like’ and ‘ephemeral’ have been separated from their previous, racial context.
Some of these motifs are now packaged as the core attributes of a new global model
of behaviour and style for the cool and mobile person.
How I wish that fashion was less about the commodification of identities and more about self-expression, (as numerous marketing campaigns would have us believe). I would really like to believe that my own clothing preferences would be a reflection of personal choice instead of hegemonies.
And yet the issue of class never fails to rear its elegant head. Fashion, after all, was invented by upper-crust people to set themselves apart from the masses. When the styles of the upper class fashions trickled down to the lower class, they were forced to reinvent themselves. So says 19th century sociologist Thorstein Verblen as mentioned in Joanne Finklestein’s piece on chic theory.
Finklestein adds that this trickle-down theory has since given way to the rise of a fashion-label that gives consumers “a sense of social location... that is made to seem part of the alure of fashionability and... stabilising identity which accompanies signature goods.”
Finklestein also mentions Foucault’s notion of the docile body that shows how “elements of a fashionable lifestyle—which include the urban habits of reading fashion magazines and engaging in body sculpting such as dieting and gym work-outs... are techniques for transforming the body into a commodity... subject to periodic upgrading.”
And so, as they say, we are what we wear. If what we wear mirrors disparities in gender, race, and class, what else is new? And how do we change this?
Sources:
Style File (quote), <http://www.pagesix.com/fashionweek/spring2002/nyc/news/news.htm>
“Indo chic” by Ananya Mukherjea, <http://www.makezine. org/indo.html>
“Orient-ing Fashion” by Mina Kim Park, <http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/~perspy/old/issues/1997/may/orienting.html>
“Universal Orientalism for Future Global Citizens?” by Sharon Kinsella, 1999, <http://www.kinsellaresearch.com/Universal.html>
“Chic Theory” by Joanne Finkelstein, Australian Humanities Review, <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-March-1997/finkelstein.html>
“Tightwad Chic,” Metafilter discussion thread, <http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/20768>
Further reading:
Theories of Fashion Semiotics by Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com, <http://www.fashion-era.com/sociology_semiotics.htm>
“From Indo-chic to Ethno-kitsch” by Ananya Mukherjea, <http://www.makezine.org/ethno.html>
“The Social Statement of the Nipple” by JanePinckard, Umami Tsunami Fashion Zine. Vol. 1.4 Fall-Winter 2001, <http://www. umamitsunami.com/zine/fashion/nipple.asp>
“Mukhang Pinoy” by Bosyo, Kakosa Magazine, <http://kakosa.com/ezine_aesthetics_ 20020826.shtml>
In a Manner of Dressing: At the Intersection of Clothing, Colonisation and Christianity
The bare-bellied and silicone-breasted young woman looms large in today’s globalised world where Britney is both the penultimate object of desire and a powerful consumer force. The media-savvy Britney sells herself and her lifestyle through a prolific output of music, videos, movie appearances, endorsements, and with a new restaurant, even her choice of cuisine. The multibillion dollar Britney Spears phenomenon leads one to think that perhaps the pronouncements of fashion designers and editors control women’s bodies just as the capitalist employer or landlord wields its power over the worker. In drawing the connection between knowledge and power, Foucault’s theory of discourse links particular social attitudes and practices to legitimised sets of understandings, or truths. This notion of discursive truth can be used to reveal how clothing and historical religious texts not only construct women as targets of social control but also condone male-inflicted violence done to them.
Clothing and Civilisation
Representations of bare-bosomed native women reinforce the myth of virginal lands ripe for the conquering. Historically, it was for the sake of men’s sanities that the parts of a woman’s body—especially those that symbolised her power to bear and nourish children—were kept from view. For instance, India’s 5,000 year old epic the Mahabharat depicts the Lord Krishna eternally lengthening the diaphanous sari that demurely yet seductively draped Draupadi in order to protect her virtue from captors. Upon Spanish colonisation, the native Filipino or indio1 came to regard the naked female body as evil. The indios’ refusal to wear clothes was just one of the many reasons that made the Spaniards consider them as inferior. To prevent men from committing sin, native Filipino women were taught to cover their bodies with an intricate layer of under and overgarments. Such a layered manner of Spanish dress became known as the Maria Clara,2 after the style the writer Jose Rizal chose to dress his popular heroine in. The silk corpiños3 covering the Filipina’s breasts under her baro, and the delicately embroidered enaguas4 she wore beneath her saya5 were the pieces of fabric closest to her skin. These undergarments can be likened to the Japanese silk Nagajuban6 and cotton Momen-no-juban slips young Japanese women wore in addition to the knee-length Haori to complement their kimonos. These undergarments beneath the Japanese kimono are held together using either a silk or brocade sash 12 inches wide and 12 feet long called Obi.7 The Obi is wrapped a little higher than the waist to cover the woman’s ribs. It is intricately fastened and kept in place with the aid of girdles—sometimes as many as 15—made from silk and brocade. The sari,8 meanwhile, is tucked away beneath two undergarments: first, a waist-to-floor length petticoat tied tightly at the waist by a drawstring and second, a tight fitting blouse that ends just below the bust.
Though seemingly different, through subtle variations in style and materials, the sari, kimono, and Maria Clara all communicate personal and social messages of gender, age, status and aesthetics. Through Maria Clara’s character and manner of dress, Jose Rizal inscribed the colonised male’s fascination with the female, just as tales of kimono-clad women were part of Western lore long before the Portuguese landed on the Japanese archipelago in 1543. Likewise, the traditional six-yard sari Indian women have been generously pleating, tucking, and draping around their bodies for centuries exudes a beauty, grace, and sensuality that continues to mystify travellers. According to folktale, the floor length, midriff-baring attire:
…was born on the loom of a fanciful weaver. He dreamt of Woman. The shimmer of her
tears. The drape of her tumbling hair. The colours of her many moods. The softness of
her touch. All these he wove together. He couldn’t stop. He wove for many yards. And
when he was done, the story goes, he sat back and smiled and smiled and smiled.
Colonisation and Christianity
In the Philippines, with trade and colonisation came Christianity. Similarly, in Japan, missionaries arrived alongside traders and were successful in converting thousands of Japanese to Christianity. The intrusion of Western religion and culture into traditional Japanese life prompted Japan’s ruler to close its doors to the West by 1640, and it became illegal for Japanese to travel to other countries. This isolation further reinforced Orientalist notions about Japan. In India, many converted to Christianity when St. Thomas “the Doubter” came to the Indian province of Kerala in AD 52, sixteen years before St. Peter stepped in Rome. St. Thomas succeeded in erecting seven churches before he died at the hands of a murderous fanatic. Many believe his tomb to be in St. Thomas Mount in Madras, the capital of the Indian state of Tamilnadu.
As the trade of silk, ivory and spices flourished, Christian doctrine entered the East. The writings of early church fathers like Tertulian gave its new converts a glimpse of why it was necessary for the female form to be hidden from the male gaze—Eve had deceived her husband in a state of nakedness. Tertulian, in the second century, elaborated on how the female’s evil nature can be traced to Eve’s nakedness/deception:
Do you know that each of you is an Eve, the sentence of God on this sex of yours
lives in this age; the guilt must necessarily live too; you are the devil’s gateway; you
are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first deserter of the Divine Law; you are she
who persuaded him when the devil was not valiant enough to attack. (writer’s italics)
By the time Friar Cherubino of Siena’s Rules of Marriage was published in the fifteenth century, the practice of beating one’s wife was seen as an act that brought spiritual benefits to both the giver and receiver of such violence:
When you see your wife commit an offense, don’t rush at her with insults and violent
blows…. Scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if still this doesn’t work… take up
a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than
to damage the soul and spare the body…. Then readily beat her, not in rage, but out of
charity and concern for her soul, so that the beating will redound to your merit and her good. (writer’s italics)
Some feminist researchers indict the religion of the coloniser for bringing with it the double standard that continues to segregate women into particular occupations, especially in Christian populations. The religion the Europeans brought with them to the East served to accentuate the difference used to define men’s from women’s bodies which inevitably led to a corresponding division of labour, confining women to reproductive work in the home as men conquered the public sphere. The proper conduct of women was based on the premium Christianity placed on women’s chastity, which in turn, gave birth to social restrictions. Once married, women were assured salvation only if they performed their role as wives and mothers as St. Paul reveals in his First Letter to Timothy:
A woman must learn in silence and be completely submissive. I do not permit woman to act as teacher, or in any way to have authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was created first, Eve afterward; moreover, it was not Adam who was deceived by the woman. It was she who was led astray and fell into sin. She will be saved through childbearing, provided she continues in faith and love and holiness… (writer’s italics)
Virgins vs. Vamps
Marriage and the formation of the human family, if some historical accounts are to be believed, evolved from various property relationships. The book of Exodus even lists a wife as one of his neighbour’s properties (before houses, slaves, oxen, and asses) a man is not to covet. Women, as heirs of Eve, “the first deserter of the Divine Law,” are seen as weak by nature. In Christian doctrine, embracing motherhood is the only salvation of women from Eve’s sin, which they inherit on account of their gender. Unlike men who are called to be true to their nature as God’s obedient sons, women are tasked with the continual rejection of their weak nature. Christianity defines the prime task of a woman as the safeguarding of her chastity, the prerequisite for marriage and motherhood.
Britney’s popularity lies largely in her packaging as “a girl-not-yet-a-woman,” the selling of an ambiguous virgin vs. vamp persona created through carefully selected lyrics, music, and dance moves. By baring her belly and flaunting her bosom, the parts historically associated as the source of women’s power, Britney has capitalised on centuries-old Christian doctrine to generate a multibillion dollar industry where the object and commodity for sale is herself.
References:
Agoncillo, T. and Domingo, A. (1990) “Becoming Filipino,” in Cordero-Fernando, G. and Ricio, N. (eds) Turn of the Century, Quezon City: GCF Books, 8-21.
Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P. et al. (1999) “Power/Knowledge: The Politics of Social Science,” in Jaworski, A. and Coupland, N. (eds) The Discourse Reader, New York: Routledge, 141-157.
Estrada-Claudio, S. (forthcoming) On Earth as it is in Heaven: The Philippine Catholic Hierarchy’s Gendered Worldview of Society and Salvation in the 1940s and 1950s.
Eviota, E. U. (1993) The Political Economy of Gender, London: Zed Books Ltd.
Foucault, M. (1999) “Truth and Power” in Cahoone, L (ed) From Modernism to Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 379-381.
Giroux, H. (1999) “Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy” in From Modernism to Postodernism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 687-697.
Gonzales, A.V. (forthcoming) Text and Violence: Reading the Medico-legal Report as a Religious Text and Claiming the Beijing Platform for Action as a Text for Women’s Empowerment, Quezon City: Institute of Human Rights, University of the Philippines Law Center.
Isis International-Manila. (1998) Women in Action No. 1, Quezon City: Isis International -Manila.
Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (1999) “Kimono: The National Dress.” Kondansha International Limited.
Legasto, P. P. (1993) “Introduction: Discourses of ‘Worlding’ and Philippine Post-Colonial Studies,” in Hidalgo, C. P. and Legasto, P. P. (eds) Philippine Post-Colonial Studies, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
Orzada, B. T. (1998) “The Japanese Kimono.” University of Delaware.
Peña, M. T. (2001) Expanding the Classic Self-Defense Doctrine to Accommodate the Novel Theory of Battered Woman Syndrome: Problems and Issues in Philippine Context, Quezon City: Institute of Human Rights, University of the Philippines Law Center.
Sari Magic. saree@angelfire. com
Tiongson, N. G. (1990) “The Dressing Tradition,” in Cordero-Fernando, G. and
Ricio, N. (eds) Turn of the Century, Quezon City: GCF Books, 112-133.
Footnotes:
1 The word indio, Spanish for Indian, was how Spanish colonisers referred to the brown-skinned inhabitants of the Philippine Islands.
2 The Maria Clara is a Filipino dress made from finely woven cotton, hemp, silk, or pineapple fibers. It is composed of a loose, long sleeved upper garment called the baro usually covered by a pañuelo, or shawl wrapped around the shoulders, and a full skirt called the saya that covered the ankles.
3 A silk garment worn to cover the breasts.
4 A slip, usually of cotton or silk, worn beneath the saya.
5 See Note 2
6 The Nagajuban, Momen-no-uban and Haori are silk chemise and robe-like undergarments worn beneath the Japanese kimono.
7 The obi, part of the Japanese kimono, is a sash made of either brocade or silk tied a litter higher than the waist to cover the woman’s ribs and to hold the kimono and all the layers beneath it, in place.
8 The sari is considered the traditional dress of Indian women. Usually six yards in length, it is made from cotton or silk. The fabric is pleated, tucked, and draped around a waist-to-floor length petticoat and a tight fitting midriff bearing blouse that ends just below the bust.
Silent No More, We're Hanging Out Our Dirty Laundry: The South Africa Clothesline Project
Mom’s spirit was killed long before Dad executed her.
Ndoda Ndini Ungeva Kanjani Inguwe lo Udlewenguliweyo
(How would you men feel if you were raped?)MisDaad moet hok Geslaan Word. (Violence must be stopped.)
He raped me. Nobody can take that pain out of my heart and soul.
These messages and hundreds of other messages were written, and drawn on the ‘canvas’ of ordinary t-shirts and hung on South Africa’s inaugural Clothesline on 26 November 2001 on Robben Island, the site of Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment and now a national historical site and museum.
The Clothesline Project is a public display of individually created t-shirts that illustrate, with words, colours or symbols, women’s personal stories of their experiences of violence (Foley 1995). Each T-shirt honours, respects, and recognises one woman’s courage in facing experience(s) of violence—rape, incest, abuse, harassment, murder, intimidation, and/or torture—in a medium that provides public exposure while guaranteeing distance and safety.
The original Clothesline Project began in 1990 in Hyannis, Massachusetts in the United States. It was inspired by an artist in a display of shirts at a “Take Back the Night Rally” (Foley 1995). Since then the project has become both national and international, with hundreds of locally organised projects in the United States and other nations displaying thousands of t-shirts (U.S. National Clothesline Project flyer, undated).
The U.S. Clothesline was built around a double metaphor: “Doing the laundry has always been considered women’s work, and in the days of close-knit neighbourhoods, women often exchanged information over backyard fences while hanging their clothes out to dry. The concept [of the Clothesline Project] was simple—let each woman tell her own story, in her own unique way, and hang it out for all to see. It was and is a way of airing society’s dirty laundry.” (Carol Chichetto, U.S. National Clothesline Project flyer October 1994).
The South Africa Clothesline debut on Robben Island provided the backdrop for the launch of the Justice for Women campaign. Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, and the National Network on Violence Against Women, the Justice for Women campaign is a public appeal to President Mbeki for the pardon or sentence reduction of abused women who have killed their husbands. Following the Justice for Women launch, the Clothesline also marked multiple events in the 16 Days of Activism, an annual international event (25 November-10 December) intended to create a worldwide movement that raises awareness of gender-based violence as a human rights issue and calls for the elimination of such violence.
Inaugurating the South Africa Clothesline Project
Within a few weeks, news headlines in urban areas chronicled the scope of violence against South African women. A Groote Schuur Hospital medical academic announced that the yearly incidence of rape in South Africa now exceeds that of tuberculosis; the rape of schoolgirls by teachers, peers and gangs was documented by both the Human Rights Watch and an Eastern Cape provincial investigating committee; a report by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation argued that violence against women and HIV/AIDS may be converging in new and lethal ways—even as Jackie Selebi, National Police Commissioner, pronounced the Domestic Violence Act to protect women “unimplementable.” While there has been ample evidence of women’s victimisation—child rape, schoolgirl assault, sexual harassment, wife battering, abuse of elderly women—and a long history of feminist interpretation and activism surrounding gender inequality and the social privileges that sustain men’s violence, the messages were obviously not getting through to those with the power of enforcement and prevention.
During informal discussions with local NGOs, Lora Lempert raised and introduced the U.S. Clothesline concept. In the U.S., the Clothesline is used as a public consciousness-raising tool aimed at exposing the general public to the realities of violence against women (U.S. National Clothesline Project flyer October 1994; Foley 1995). By dismissing sensationalised media constructions and by using the forms and features of women’s lives, the Clothesline presents women’s experiences of violence from women’s perspectives. The combined use of the project to generate awareness while simultaneously giving women, whose lives are/were directly impacted by violence, a venue to speak out won immediate appeal. The response of shelter providers and residents in the Western Cape to the Clothesline was instant and enthusiastic. Ideas percolated about how to employ the concept effectively—how to alter and adapt it to suit the situations and circumstances of women’s lives in South Africa’s many social, political, geographical and other contexts.
The ethical issue, both symbolic and material, of using new t-shirts for display, in a country where some women and their children do not have t-shirts, was a fundamental concern. Symbolic concerns were ameliorated by the recognition that t-shirt messages had been central to the struggle against apartheid and remain central to ongoing movements for social justice. In fact, the Clothesline’s use of t-shirts was in keeping with historical precedent. Material concerns were remedied by decisions to offer women the opportunity to use their own shirts to create their messages and then to exchange them for new shirts.
The South African Clothesline replicated the aims of the U.S. project (U.S. National Clothesline Project flyer, undated):
* To bear witness to the survivors of violence against women;
* To help with the healing process for victims and their families/friends;
* To educate and raise awareness of the extent of the problem; and
* To provide a nationwide network of support and encouragement.
The colour coding, which represents the spectrum of abuse, was adapted from U.S. suggestions (U.S. National Clothesline Project flyer, undated) to reflect the particular experiences and circumstances of South African women. It was decided that the South Africa Clothesline Project would suggest, but not require, use of these colour codes:
* White - women who are/have been in abusive relationships;
* Red - women who have been raped;
* Green - women raped, killed, tortured, or harassed during the struggle;
* Blue - providers who work in the field of violence against women;
* Yellow - relatives of women who were killed or attempted to be killed by men known to them (husbands, fathers, brothers, and so on);
* Pink - child victims of incest/sexual abuse; and
* Orange - women violated because of sexual orientation or those experiencing abuse in a same-sex relationship.
Once these decisions were made, the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children and the Western Cape Network on Violence Against Women collaborated on a funding request submitted to the U.S. Consulate Cape Town for support of the launch of the project. By this point, the Clothesline concept had grown to include the National Network cluster of Western Cape, Northern Cape, and Eastern Cape Provincial Networks. It was clear that the launch of the project needed co-ordination and collaboration.
The funding requested and received from the U.S. Consulate Cape Town was stretched to include a Project Manager in each of the three provinces. June Henkeman took the lead in the Western Cape, Alice Queen Letiane in the Northern Cape, and Ntombo Dyantjie in the Eastern Cape. Each project manager contacted the network’s member organisations in their respective areas to invite participation. The response from a broad spectrum of individuals and organisations was spontaneous and overwhelming. Women from a variety of service venues—NICRO (National Institute for the Criminal Rehabilitation of Offenders), elementary and secondary schools, Women on Farms, academic programs, shelters, rape crisis one-stop centres—participated. By the 26 November launch, almost 700 individual T-shirts had been created.
Creating the Shirts
The Clothesline Project is an honouring of survivors and fatalities of violence against women. In making a shirt, a woman gives public recognition to her experiences and speaks what may have previously been unspeakable. The shirts provide a means to subvert the silences imposed on women. Consequently, opportunities for design and creation require a supportive and nurturing environment.
In their messages, women, and/or their families, friends and colleagues can empower themselves as survivors of the abuse and violence they or their loved ones experienced. Using the familiarity of ordinary t-shirts, contributors were free to engage in expansive production. Their messages broke barriers of form, politics, artistic skill, customs, and literacy. Truths were spoken on the fronts, backs, and sleeves of the shirts.
Each shirt is part of the whole clothesline, and no shirt hangs alone. Creation was also part of a collaborative, coordinated process sponsored by a non-government organisation (NGO), an academic programme, a Gender Equity Unit, a crisis centre, a community-based organisation, or a similar group. While individual women might have chosen to work on their t-shirt messages/designs on their own, the shirts were not produced in isolation.
Designing the means and forms of the sharing of their experiences provided women with the opportunity to address past or present pain and to look to the future (Ostrowski 1994; Foley 1995). For many it was a cathartic experience:
It was a pleasure to write all over the t-shirt. It really felt good.
When I did the workshop [to create t-shirts], the women said it was very therapeutic—an opportunity to put down what they were feeling. - Rene van Staden, NICRO Women’s Support Centre
Creating a t-shirt for public display can also be interpreted as a courageous act of empowerment:
It felt so good, the message just burst out, it wasn’t prepared.
I wrote everything that was on my heart and it felt good afterwards.
I wrote exactly how I was feeling—everything.
Making a shirt can also be a very painful but healing experience.
It brought out a lot of memories, which was disturbing.
My very immediate feeling was that it was finally out there. There are a lot of women who walk with things and there’s a sense of relief when it’s out there.
The Clothesline Project is more than a simple visual representation of the magnitude of male violence. The shirts also provide a way to create community. In viewing a clothesline, a woman recognises that someone else knows what I know and understands what I understand (Ostrowski 1994). As one contributor noted:
I see it as encouragement. The courage to do it the first time. It can be done. It is really about putting it out there. Once somebody has put it out there—hundreds will have the courage to come. It’s motivating. There’s strength in numbers.
The South Africa Clothesline offered service providers (blue shirts) opportunities to speak their experiences as well:
It was nice to know that someone would read my message and feelings. It was an advertisement for others, an eye-opener and a way of helping someone to know that they are not alone in an abusive relationship. There are others like her.
Since the original display, the Western Cape Clothesline has been hung in multiple venues in South Africa—on the street, at Peninsula Technikon, at the University of the Western Cape, at the Impumelelo Awards presentation, at a Khayelitsha prayer service for female victims of violence, and more. Of her experience with the on-the-street Clothesline in Cape Town, Rene van Staden, NICRO Women’s Support Centre, said: “The display itself was very powerful—the images really reflect the impact of violence and abuse. It was very effective—the general public stopped and it generated discussion. People were commenting on the shirts and the issues. It was something different—‘What is a washing line doing in the middle of town?’ Many people stopped, also a lot of men, and it’s not often that men stop and discuss this issue.”
The Northern Cape Network was presented with the Northern Cape Parliamentary Award for the Most Informative Display in 2001 for their Clothesline, which was hung in the Provincial Parliament Building in Kimberley, South Africa.
The Audience
Seeing the display often has a profound effect on the viewer (Ostrowski 1994; Foley 1995). Viewing the Clothesline is both an emotional and a visceral experience. We observed at the launch in Robben Island that messages created on something familiar and that moves with the wind is much more effective and alive than text on paper stuck to a wall. The on-site comment by female viewer on Robben Island was typical: “What I find most striking is the honesty and the directness and the individuality of the messages. It really hits me, the pain women and children experience through violence, and I’ve worked in this area for over a decade. Umpteen T-shirts around rape, but they all say something different.”
We also saw that the form and variety of the messages encouraged discussion and conversation about the issues, as well as onlookers’ about these. We overheard time and again, “This gives me goosebumps,” and the ubiquitous “Shame.”
“It was a good awareness strategy. The messages were horrific. I felt a lot of sadness while reading them. For the audience to see the shirts and to come close and interact— that is a very powerful awareness strategy,” said Debbie van Stade of the Department of Social Services in Western Cape.
The Future of the Clothesline Project
It was the intent of everyone connected with the initiation of the South Africa Clothesline Project that it would not be a one-off event. The Clothesline was meant to be a continuous project within which women make public statements detailing their experiences of male violence. The Clothesline is meant to be hung at any and all public venues—libraries, court houses, musical venues, national holiday events, public roadways, prayer services, universities and so on—not just women’s events. The limits of Clothesline use are the limits of South African women’s imaginations.
Our hope is that the Clothesline will be replicated in every province in the country. And that someday the project will become obsolete, when there are no longer any stories of men’s violence against the girls and women of South Africa, or the world.
Lora Bex Lempert is an Associate Professor in Sociology and the former Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in the U.S.A. For 17 months beginning in 2001, she was posted to the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme at the University of the Western Cape as a Fulbright Scholar/Lecturer where she taught Feminist Research Methodologies and a course on Family Violence. Her own research focuses on intimate, interpersonal violence against women.
References
Chichetto, Carol A. 1994. The Clothesline Project. Flyer. National Network, East Dennis, Massachusetts. October.
Foley, Sally Lee. 1995. First National Clothesline Project Display. Women Lawyers Journal 81 (3), 18-19.
Ostrowski, Constance J. 1994. The Clothesline Project: Women’s Stories of Gender-Related Violence. Women and Language 19 (1), 37-41.
U.S. National Clothesline Flyer, undated.
Undressing Dresses
Undressing Dresses” is about decoding the various encodings in fashion, the various ways in which we transgress and even subvert the very language of fashion imprisoning us as women in various cages of beauty myths and social constructions of womanhood. Undressing is the process of exposing the language of fashion (dresses). By such undressing, we will, hopefully, better know our place as women consumers of fashion in this battlefield of images, and consequently create disturbing spaces within this language that could shatter that force that impinges on women’s subjectivity and creates manipulative, oppressive images.
According to Angela Mcrobbie, a British pop culture and fashion analyst, women dominate participation in the fashion industry—from designing, packaging and modelling, to producing, writing about and consuming clothes. There are an overwhelming number of women who are a part of the workforce, sewing and cutting patterns for mass-produced merchandise. Thus, she says, fashion is a feminist issue.1
Throughout the history of fashion, the main object has been mostly women. As early as the medieval period, so-called sumptuary laws 2 were imposed on women to indicate class and gender. Clothes did not only serve as protection from the elements and as compliance with Christian rules on modesty but also as an apparatus of caste. Women of the elite class were dressed differently from the working class, with specific styles and types of garment indicating the differences. Other forms of body modifications such as foot-binding and corseting, or even the modern high heels, were used to control women’s movements to maintain a certain daintiness and gracefulness, all in the name of beauty, femininity and chastity. 3
Women’s apparel was also seen as symbols of the aspirations of an era. During the Dark Ages, women’s clothes were literally cushioned with pillows around the stomach to produce the effect of a pregnant woman. The bubonic plague had depopulated Europe, and fertility, as represented by women’s clothes, was the social goal.4 Along with the imposition of institutionalised ideals through women’s clothing, various prescriptions on women’s body types were imposed as well. After the Dark Ages, Reubenesque bodies characterised by lush and voluptuous curves became the ideal body type. Corseting was imposed during 16th and 17th centuries. In the 1920s, the boyish look was in; in the 1960s, the phrase “thin is in” became the norm; in the 1980s, the muscular athletic look became the vogue, and now it seems “thin is in” again. Thus, standards of femininity and beauty were directly proportional to the changes in apparel styles.
In psychology, clothing is viewed as the second skin. Clothes are used to highlight body image. Whether these are tight-fitting to call attention to certain parts of the body, or loose to hide a weak body image, clothing has become an extension and affirmation of bodily identities.5 If this is true, then the intimate relationship between body and apparel is also an inseparable one.
The body has always been one of the most exploited terrains in general, but it is also one of the most eluded topics in various fields—sociology, humanities, anthropology, and philosophy. In philosophy and religion, there was a denial of the body in favour of ontology. The body has been constructed as a passive container for the soul, a site of sin, the object of desire, and as many more concepts that do not discuss the reality of its corporeality. The body has life; blood flows through it. We see through the body, we comprehend the world around us through the body, we feel through the body, sense through the body, and we know through the body and yet, we elude from its materiality and the way knowledge on it is written.
Judith Butler’s influential book on the performativity of the body tells us of the idea that the body is not an essence like identity is not an essence. The reality of the body is only real through numerous discourses and it doesn’t necessarily or only necessarily bears inscriptions of history.6 The materiality of the body is therefore, not the essence of truth about the body but only an aspect and at the same time a discourse, from which we perform other discourses. Our gestures, and the way we eat, walk, stand, blink our eyes, smile, pucker our lips, manipulate, cover or uncover our bodies—are all performative aspects of discourses only comprehensible through corporeal machinations. Some of these performances are conscious and some, unconscious. In this sense, the body is freed from the character of passivity to activity—the body is not therefore the prison of the soul, but the soul is the prison of the body.7
In psychology, this unconscious performance of the body is said to be compounds of the various accumulations of feedback and self-image reflected back by society. The phenomenal self (body) and how we manage this is most of the time dependent upon the bodily image (mental picture of ourselves) motivated and prescribed by the society.8 Fashion (including other forms of body modifications such as tattooing, scarification, adornment, etc.) is one of the most common, imposed, accessible and value-laden forms of body performativity. In his study of dress and adornment, Erving Goffman calls his theory, dramaturgy. He used the metaphor of the stage to represent society, and the actor as the people who present and dress as spectacle in everyday life.9
Fashion is the greatest performance and spectacle. It is not only lush with garb and decorations, colours and pastiche images, but it’s also where performative gestures such as walking, turning and other bodily performances are trained. William Shakespeare foresaw the idea that “all the world’s a stage” and we are but mere actors in it, but the extent of this idea and its implications on how we conduct our everyday lives in this consumer-oriented society was not covered by Shakespearian genius. Given the relationship of clothes, body and performance is such an intimate ménage a trois, we are hard placed to separate one component from the other and analyse each one.
Women are the greatest performers in this field dominated by images. Efrat Tseelon, in “The Masque of Femininity,” submits that women were made to embody the essence of fashion and that the qualities of fashion have become one with her flesh.10 Moreover, women were made to expend themselves—effort, money, and everything in between—into achieving the ideal beauty. Hooked up with images, women are the greatest consumers of fashion products from make-up, lotion, accessories, apparel. In fact, during the early 20th century, there was a psychological disorder called “dressing disorder” applied to female adolescents who spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and energy on clothing and exhibit an inflexible insistence on being dressed identically with peers, or in what is believed to be the contemporary mode, no matter how uncomfortable, expensive, or aesthetically distasteful the fashion. This disorder is supposedly chronic and cureless, and is exacerbated by living in a consumer-oriented society, according to the manual of mental disorders.11
However, women could also use this fashion prison into languages of transgression and subversion. The intimate threesome between body, fashion and performance is not as inseparable as it may seem, and women could actually deconstruct each one to see the radical potential of each element, and then piece them together again in an ensemble that could work for them instead of imprisoning them. The effect, the body, could have an active say in how to shape clothes that could complement and politicise the same deemed passive body.
Wearing my Body, Wearing my Clothes
If the body is performative in itself and fashion is another level and probably the most common and celebrated performance outside the formalities of the stage, then we actually wear our clothes over our worn bodies. In the theory dramaturgy, we take on roles in the society as beings and clothes are symbolic characteristics of these roles. Once in a while, however, we cross characters, or we subvert the language of our traditional roles by parodying these roles (double negations), intentionally miss-matching apparels or bringing some visual conflict within a fashion ensemble to create a momentary chaos, a fragment of disruption within a seemingly monolithic surface of the stage.
My own fashion sense is almost indefinite. Most of the time the term “fashion statement” is accorded to how I dress. But if “statement” means a declaration, then every form of fashion is a fashion statement because every form of fashion is some kind of declaration, whether this purports conformity or non-conformity. I don’t even have a conscious statement on how I dress. As with the other arts, the medium (fashion) may have some significance, but in the aesthetics of clothing, it is in the composition of the various elements where fashion genius truly lies. The transgressions that occur whenever I put on an ensemble are brought about by an “inherent” attraction to colour, textures, play, display and asymmetry. As far as I can remember, I never really put an ensemble that was predictable. I hate predictability. I hate boxing and stereotyping, and so, I try to illustrate/present fluidity in the images that I put on my body, the way my identity is characterised by flexibility and poly-vocality. Yes, fashion could be the extension of one’s identity or an illustration of an aspect of that identity, but just like fashion, which is bound to change, identities can also accommodate large numbers of languages and images.
I must be doing something different in the way I look because people started noticing my clothes and how I wore them, some of them even praising me for the guts to be outrageous, crazy and experimental. I change hairstyles maybe as often as I change my shampoo—from being shaved, permed, bleached, short, long—name it, I probably have done it with my hair. I change fashion style almost everyday that it is hard to keep up, and it is hard to capture my so-called fashion identity. Then, I came to realise that I represent a certain image of women—the phantasmic image of the strong/outrageous/crazy woman without boundaries and almost unaffected by beauty myths (that’s what they think). And then again, by my fashion sense, I could also be suggesting that the materialisation of the wild woman is true.
Sometimes, I consciously compose an ensemble that would represent an ideology that I want to pursue, whether I’m off to a symposium where I am presenting a paper, or a political rally or parade. I consider these conscious compositions as conscious performances in which I know I present myself as a spectacle and at the same time, as bearer of ideological symptoms. When I march in a rally against imperialism, for example, I wear iconic signage like a Rastafarian bonnet, a Che Guevarra bag, or a Mao Zhe Dong t-shirt. On the one hand, I am aware that I am falling into the consumerist trap that capitalists produce by turning these precise images of revolution into pop and decontextualises them from their ideological roots to achieve an appeal to the masses (in which they were rooted) and to the bourgeois consumerist crowd that these capitalists target. On the other, I consciously use these images in contexts that may be considered as step to advance the ideologies that these people and symbols stand for.
I enjoy cross-dressing and drag. The politics of drag lies in the idea that drag doesn’t over simplistically imitate the traditional gender roles (as in the case of transvestism), but it subverts these traditional roles by parodying them. It creates a whole new language by firstly, exaggerating and carnivalising these roles/rules, and secondly, by presenting a visibility to absence. As Marjorie Garber put it, “Drag is the theoretical and deconstructive social practice that analyses these structures from within, by putting in question the naturalness of gender roles through the discourse of clothing and body part.”12 Dragging is an act of destabilising and disturbing monolithic structures and gazes, and inserts images and effects that will make us think twice, shock us even. Drag is a powerful political tool that subverts the language of the ruling ideology.
Maybe I am meant to disturb some sort of social order. Sometimes, I consciously disturb the social order. I look at various clothes and images and I think of conflict. Conflict is probably the best compositional guideline I have ever found useful in creating a fashion ensemble. Images are images, and you have to make these work for you. Make the clothes fit you, not you fitting in your clothes. Clothes should be seen as signs inscribed with ideologies and social constructs that may well be instruments to maintain oppression, on the one hand. But on the other, fashion is also a sign of contention, a site of conflict in which one could inflict disruption, disturbance and subversion.
Epilogue: Women and Fashion
For the many, many reasons, women are always the ones most affected by fashion—because of the social construction of women’s identities; because of the social construction of the beauty myth through prescriptions of fashion, body, and skin types (corsets, thin is in, block and white); because of the participation of men designers in the fashion world that defines what is “women’s beauty” from the male gaze following the idea that it is men who know exactly how women should act and appear. As John Berger would say, men gaze and women appear.13 It is also for this reason that women should take charge in this business called image making. We should take charge of our bodies and assert what and how we want to look like. Beauty (or non-beauty) is our business as much as construction of it should be ours too. And if we think it is still not ours, then we should make it ours. As Ani Difranco would sing, “Some guy designed these shoes I use to walk around, some big man’s business turns profit every time I lay my money down, some guys designed this room I’m standing in, another built it with his own tools, who says I like right angles, these are not my laws, these are not my rules…”14
Roselle Pineda is a performer, art teacher, and activist from the University of the Philippines (UP). Her essays, creative works, and scholarly papers have been published around the country in various magazines, anthologies and scholarly journals. She is currently finishing her masters thesis on lesbian art in the Philippines for an MA degree in Art Theory and Criticism in UP Diliman.
References:
Berger, John. 1979. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
Cannell, Fenella. The Power of Appearance: Beauty, Mimicry and Transformation in Bicol. No bibliographical data available.
Dorenkamp, Monica and Richard Henke (editors). 1995. Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects. London and New York: Routledge.
Foster, Patricia (editor). 1995. Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. New York and London: Anchor Books/Double Day.
Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York and London: Routledge.
Kaiser, Susan B. 1985. The Social Psychology of Clothing. New York and London: Macmillan Publishing Company.
McRobbie, Angela. 1999. In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music. London and New York: Routledge.
Pineda, Roselle. 2002. “The Unbearable Heaviness of My Being.” In Body Politics: Essays on Cultural Representations of Women’s Bodies. Edited by Odine de Guzman. Philippines: University Center for Women’s Studies and Ford Foundation.
Tseelon, Efrat. 1995. The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Turner, Bryan S. 1996. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Footnotes:
1 Angela Mcrobbie, In The Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music (New York and London: Routledge), p. 41.
2 The idea of a “sumptuary law” was to regulate men and women through the imposition of dress codes. These laws were promulgated in cities, towns, and nation states attempting, with apparently indifferent success, to regulate who wore what, and on what occasion. Sumptuary laws, moreover, were related to consumption. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 21.
3 Susan Kaiser, The Social Psychology of Clothing (New York and London: Macmillan Publishing Company), p. 9.
4 Ibid, p. 67.
5 Ibid, p.62.
6 Quoted by Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 129.
7 Ibid, p. 135.
8 Susan Kaiser, p. 62.
9 Ibid, p.137.
10 Efrat Tseelon, The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications), p.15.
11 Ibid, p. 17.
12 Marjorie Garber, p. 151.
13 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 89.
14 Ani Difranco, “I’m No Heroine,” from album entitled “Imperfectly” (United States: Righteous Babes Records, 1992).
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Isis Resource Center holds one of the largest feminist collections of materials in the Global South. With 40 years of publication experience, Isis holds a vast collection.