The engine of Western fashion proclaims and disguises identities, constructs and deconstructs hierarchical systems, and upholds and transgresses binary structures. This course investigates Western sartorial strategies that construct the social body, with particular focus on colonial voyeurism, aesthetic appropriation, paradigms of authenticity, and cross-cultural and cross-gender dressing as statements of domination and resistance. From Victorian to contemporary fashion, subjects include: Orientalist styles as erotic expressions of colonial rule; fashion’s “black face” as symbol of Western fetishistic “primitivism”; the transformation of traditional Polynesian tattooing into an expression of the marginalized “Other”; the role of “playing Indian” in the construction of American settler identity; and sobriety and extravagance as signatures of twentieth-century gender ideology. HAAVC 3000 seminars continue developing students' visual analysis and research skills while providing students the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the specific topic/theme. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created. This course cannot fulfill the HAAVC 2000 requirement.

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