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.This course may be taken to fulfill a HAAVC 3000-level requirement or the Textiles media history major requirement.

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