FSJ in collaboration with the collective ‘Border Creatures,’ consisting of Chilean fashion scholar-activists Tamara Poblete and Loreto Martinez (Colectivo Malvestidas) together with Ellen Sampson (Northumbria University) and Karen Van Godtsenhoven (Ghent University), invites submissions for a special issue:
“Border Garments. Fashion, Feminisms and Disobedience”
“The U.S-Mexican border is una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987
Anzaldúa writes that borderlands, teeming with transition, as an in-between space of resistance against control, are also full of potential. Similarly, garments, with their potential for transmutation, can create new hybrid identities for marginalized or colonized peoples and harness artistic and social protest and political practices, organized around the axes of gender, colonialism, race, and inequality (class).
Both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous countries (in particular those across the global South), saw a surge of protests and uprisings, against race and gender inequalities and authoritative regimes: protests in which garments were often deployed as sites of and tools for disobedience and resistance. Despite global lockdowns and isolation, these protests have not been silenced, instead re-emerging online, through social media, with garments again as enduring material, embodied signifiers of allyship, protest, and disobedience.
This special issue of Fashion Studies Journal, “ Border Garments. Fashion, Feminisms and Disobedience” explores clothing as a site of resistance and disobedience. The issue will focus on garments, as material as well as symbolic agents of struggle, protest, and liberation, particularly for those from non-Western nations and from territories that are traditionally strongholds of colonialist thought and autocratic regimes. By framing disobedience as a liberating, affirmative ethical practice, clothing can be thought of as not just a powerful weapon against authority and control but also a tool for subversion and empowerment as well as transformation.
The editors invite contributors to create, write, testify, or respond in their own affirmative voice (in the spirit of the Latin-American notion of ‘artistic activism’) to the following axes of clothing and disobedience:
- Disobediences in the ways of producing clothing: materialist perspective, labor practices, crafts(wo)manship, reclamation of indigenous methods, motifs, and textiles.
- Disobediences in everyday ways of carrying and wearing clothing: deconstructing and appropriating eurocentric, ‘fashionable’ conventions, affect/enjoyment as resistance, queering gender codes ...
- Disobedience and protest through (collective) performance: rituals and catharsis, religion, manifestations, hybrid identities, anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist struggles (anarcho-feminism, Chicano, lesbian and Black feminism, xenofeminism, queer and trans bodies, crip bodies, fat bodies).
- Disobedient futures: innovative, disobedient ways of engaging with fashion in the virtual realm, where fashion functions as a non-normative tool for self-expression and community formation (virtual fashion, avatars, eco-critical fashion, digital communities, gaming, the posthuman turn).
The editors seek contributions including:
Scholarly essays (max 4000 words),
Photo-essays and video submissions, accompanied by ~1000-word text.
Interviews (1500 words)
Illustrations
Please submit a 250 word outline of your proposal indicating its format, length, and language, alongside a 150 word biography in English or Spanish, by November 15, 2021. Theoretical, historical, ethnographic, personal narrative, disobedient, and creative perspectives are welcome.
We also welcome graphic designers, artists, and illustrators to co-create a visual identity for this special issue with us, based on the disobedient practices of zines and independent publications. Please send us your portfolio and we can discuss!
Deadline for abstracts: December 1st, 2021
Notification of abstracts: December 1st, 2021
Deadline for Full articles/submissions: March 30, 2022
Email: bordergarments@gmail.com
Language Note:
“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/ La Frontera, 1987.
In the spirit of disobedience,in solidarity with non-English-speaking authors and indigenous languages and as a corrective to the white anglo-saxon gaze of fashion and dress scholarship, the editors welcome articles written in the contributors’ mother tongues, and aim to make the contributions available in both their original language and in English translation.