Feminist ideologies meet fashionable bodies: Managing the agency/constraint conundrum

Abstract

The relationship between women and fashion is a complicated one that raises important questions concerning agency. Feminist scholars interested in fashion have the potential to contribute to an explication of such questions since they often explore the degree of agency women have within fashion's forms of bjectification. To date, however, much of the feminist literature about fashion addresses these questions only theoretically. Moreover, while feminists have written much about the relationship between women and fashion, they have written much less about feminist women's fashion practices. The result is that we know much about what feminists believe about fashion and little about what they actually do with fashion in their everyday practices. Based on interviews with sixteen feminist women in academia, this study describes the constraints these women encounter and the rhetorical and performative tactics they enact as they negotiate their relationship with fashion.