Authors:Mina Roces Pages: 5 - 14 Abstract: During the past decades, Asian Studies scholars have made outstanding contributions on the topic of how political elites have promoted changes in clothing in their projects of modernising their citizens or creating new nationalist identities (such as by inventing national dress). But the visual power of the politics of appearances allows also marginal and oppressed groups to send powerful messages. This special issue proposes to shift the analytical lens from the way sartorial changes have come from above – i.e., from political elites in power – to examining instead how resistance movements, including women’s movements, social movements, minorities and marginalised groups, utilise the semiotics of dress to advance their agendas from below. Thus, this issue underscores the importance of dress, bodily deportment, fashion and etiquette, analysing how these have been intrinsic to the performance of social, political, cultural, religious and gendered identities, and in challenging the status quo. The focus here is on how dress and fashion are marshalled for the performance of collective action, socio-political dissent, alternative politics and identity politics. PubDate: 2022-04-25 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18155 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Mina Roces, Valerie Steele Pages: 15 - 24 Abstract: Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, where she has organized more than 25 exhibitions since 1997, including “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk”, “Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color”, and “Paris, Capital of Fashion”. She is also the author or editor of more than 30 books, including Women of Fashion, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, and The Berg Companion to Fashion. In addition, she is founder and editor-in-chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, the first scholarly journal in Fashion Studies. PubDate: 2022-04-25 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18158 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Mary Austin Pages: 25 - 51 Abstract: This article investigates the use of dress by Indonesia’s domestic worker movement as a means of resisting gendered political disregard and legal exclusion. JALA PRT, Indonesia’s National Network for Domestic Worker Advocacy, founded in 2004 and spearheaded by feminist activists, supports the development of domestic worker unions. From the outset, it has campaigned for an Indonesian domestic workers law, and, since 2011, for the ratification of ILO Convention 189 (C189) on decent work for domestic workers. Analysing a series of demonstrations staged from 2009 onwards, this article argues that the use of elements of a housemaid’s uniform as a costume within a contentious politics of presence has helped keep domestic worker rights on the political agenda, fashioned workers into activists and created a collective history and new identity for Indonesia’s domestic workers as members of an emergent domestic worker class. PubDate: 2022-05-14 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18545 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Kyungja Jung, Bronwen Dalton Pages: 53 - 75 Abstract: North Korean women’s fashion has changed in the context of women’s relatively recently assumed role as critical actors in North Korea’s market-dependent economy. Through examination of changes in women’s fashion we learn more about how the way women choose to dress can become an agentic and empowering process. The article argues that the case of North Korean women and their dress practice can inform our understanding of how women, even in the most oppressive of circumstances, develop tactics to manipulate the systems and social order that seek to control them. North Korean women have enacted upon their agency deliberately, getting away with what they can while simultaneously skilfully avoiding the dire consequences of being identified as actors who dare to disrupt the status quo. This type of agency is not always understood or appreciated by Western liberal frames and sensibilities of agency that centralise notions of individualism and freedom. This nuanced appreciation of women’s agency has the potential to expand the “rights, choices and autonomy” Western discourse of women’s agency in ways that are inclusive of women who live, and sometimes manage to thrive, in the face of extreme oppression. This paper is informed by the authors’ field notes from trips to North Korea and by 45 in-depth interviews with North Korean refugees, regular visitors to North Korea and NGO workers. PubDate: 2022-05-14 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18546 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Juanjuan Wu Pages: 77 - 96 Abstract: Following the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the beginning of the 1990s witnessed one of the few instances in modern Chinese history of the silenced making their voices heard – through printed messages on T-shirts. Phrases and sentences in large Chinese characters were printed on the front or back of plain white short-sleeve T-shirts with statements originating from a variety of sources, including literature, rock music, pop songs, movies, cartoons, old sayings and political slogans – or sometimes only an apparently meaningless assemblage of words. These phrases distanced the wearers from the earnest attitude that was promoted by the state, affording the wearer a sense of individual empowerment. This paper focuses on this cultural T-shirt fad of the 1990s in China and traces its rebellious origins, along with the multiple interpretations of its significance. This hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry relies on Chinese newspapers published at the time, as well as the researcher’s own observations as a participant of this shared cultural experience. As a unisex sartorial symbol, the “cultural T-shirt” presented an open arena for both males and females, as well as a battleground over “spiritual pollution”. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18746 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Barbara Molony Pages: 97 - 119 Abstract: Two Japanese women’s organisations – Shufuren, founded in 1948 and still in existence, and Chūpiren, founded in 1972 and disbanded in 1977 – appear to be vastly different from one another. And yet, they had one critical similarity: their use of accessories to make a political point. Shufuren members were advocates for consumer rights (and in the immediate postwar era, for food availability). Since then, they have demonstrated for such political issues as food safety, recycling, environmental protection and anti-nuclear energy, all in the name of their roles as wives and mothers. When demonstrating, they always appear bearing large mock-ups of the rice paddle used in Japan to scoop rice from the cooking pot. The rice paddle was a powerful symbol of women’s domestic and political strength. Chūpiren women, on the other hand, distinguished themselves in their advocacy of reproductive rights not only by their forcefulness but also by wearing pink helmets. Chūpiren saw value in street theatre and sensationalism. No other radical feminist group in the mid-1970s wore uniforms. The media at that time mocked Chūpiren’s helmets and attention-grabbing tactics, and in the process disparaged contemporary feminism as a whole. PubDate: 2022-05-26 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18747 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
Authors:Mina Roces Pages: 121 - 142 Abstract: Singaporean female employers subject their Filipina domestic workers to strict rules governing their dress and behaviour, in the name of de-sexualising them and maintaining their status as invisible servants at the employers’ beck and call. This paper suggests that the fashionable attire that Filipina domestic workers don for their day off is also a symbol of rebellion and a rejection of their employers’ desires to render them plain and unattractive. In this sense, fashion is more than just a coping strategy: it is a way of expressing a sexual self, a beautiful and feminine self that is not allowed to be exhibited during workdays. Although these fashion makeovers only last less than 24 hours, in their leisure time Filipina domestic workers transgress the weekday restrictions of their employers while marking their own personal self-transformation as ultra-modern, independent women with consumer power and cosmopolitan tastes. PubDate: 2022-05-30 DOI: 10.11588/iqas.2022.1.18828 Issue No:Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022)
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