Gender and Performance: Comparing Western and Non-Western Modes of Expression through Dress

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Gender and Performance: Comparing Western and Non­Western Modes of Expression through Dress

Fashion Institute of Technology Social Sciences Department

The fashion industry today is cut­throat. Designers and brands often use whatever means necessary to make a statement, or to sell. However, what is often overlooked is the deeper impact of these campaigns ­ their statements about culture, sexuality and gender. Similarly, the West often looks at Non­western peoples, emphasizing that the norms of behavior and expression in various cultures in the Global South must be changed. In any discipline, it is easy to forget the many ways of creating meaning in our world. This course will explore women’s use of clothing to express themselves politically, socially and sexually. Students will develop a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances within Non­Western women’s understanding of traditional and nontraditional dress as well as the problems that lie within Western ideas about universal freedom of expression. The questions students will be asked will push them to re­evaluate their assumptions of what fashion and expression mean, forcing them to become aware of the social and political impacts of their future careers in the design industry. The first half of the semester, spent on campus at FIT in New York City, will focus on texts that analyze Non­Western, Non­American modes of expression. In Riyadh, for the second half, students will be at the Raffles Design Institute and will be asked to look back at Western and American fashion. Throughout, students will be asked to write reflection papers on their changing ideas about the role of their future work as designers, focusing on in­class texts.

First Half of the Semester: Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City Second Half of the Semester: Raffles Design Institute, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Course Objectives ● To critically evaluate different perceptions of what freedom of expression means ● To, through both Western and Non­Western points of view, understand the impact of identity on dress and vice versa ● To critique previous assumptions about Non­Western women’s choice of clothing and to bring into focus the problematic nature of the Western media and its effects on women’s conceptions of dress

2 ● To grasp the importance of the fashion industry in sending different messages about identity, sexuality, culture and diversity

Assessment 20% Participation 40% Reflection Papers 10% Current Events Assignments 30% Final Reflection Paper

Participation Students in this class likely are interested in looking deeper at their future careers and the implications of their roles as designers. Therefore, they are expected to come to class prepared to discuss the many readings and be challenged by the different questions that arise within each unit of the course. Although this is likely a distribution or core requirement for students, I still expect students to be active in class and excited to challenge their previous conceptions of dress and expression. If any issues come up, do not wait to inform me of them.

Reflection Papers I will ask students to write three short (3­4 page) personal reflection papers. Although students will be free to choose from many different texts to write about within these essays, they must deeply and concisely probe those pieces, creatively assessing different perspectives and constructing original analyses. These will push students to look at their previous assumptions about what expression through dress means and to reflect on how the course readings and discussions have changed their views. The first, at the very beginning of the course, will ask students how their cultural, religious, ethnic, etc. backgrounds have affected their understanding of gender, dress and their own creative process. After reading studies of Non­Western modes of expression, the second reflection paper is assigned and will ask students to take one of those pieces and challenge, question or complicate it using students’ own experiences/ideas or a source outside the curriculum (does not need to be a scholarly work). The third reflection paper is a comparison between one piece from the course focused on the West and another from the course that looks at Non­Western women.

Current Events Assignments Students will be asked to bring in outside articles, blog posts, pieces of media, etc. that are relevant to the themes of the course at least two times throughout the course of the semester.

I will make a calendar of when students will present their stories. They are expected to send the class their article at least 24 hours before the beginning of the class they are assigned to present at. All students must read all pieces sent to them by their classmates before class as well. During these in­class presentations, students must share 2­3 prepared questions about their articles and guide a short discussion about them.

Final Reflection Paper This (5­7 page) paper will bring together the course content and will ask students to reflect on their different experiences in Riyadh and New York City. Using at least four texts from the course, students will examine their own changing perspectives on modes of expression

3 through dress. From this essay, I want to see students’ personal growth and an understanding of their opportunities and powerful roles as people who devote their careers to sending messages through design and fashion.

Notes on Readings/ Texts ● Students must read all texts by the class period they are bulleted under ● Required texts: (all others will be provided on the course website ­ including films) ○ The Fashion Reader, Welters and Lillethun ○ Dress and Globalisation, Maynard ○ Was it something I wore?, Moletsane, Mitchell and Smith ○ The Veil Unveiled, Shirazi ○ The Veil, Heath

Course Schedule Unit 1: Expression and Identity ● January 29: As the course begins, this class looks at notions of how clothing and identity interact within various contexts: the fashion industry, American consumerism, and different sociological discourses. The chapters that we will discuss here will provide a foundation upon which the rest of the class discussions will rest. ○ The Fashion Reader ■ Chapter 6, “The Power of Fashion” ­ Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang ■ Chapter 8, “The Fashion System” ­ Grant McCracken ■ Chapter 9, “The Dressed Body” ­ Joanne Entwistle ■ Chapter 10, “Re­Orienting Fashion Theory” ­ Sandra Niessen ■ Chapter 59, “What Happened to Fashion? ­ Teri Agins ■ Chapter 61, “Born to Buy” ­ Juliet B. Schor ● February 5: Continuing this foundational work, in this class students will be asked to look at dress through a feminist and gender lens. Discussion will center around questions about sexuality, gender constructs and their implications in fashion. ○ The Fashion Reader ■ Chapter 14, “Men and Women: Dressing the Part” ­ Jo B. Paoletti and Claudia Brush Kidwell ■ Chapter 23, “Feminism and Fashion” ­ Elizabeth Wilson ○ An Intimate Affair, Introduction, “Sexual Foundations” ○ Kaiser, “Gendering Fashion, Fashioning Gender: Beyond Binaries” ○ Kawamura, “Sociological Discourse and Empirical Studies of Fashion” ● February 12: Building off of these more generalist texts on fashion, this class will finish our first unit, opening up discussion to ideas about the impact of globalization on fashion. Students will be pushed to see dress as a means of communication. ○ Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” ○ Dress and Globalisation ■ Chapter 1, “Theorising global dress” ■ Chapter 5, “Style and communication” ■ Chapter 6, “Headwear: negotiating meaning”

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Unit 2: Islam, the Hijab and more ● February 19: This class will introduce the tension­filled discourse on veiling. Building off of the previous class on globalization, students will discuss the problems with and also benefits that women receive from seemingly restrictive dress. ○ Transparency (film) ○ The Fashion Reader, Chapter 52, “The Islamic Factor” ­ Nicholas Coleridge ○ Eum, “Discourses on (un)veiling in Egypt” ○ Billaud, “Visible under the veil: Dissimulation, performance and agency in an Islamic public space” ● February 26: This class will continue a discussion on women’s veiling in Non­Western countries, looking at even more specific and personal accounts. Students will be pushed to understand the connection between veil and self, becoming more familiar with this context. ○ The Veil Unveiled ■ Chapter 1, “Veiled Images in Advertising” ■ Chapter 4, “Iranian Politics and the Hijab” ■ Chapter 5, “Militarizing the Veil” ■ Chapter 6, “Literary Dynamics of the Veil” ○ The Veil ■ Chapter 1, “From Her Royal Body the Robe Was Removed: The Blessings of the Veil and the Trauma of Forced Unveilings in the Middle East” ­ Mohja Kahf ■ Chapter 17, “Concealing and Revealing Female Hair: Veiling Dynamics in Contemporary Iran” ­ Ashraf Zahedi ● March 5: This class will conclude the unit, emphasizing the less obvious ways in which women in Islamic contexts express themselves through different types of dress. Students will be challenged to imagine themselves in these contexts and will be asked to further question their own assumptions. ○ The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie ■ “On Love and Lingerie” ­ Noura Kevorkian ■ “Inside Story, Interviews with Syrian Women” ○ The Veil ■ Chapter 18, “That (Afghan) Girl! Ideology Unveiled in National Geographic” ­ Dinah Zeiger ■ Chapter 19, “Burqas and Bikinis: Islamic Dress in Newspaper Cartoons” ­ Kecia Ali

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Chapter 20. “Dress Codes and Modes: How Islamic Is the Veil?” ­ Aisha Lee Fox Shaheed Chapter 21, “From Veil to Veil: ‘What’s in a woman’s head is a lot more important that what’s on it’” ­ Sherifa Zuhur ● March 6: Guest Lecturer Alaa Balkhy, Fashion Designer and Illustrator originally from Jeddah, living in New York City Unit 3: Dress in Africa ● March 12: This unit intends to broaden the discussion in class to forms of dress not necessarily associated with Islam, but that emphasize women’s understanding of the connection between fashion and expression.

This class is intended to transition students from Islamic veiling to other forms of Non­Western dress. ○ FIRST REFLECTION PAPER DUE! ○ Ndebele women (film) ○ Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya ■ Chapter 3, “Muslim Women Legislators in Minority Status: Contributions to Representative Politics” ■ Chapter 4, “ Judge Abida Ali­Aroni: First Muslim Woman Justice of the Kenya High Court” ■ Chapter 5, “Muslim Women and the Use of New Media: Inscribing Their Voices in Rights Discourse” ● March 19: In this class, discussion will focus on the intersections of globalization, ethnic dress and gender in South Africa and Rwanda. Students will be asked to connect these pieces to their own understandings of the implications of fashion for gender identity. ○ Was it something I wore?

■ Chapter 5, “Aesthetics and identity in contemporary South African fashion” ­ Desiree Lewis ■ Chapter 8, “Do clothes make a (wo)man? Exploring the role of dress in shaping South African domestic workers’ identities” ­ Sithabile Ntombela ■ Chapter 11, “Who wears the trousers here? Women teachers and the politics of gender and the dress code in South African schools” ­ Pontso Moorosi ■ Chapter 12, “Was it something she wore? Gender­based violence and the policing of the place of girls in the school space” ­ Naydene de Lange ■ Chapter 18, “The art of representation versus dressing to be invisible: Who am I dressing for in contemporary Rwanda?” ­ Eliane Ubalijoro Unit 4: The Presence of Veiling in the West ● March 26: This last unit at FIT will transition the class to discussions of how the West interprets Non­Western women’s dress. Students will bring together their understanding of the context of the veil in Islam as well as their personal experiences to challenge the ways that Americans, Canadians and Europeans look at veiling. ○ Ramachandran, “No woman left covered: Unveiling and the politics of liberation in Multi/interculturalism” ○ Constructing Muslims in France ■ Chapter 2, “Elusive Citizenship: The Consequences of an Undesirable Public Identity” ■ Chapter 4, “Education: The (Undelivered?) Promise of Republican Equality” ○ The Veil, Chapter 7, “I Just Want to Be Me: Issues in Identity for One American Muslim Woman” ­ Pamela K. Taylor Unit 5: The History of Expression in America ● March 30: Flight to Riyadh! ● April 2: This unit begins our exploration of what identity and dress mean in the West. Starting from discussions on the restrictiveness of 19th century women’s attire, we move to texts on the American dress reform movements ○ Matt, “Frocks, Finery, and Feelings: Rural and Urban Women’s Envy, 1890­1930” ○ The Fashion Reader ■ Chapter 27, “A Second Look at the Big Squeeze” ­ Jennifer Ruark ■ Chapter 13, “Sentimental Culture and the Problem of Fashion” ­ Karen Halttunen

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Torrens, “All dressed up with no place to go: Rhetorical dimensions of the nineteenth century dress reform movement” ● April 9: From texts predominantly focused on white women’s clothing, we start to look at discourses on African American expression through dress. Discussion will ask students to re­evaluate their assumptions of who the consumers of fashion are in America. ○ SECOND REFLECTION PAPER DUE! ○ White, “From ‘Strolling, Jooking, and Fixy Clothes’” ○ The Fashion Reader ■ Chapter 15, “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare” ­ Stuart Cosgrove ■ Chapter 28, “Nap Time: Historicizing the Afro” ­ Robin D. G, Kelley ○ An Intimate Affair, Chapter 4, “The Meaning of Black Lingerie” ● April 16: To conclude this unit looking at the history of women’s expression of identity through fashion, these texts will emphasize the power and influence that dress still has today on the treatment of women in politics, business and more. ○ Fashionable Queens: Body­Power­Gender, “Fashionable Gender Trouble in Politics” ­ Flicker ○ Seaman, “The Peahen’s Tale, or dressing our parts at work” ○ Stewart, “The politics and spectacle of fashion and femininity” Unit 6: Gender and Sexuality in the Western Media ● April 23: This short unit will focus on students’ own perceptions of sexualization in the American media and the role that the fashion industry plays in educating young people. Class discussion will ask students to take the pieces below and apply them to current fashion events (previous examples: Kim Kardashian’s nude photos in Paper Magazine, Dolce & Gabbana advertisements glamorizing rape, etc.). ○ Fashionable Queens: Body­Power­Gender, “Fashion Queen Barbie” ­ Lehnert ○ Egan and Hawkes, “Endangered Girls and Incendiary Objects: Unpacking the Discourse on Sexualization” ○ Hatton and Trautner, “Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone” ○ “Magazines Concede Need for New Approach to Body Image” ○ Gill, “Supersexualize Me! Advertising and the ‘Midriffs’” Unit 7: Fashion and Cultural Appropriation ● April 30: This last and specific unit intends to tie together these discussions of globalization with the role of the fashion industry. Students will be asked to look at these different examples of cultural appropriation and reflect on their similarities and complexities. ○ THIRD REFLECTION PAPER DUE! ○ Was it something I wore?, Chapter 2, “‘White’ women in ‘black’ clothing: Overtures towards Africanness in dress in a South African context” ­ Juliette Leeb­du Toit ○ Dress and Globalisation, Chapter 4, “Ethnic dress or fashionably ‘ethnic’?” ○ Tsosie, “Reclaiming Native Stories: An Essay on Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Rights” ● May 7: The final class in this course will bring veiling back to the forefront of class discussion, focusing on its presence in the Western media. These texts will push students to think about the immense power that the fashion industry has in making statements about equality, culture and diversity. ○ McLarney, “The Burqa in Vogue: Fashioning Afghanistan” ○ The Veil Unveiled, Chapter 2, “Veiled Images in American Erotica” ○ Maira, “Belly Dancing: Arab­Face, Orientalist Feminism, and U.S. Empire” ● May 20: FINAL REFLECTION PAPER DUE! (Class will not meet) ● May 22: Flight back to New York!

7 Sylvia Levy Professor Pinto The Question of Equality December 18, 2014 Educating The Whole Designer: Gender and Performance through Dress Clothing, as a form of human self­expression, is critical to our perception of gender. The ways in which women and men chose to adorn their bodies communicates political, economic, social and sexual identities. Sociologist Yuniya Kawamura writes: “I treat fashion as a cultural practice as well as a symbolic product. Culture is the means through which people create meaningful worlds in which to live” (Kawamura, 32). This “desire to create a positive self­image” within a culture and to “exhibit a clearly­defined class structure” (Kawamura, 27) is tied up in conversations about feminism and the performance of gender. By adorning ourselves using “shifting coding systems of colors, fabrics, trims, forms, shapes, and patterns” (Kaiser, 121), we not only express the norms of “the social worlds we inhabit” but also show our own personal “ways of becoming” and searches for identity (Kaiser, 123). Joanne Entwistle writes that “any understanding of the dressed body must acknowledge the social nature of it ­ how it is shaped by techniques, attitudes, aesthetics, and so on, which are socially and historically located” (The Fashion Reader, 93). However, dress has a “range of uses and meanings” for women to express sexuality, gender, power and culture (Fields, 17). Although there is this collective, societal creation of fashion (Kawamura, 33), individual women do use its tools to express their own ideas that are not necessarily normative.

8 The independence that clothing offers us to determine the different aspects of our identities is often narrowed by cultural, social, religious and political contexts that provide us with definitions of what appropriate dress looks like. Fashion and the industries connected to it often play a major role in sending messages about gender and normalcy. Grant McCracken writes that “the fashion system takes new styles of clothing or home furnishings and associates them with established cultural categories and principles. Thus does meaning move from the culturally constituted world to the good” (The Fashion Reader, 90). Designers communicate the values of a society to consumers of clothing, and are often unchallenged in their portrayals of what a culture values. For example, the fashion industry tells us what gender is by “keeping a few symbols tightly bound to masculinity or femininity” and drawing out physical differences between male and female bodies (The Fashion Reader, 133). Jill Fields comments in her studies on women’s lingerie that “Private and sexualized, yet essential to the shaping of the publicly viewed silhouette, intimate apparel ­ a term in use by 1921 ­ is critical to making bodies feminine” (Fields, 3). And while no one is forcing women to use lingerie, these “Undergarments are specifically significant to feminization of the body because they are associated with sexual anatomy often perceived as vessels of essential femininity” (Fields, 3). The deep connection between identity and clothing is impacted by what our systems of fashion and commercialization determine acceptable dress to be. So when a Victoria’s Secret model, smiling and applauded by an audience of celebrities, is what a little girl sees on TV, she may begin to associate that sort of dress with what society expects of her.

The power of fashion spokespeople to create a socially acceptable form of dress is daunting, especially in a discussion of gender and its performance. Women and men see different

9 articles of clothing in different ways because of what they see on TV, in magazines, on the street and more. However, when people start to look at dress that does not necessarily conform with either the sexualization of Western women or the separation of what is appropriate for the different sexes to wear, these non­normative modes of expression are rejected and not deeply understood. The advent of globalization and international communication have allowed women and men from the West to look at the ways in which people in Arab and African countries dress, and vice versa. But when many people look at Islamic women’s use of veils (burqas, chadaris, hijabs, etc.), the complexities of their reasons behind doing so are often overlooked in favor of demands for women’s empowerment and the forced removal of the veil. The power of the fashion industry comes in here, as designers have the opportunity to send messages about what is important and acceptable with respect to dress. Because of the harsh and often ignorant criticisms by the West of veiling and other non­Western norms of dress, it is crucial for those looking to work in fashion to really understand the questions that come up within conversations about the role of culture in people’s perceptions of clothing.

This course entitled “Gender and Performance: Comparing Western and Non­Western Modes of Expression through Dress” aims to push students at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York to question their own ideas of what acceptable clothing is. They will be exploring the texts they read about veiling, over­sexualization in Western media and cultural appropriation through the lens of their own personal experiences and understandings of the intersections of culture, gender and expression. Studying in Riyadh for the second half of the semester will give them different perspectives on the texts they will have read in New York about the nuances within discourse on veiling. As they will be taking other classes, living and

10 interacting with Saudi design students at the Raffles Design Institute, they will be talking to and seeing many different women who choose different ways of expressing themselves with or without the veil. Not only will these personal experiences help students to more deeply probe class discussions and allow them to formulate their own opinions, but they will also push students to look at Western fashion critically. While in Riyadh, students will be reading about hyper­sexualization and dress reform in the U.S. They will be asked to look at how the Western fashion industry uses culture and ethnic dress. Living in a different context, students will be able to question how we see gender through clothing in the U.S. in very unique and important ways.

Students’ contrasting or complicating experiences in these two very different settings will help them to broaden their understandings of how culture and gender interact within discourses on fashion.

By the end of the course, students will understand the nuances behind Islamic women’s reasons to wear veils. As emphasized by Julie Billaud, “women’s veiling is a religious sign of modesty, the marker of gender segregation and it should not be systematically read as a sign of women’s oppression” (Billaud, 121). Rather, veiling is a sign of religious devotion and power (The Veil, 29­30). The honor code and privacy that veils uphold ensure a certain amount of protection to women in places like Afghanistan (Billaud, 124). This performance of Islamic values, Billaud says, allow women to participate in different political, social and economic contexts without being marginalized or having their faith or ability challenged by the media or opponents (Billaud, 132­3). In some ways, women in Islamic contexts cannot have power or a positive impact in their communities without veiling themselves.

11 Veils can also be empowering and affirming for women. The veil allows women “to partake in a primal power: I see without being fully seen; I know without being known” (The Veil, 30). Women are connected to their veils, emotionally, as exemplified by the reactions by women forced to unveil themselves, made to lose “a part of their autonomy and dignity” (The Veil, 35).Veiling allows them to serve their people, their countries and their religion (Shirazi, 110). In 1979 Iran, “Women who appeared unveiled in public were assumed to be opposed to the tenets of the Islamic Revolution…” (Shirazi, 92). The veil allows women not only to express their cultural heritage and religious devotion, but helps them to participate in ongoing political dialogue on globalization. Women’s veiling communicates their commitment to upholding traditional values in the face of Westernization. So when the West rejects the veil, women’s creation of meaning and identity through the use of these pieces of clothing is negated.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes that Third World Women are determined to be universally “‘powerless’, ‘exploited’, ‘sexually harassed’, etc., by feminist scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses” (Mohanty, 200). Her discussion of the problematic nature of “colonial feminism” emphasizes that we start to consider women in the Global South as individuals, not always in ideal living situations, but who have different social, familial, political, economic and religious contexts that determine how they choose to express themselves. Pamela K. Taylor highlights the importance of Mohanty’s criticisms in the context of veiling: “My choice to wear a head scarf was, essentially, the most dramatic, proactive, feminist statement that I could make in my personal life, an in­your­face rebellion against the feminine mystique… Non­Muslim Americans in general, like my audience at Harvard, are often quick to judge Muslim women who wear the head scarf ­ and we are surprisingly numerous ­ as oppressed, in need of liberation and empowerment… we are increasingly seen as proponents of militant political Islam, or even terrorism” (The Veil, 121).

12 In Tanisha Ramachandran’s discussion of Islamic women’s veiling in contemporary Canada, she also comments on this “construction of the ‘Third World woman’ as uneducated, bound to tradition, and under continuous threat of violence from the ‘Third World Man’” (Ramachandran, 35­6). Highlighting the problems of this perspective, she writes that “while the Canadian nation wants to liberate Muslim women from what they conceive of as the coerced practice of veiling by their ‘barbaric’ culture, Canadian and Quebecois society are leveling a similar control over Muslim women through their dictates to unveil” (Ramachandran, 37). In the advent of globalization, women’s dress choices are often misinterpreted and associated with generalizations that can be harmful for many women.

The power that the West wields in these statements is even more complicated by the use of exotic images in fashion. A denunciation of the veil as being universally oppressive for women comes along with fashion campaigns that use the veil and other articles of clothing used by women of the Global South. High fashion’s obsession with the “other” often has negating effects on cultures deemed to be more “primitive” (Maynard, 79­80). In the U.S., the commodification of Native American cultural symbols (headresses, etc.) leads to “various types of harm” (Tsosie, 312). Cultural appropriation “interferes with the community’s ability to define itself and establish its own identity” (Tsosie, 313). Similarly, Ellen McLarney comments on Vogue magazine’s use of the burqa, emphasizing that it “became a fetishized commodity” (McLarney, 2). “[T]he burqa’s cooptation by the fashion industry” used images of “darkness that superficial analyses attributed to the Taliban’s (and accordingly, to Islam’s) oppressive attitudes towards gender” while other analyses interpreted this darkness as representative of “the violence that neo­imperial, global capitalism inflicts on women’s bodies” (McLarney, 2). It is very likely

13 that these campaigns re­emphasized this Western feminist concept of the universally oppressed veiled woman, even if the designers intended to express more nuanced ideas: “Onto the burqa are projected relationships of domination simultaneously infused with sexual content and the politics of capitalism’s global expansion” (McLarney, 20). The fashion industry, in its determination of what societal expectations of dress are, has the potential to communicate the complexities of multiculturalism, specifically veiling in Islam. Unfortunately, however, it is easy for designers to profit off of the West’s interest in the exotic and simplify their portrayals of women in the Global South.

Western fashion is problematic in a broader sense: apart from instances of cultural appropriation, the industry time after time emphasizes the hyper­sexualization of the female body. Historically, women have looked to clothing as a means of reforming what society deems gender to be (Torrens, 189). However, the overthrow of corsets and other restrictive articles has brought the idea that women should be able to wear whatever they choose has come to the forefront (Stewart, 194). The fashion and advertising industries use this new liberation of women to make money off of the female body. Images of sexualized women dominate popular media, “narrowing of the culturally acceptable ways for ‘doing’ femininity” (Hatton and Trautner, 256).

Girls are taught to be “passive recipients and their sexuality becomes the result of and reduced to sexualization” (Egan and Hawkes, 291). Instead of constructing their own sexualities and sexual identities, girls are instructed not to ask the questions they have about sex and images of barbies and models that do not reflect their own physical features (Egan and Hawkes, 308).

This discussion of hyper­sexualization paired with the complexities of veiling discourses tell us that there is ultimately no right answer with respect to questions about the intersections

14 between culture, dress and the creation of identity. Women in any context are instructed to dress in certain ways and to perform what their society deems to be the proper aspects of gender.

Neither Western nor Non­Western women’s use of clothing is more empowering than the other, as women find empowerment and identity in both and disempowerment and marginalization in both. This course’s goal is to have students better grasp this concept and understand that they have opportunities in the future as spokespeople in the fashion industry to educate their peers and their consumers.

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