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Cara Marta Messina, Critical Fandom: Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fan Fiction: Messina, whose background is rhetoric/writing studies, frames the book’s focus as on “fan authors’ choices and actions as they write,” with fandom a potentially but not inevitably a liberatory space. Case studies are The Legend of Korra, Game of Thrones, the Black Panther films, and Our Flag Means Death, examining the specific fandom, tagging practices, and individual authors’ accounts. The authors interviewed are ones who are consciously trying to speak back to canonical (mis)treatment of race, gender, and marginalized characters, to bring in Black critical theory, to write non-Western AUs more reflective of their own experiences, etc.
The last chapter argues that refusing AI is part of fan fiction communities’ liberatory practices. The statement that “AO3’s new terms of service failed to fully address” “[t]he grassroots ‘End OTW Racism’ campaign that called for stronger moderation practices” is … not how I would have put it, but ok. Because Messina is a researcher who had to change data collection practices mid-book because of AO3’s bot-related restrictions, adopted both for server load and loud user consensus around AI training reasons, she characterizes AO3 as “active[ly] refus[ing]” AI. Messina also understands that tagging is much better than an unenforceable ban on AI-generated works. But I would say at this point AO3 is more actively refusing algorithmic recommendation. I liked this: “Fan fiction is not activism, fandoms are not radical spaces, and reading and writing fic will not save the world. But I do believe the communities centered around writing, reading, discourse, and advocacy provide a model for moving toward and imagining better futures.”
Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome: Enjoyable reading about awful topics. “[F]or most of Roman history murder was not a crime. And for all of Roman history, killing in the gladiatorial arena was a literal sport. The symbol of the Roman state was the fasces – a bundle of sticks containing an axe. The sticks represented the power of the state to beat its citizens, and the axe represented its right to kill them.” Southon argues that the modern West has built unprecedented media empires on “mountains of dead and mutilated women,” while Romans seem weird to us because they were “fascinated by murder in a different way.” Murder wasn’t a crime against the state for most of Roman history: “As the power of the state came more and more to rest on just one man, the emperor, the state slowly took control of the power to kill and reduced the power of the family and the individual.”
That doesn’t mean Romans accepted murder, but they didn’t think it was the state’s job to punish or protest it in most cases: that was the victim’s family’s burden. Parricide was the exception: they had “a unique and deep-seated cultural horror of murder within the family.” Fathers could kill children with impunity in celebrated legends, though probably not in fact—she presents the legends as political fables designed to emphasize the power of a ruler as a loving-but-violent father. Even exposed babies were probably mostly picked up (albeit often to be raised as slavery), though some did die from abandonment. What we can know: “infanticide and neonaticide were not considered to be crimes because they were never public acts. They were family acts, and the Roman state had no right to be, or interest in, intervening in people’s private lives where children or death were concerned.”
What about murder of an enslaver? “[E]very single enslaved person living under the same roof as the murderer would be executed” in extremely painful fashion. Slaveholding Romans were as frightened of slave rebellions as rich antebellum whites—a proposal to make enslaved people to wear special clothing, Seneca wrote, was voted down because enslavers “feared that if the people they enslaved could see how many of them there were in the city, they’d feel the strength of their numbers and possibly act on it.” Ordinary Romans might think that executing hundreds of innocent men, women and children was cruel and pointless, but the senators “gave no fucks about the concerns of enslaved people or the masses regarding such trifles as ‘other people’s lives’ or ‘justice’. They cared about the message they’d be sending to the hundreds of people they’d be going home to that night.”
Private firms “offered bespoke punishment of enslaved people and execution services for the busy enslaver who didn’t have the time to do his own killings.” Southon suggests we ponder for a moment what that says about what it was like to live in a slave state.
Then there were the games: animal shows (including animal-on-animal, hunter-on-animal, and even animal tricks), the half-time show of executions (not “the reason anyone rolled up at the arena but they were an entertaining diversion while the professionals were having a break and forty-five percent of the crowd went for a piss”), and gladiator fights. “[A] low-key, provincial four-day festival of games in some small town – absolutely not the top end of games here, very low- to mid-tier – … ended with an entire day of executions. … Of course that got dull.”
Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI: Provocative set of questions about vision in the age of AI. “Cultural producers have developed very good tactics and strategies for making interventions into human-human visual culture in order to challenge inequality, racism, and injustice…. There’s no obvious way to intervene in machine-machine systems using visual strategies developed from human-human culture.” Like Evgeny Morozov, Paglen advocates in favor of inefficiency—deliberately created by humans, both for self-expressive and political purposes. He also draws an analogy between the carefully crafted food products that combine flavors, textures, and sensory properties to create “craveability” and the information environment. “The goal isn’t nutritional value but neurological engagement. … Doritos aren’t food: They’re psyops in the shape of food…. The question is: Are all media becoming like Doritos?”
Disturbingly, he cites research that images that are slightly altered to fool computer vision systems—to get them to classify a gun as an alligator, for example—also slightly affect humans, biasing them in the same direction as image classifiers. Slight means slight, but, “at the scale of the internet, 2 percent is a helluva lot of people.” And AI images also turn us all into ufologists for every depicted event. “The world of UFO research is infamous for infighting, backstabbing, narcissism, disinformation, charlatanism, and tribalism. … And for a paradoxical relationship to a state that is simultaneously loathed for concealing proof of extraterrestrial visitation, while looking toward the Voice of the state as the only source from which the Truth (‘disclosure’) may come.” So that seems like it will be us unless we manage a reset (or a Butlerian jihad).
Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History: Somewhat sadly depending on one’s goals, not limited to “laws” but also covering social norms about who could wear what. Relies a lot on female historians’ accounts of specific fashions/periods; full of interesting tidbits, but at its best analyzing modern disputes over rules for fashion.
Fashion as a subject of regulation emerged only once there were enough resources and technologies around to let people express themselves through fashion. Ford suggests that “the fawning parvenu was ever-present, but the greater threat to the old social orders was a newly confident bourgeois class that insisted not on joining or aping the nobility but on its own distinctive place in society.” Sumptuary laws reserved certain forms of dress for certain people, but not always the most honored: e.g., “fourteenth-century Siena assigned to prostitutes the silks and platform shoes its sumptuary laws otherwise banned.” Similarly, in 1416, a Jewish woman in Ferrara (Italy) was arrested and fined ten ducats for appearing in public without her earrings, required for Jewish women. “[I]n an era when superfluous adornment was condemned as a sign of sin, Jews were required by law to wear conspicuous jewelry.” And “in the fifteenth century, Roman Jewish women were required to wear a red overskirt that prostitutes also wore; Jewish women in other parts of Italy had to wear a yellow veil—a sign of the prostitute in Italian cities from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.” But earrings proved popular enough with powerful people that they changed the rules. For example, “in 1521 Bologna’s Jewish women were limited by law to three finger rings and three gold pins—stripped, by law, of the earrings” previously required.
In 1746, the British Parliament prohibited “the Highland Dress,” in the name of assimilation. Unsurprisingly from today’s perspective, the backlash led to widespread Scottish identification with it instead—and here law has an interesting function: “Moreover, by enumerating the precise elements of Highland dress, the Tartan Act may have helped to create a more easily identified ethnic style than had existed before.” After it was repealed, the peasantry mainly stuck with trousers, but the Scottish elite “who had never worn the kilt nor, in all likelihood, a family tartan before … saw a reason to adopt them after the restrictive dress code was repealed.”
As codes of masculinity changed, men showed off opulence “through their wives, mistresses, and daughters, while maintaining enough distance from it to avoid any impression of vanity,” while certain “new, modern sartorial signs” were reserved for men, separating masculine and feminine fashions and insisting that the former weren’t fashion at all. I loved the point that, “while a gown exhibits its adornment on the outside of a draped garment, most of the intricate work in a suit is hidden in the seamwork, canvassing, and padding that give the ensemble its seemingly natural shape.”
Corsets can be classified as part of social or even scientific intervention on a disfavored body: “Corset advocates believed its structure provided necessary support for what they considered to be weak feminine bodies and deficient feminine morality alike…. Many insisted that the corset provided a necessary physical constraint on loose sexual appetites, but they nevertheless condemned tight lacing as evidence of female vanity.”
Modern fashion for men, Ford says, “has progressed in a straight and unbroken line toward ever more streamlined, formally refined, and unadorned styles—a modernizing coherence, punctuated by a few anachronistic details, such as vestigial lapels and pockets. By contrast, … women’s fashion has been marked by ambivalence: liberation in the shadow of the lofty pedestal of pure womanhood; refinement offset by superfluous opulent display; austere practicality embellished with dramatic flourishes.” This is fun, but it also “ensures that women’s fashion sends mixed messages, open to misinterpretation—hence the familiar misogynistic slurs that modern women are coquettish teases or conniving minxes.”
Turning to America specifically, South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740 announced that “many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves” and therefore prohibited enslavers from allowing enslaved people to wear “finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons or Scottish plaids.” Ford points out that advertised descriptions of enslaved people who’d run away also regularly included a hard-now-to-see “light mocking touch” in describing their outfits: the “odd blendings… so different from the coordinated apparel of gentility that fugitives must often have seemed to be… mocking proper attire.”
White violence based on any violation of supremacist logics could be severe. In 1919 Georgia, a Black former soldier killed by a mob for wearing his uniform for “too long” after the end of the war. Vigilantes in 1940s Los Angeles beat up pachucos for wearing zoot suits. Understandably, many civil rights activists—especially in the 1950s and 60s—dressed formally to indicate their seriousness and worthiness. That changed with a new generation who wanted to organize, among other people, “rural laborers who lacked the signs of bourgeois respectability” and claimed that equality required respecting those who weren’t outfitted in “proper” fashion, especially when, for example, “the hairstyles that counted as proper were designed for white women. If “the ideal of respectability itself was designed for white people,” then it was a false goal. But one barrier these new activists faced was that “[m]any rural and small-town residents of every race felt that ‘anybody wearing old work clothes all the time couldn’t be about very much.’” Ragged jeans might not be so liberating if you didn’t have a choice about whether to wear them.
Obviously, race and clothing discourse continued, including legal sanctions in some cities against sagging pants (that is, the fashion of young Black men). I am precisely the kind of bourgeois who would feel extremely awkward and uncomfortable wearing sagging pants and would consider it inappropriate for settings like the classroom. Ford notes that his students at Stanford mostly grew up in “professional” households, but the few who don’t— “those from ‘underprivileged backgrounds’ and ‘underrepresented groups’ who we congratulate ourselves for recruiting and admitting” are left alone to figure out that kind of tacit knowledge. “By contrast, Morehouse, like most historically Black colleges, has made upward social mobility a central part of its institutional mission; it deliberately focuses on cultivation and socialization—things that many other schools take for granted.” He’s not completely convinced that the Morehouse dress code is good, especially its gender identity aspects, but he believes “it is not simply bigoted and elitist. It seems an honest, if imperfect, effort to spare its students, who will suffer the unavoidable disadvantages of racism, the avoidable disadvantages that come with inappropriate attire and grooming.”
Respectability politics has its reasons, and Ford points out that “Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first used the idea of respectability politics in her 1994 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, to describe a fierce, uncompromising, and dignified political activism that compelled the respect of those who witnessed it.” Likewise, dress codes—when everyone has the ability to satisfy them—diminish the ability to judge people’s taste, judgment, and character based on their clothing choices. (This is also why prison uniforms dehumanize.)
“The dress codes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whether written or unwritten, represent a clash between the familiar effort to use attire to mark status, sex, and power and the increasingly widespread and jealously guarded prerogative to express individual personality.” Dress codes for female students also “insist that certain outfits are provocative”; Ford reminds us that the foot was the “heart of all male fixations” in the nineteenth century.
Ford also discusses Elena Kagan’s unappealing choices as Solicitor General; the SG traditionally wears a morning suit to argue. But “the morning suit became professional attire because it was the formal masculine attire of its era. … An indispensable part of the symbolism of masculine attire lies in the contrast with its opposite—feminine attire—which came to symbolize much of what the Masculine Renunciation renounced: ornamentation, display, fantasy, and vanity surrounding the physical body. The morning suit itself is unmistakably masculine and as a consequence, any woman who adopts it will unavoidably come off as if dressed in provocative drag, like Marlene Dietrich in the film Morocco. The symbolism of the morning suit is unmistakably masculine by design. There can be no feminine equivalent.”
This also has implications for bans on “cross-dressing,” because women’s clothing “is simply any clothing that women typically wear.” Typical mid-20th-century bans on cross-dressing in American cities “didn’t enforce any specific type of gendered attire at all. Instead, they enforced a regime of gendered symbolism. Because the definition of gendered attire is both unclear and in flux, these cross-dressing bans were unavoidably vague.”
But Ford reminds us that other gendered regimes also seemed “natural” to their enforcers. Gendered clothing can also signal reproductive role: in other periods (and even now in some communities), “prepubescent boys were dressed in gowns similar to those worn by girls, … unmarried women wore different clothing than married women, and … older women dressed differently than women of childbearing age.” Today, Europeans are at the forefront of banning headscarves and burkas; some European cities also ban full-body bathing suits used by Muslim women: it’s wrong to show too much skin and too little.
Ford defends “the fashionable Muslim woman, when she wears her hijab along with chic clothing or with makeup” because she challenges “the idea that the hijab is designed to obscure a female body that is a source of temptation.” “[B]y complicating the stereotypical meaning of the hijab as an instrument of compulsory modesty, she insists on the primacy of its other meanings: the hijab becomes a symbol of cultural pride, a sign of post-colonial resistance or of opposition to Islamophobia” while also using it to reveal her distinctive personality. This is also a challenge to religious orthodoxy: “Once the hijab becomes fashion, no hijab can ever again be an inscrutable partition; each now inevitably reveals something of its wearer, whether the wearer wants it to be revealed or not. Each becomes a fashion statement.”
What about the dress codes of wealthy whites? Ford describes “tattered oxford cloth button-down collar shirts and ‘Nantucket red’ chinos for men; nondescript flat shoes and unimaginative pearl necklaces for women” as “the choices of the preppy precisely because they are both expensive and either bland or garish: a combination that guarantees that no one outside the tribe will wear them.”
Tech bros are tempted by another code: spend no energy on frivolous fashion. But, Ford points out, that works out differently for women. “Purported indifference to appearance becomes a reason to judge based on appearance; a new dress code displaces an older one.” And it’s also unstable given the meaning of the men’s suit in Western culture—the book’s publication predated JD Vance’s attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit in the Oval Office, but he notes that Mark Zuckerberg, who like Steve Jobs claimed to ignore fashion in order to focus on more important things, wore a suit and not a hoodie to testify before Congress, because the suit “communicates seriousness of purpose. It conveys a familiarity with and respect for conventions. Because it requires at least a modicum of effort and because its tailoring gives the impression of improved stature and posture, it suggests a physical and mental discipline. Although a well-made suit can be as comfortable as jeans and a T-shirt, to say nothing of a Patagonia fleece, its true comfort comes from its ability to project competence. When Mark Zuckerberg was on his own turf he could afford to assert his status through the subtle signals of reverse snobbery. But when he was out of his element and under attack, he needed sartorial armor. … When he had to care what other people thought—and needed them to know he cared—he put on a suit.”
Meanwhile, the “Midtown Uniform” of fleece over chinos “is more immutably masculine than the suit, which women have adapted to their needs over the decades.” Ford rightly quotes Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute: “We’ve just achieved the parity of the pantsuit, and suddenly we’re told the standard pantsuit is no longer workforce attire. Women will need to find another way to achieve parity in attire.…” And a Black man in hoodie and jeans will also find it very difficult to be treated like Mark Zuckerberg in same.
Ford suggests that fashion will always engage in “cultural appropriation,” which he deems “another example of the centuries-old anxiety about the corrupting influence of fashion on symbols of group identity and social status. Fashion is ready to sacrifice any convention in the tireless quest for novelty; it is indifferent to political struggles and claims of moral prerogative. No doubt: fashion exploits and appropriates, but it doesn’t discriminate.” And he contends that complaints about cultural appropriate are “unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchy. Groups who are more secure in their social status tend to be more forgiving when outsiders borrow their fashions.”
Ford ultimately approves of some dress codes precisely because clothing matters to meaning. A dress code can shape what a group or activity is and what it means to participants: this is a particular space, and we are in agreement about its importance. Plus, “informal standards of attire can be more demanding and more treacherous than any written dress code: failure to respect conventions of good taste marks one as an ignorant and tasteless boor, but too-slavish adherence to the rules can be a sign of insecurity, and hence poor breeding. While an explicit dress code demands only simple adherence, its absence leaves one adrift, forced to navigate ineffable standards of taste, elegance, and style—many vague and unwritten or overdetermined and contested.” He wryly concludes: “since 1960—precisely when large parts of American society began to abandon explicit common norms of dress—the volume of discarded clothing has increased by 750 percent, a reflection, perhaps, of millions of frantic and ultimately failed searches for an appropriate outfit in a world free of rules but full of judgment.”
The last chapter argues that refusing AI is part of fan fiction communities’ liberatory practices. The statement that “AO3’s new terms of service failed to fully address” “[t]he grassroots ‘End OTW Racism’ campaign that called for stronger moderation practices” is … not how I would have put it, but ok. Because Messina is a researcher who had to change data collection practices mid-book because of AO3’s bot-related restrictions, adopted both for server load and loud user consensus around AI training reasons, she characterizes AO3 as “active[ly] refus[ing]” AI. Messina also understands that tagging is much better than an unenforceable ban on AI-generated works. But I would say at this point AO3 is more actively refusing algorithmic recommendation. I liked this: “Fan fiction is not activism, fandoms are not radical spaces, and reading and writing fic will not save the world. But I do believe the communities centered around writing, reading, discourse, and advocacy provide a model for moving toward and imagining better futures.”
Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome: Enjoyable reading about awful topics. “[F]or most of Roman history murder was not a crime. And for all of Roman history, killing in the gladiatorial arena was a literal sport. The symbol of the Roman state was the fasces – a bundle of sticks containing an axe. The sticks represented the power of the state to beat its citizens, and the axe represented its right to kill them.” Southon argues that the modern West has built unprecedented media empires on “mountains of dead and mutilated women,” while Romans seem weird to us because they were “fascinated by murder in a different way.” Murder wasn’t a crime against the state for most of Roman history: “As the power of the state came more and more to rest on just one man, the emperor, the state slowly took control of the power to kill and reduced the power of the family and the individual.”
That doesn’t mean Romans accepted murder, but they didn’t think it was the state’s job to punish or protest it in most cases: that was the victim’s family’s burden. Parricide was the exception: they had “a unique and deep-seated cultural horror of murder within the family.” Fathers could kill children with impunity in celebrated legends, though probably not in fact—she presents the legends as political fables designed to emphasize the power of a ruler as a loving-but-violent father. Even exposed babies were probably mostly picked up (albeit often to be raised as slavery), though some did die from abandonment. What we can know: “infanticide and neonaticide were not considered to be crimes because they were never public acts. They were family acts, and the Roman state had no right to be, or interest in, intervening in people’s private lives where children or death were concerned.”
What about murder of an enslaver? “[E]very single enslaved person living under the same roof as the murderer would be executed” in extremely painful fashion. Slaveholding Romans were as frightened of slave rebellions as rich antebellum whites—a proposal to make enslaved people to wear special clothing, Seneca wrote, was voted down because enslavers “feared that if the people they enslaved could see how many of them there were in the city, they’d feel the strength of their numbers and possibly act on it.” Ordinary Romans might think that executing hundreds of innocent men, women and children was cruel and pointless, but the senators “gave no fucks about the concerns of enslaved people or the masses regarding such trifles as ‘other people’s lives’ or ‘justice’. They cared about the message they’d be sending to the hundreds of people they’d be going home to that night.”
Private firms “offered bespoke punishment of enslaved people and execution services for the busy enslaver who didn’t have the time to do his own killings.” Southon suggests we ponder for a moment what that says about what it was like to live in a slave state.
Then there were the games: animal shows (including animal-on-animal, hunter-on-animal, and even animal tricks), the half-time show of executions (not “the reason anyone rolled up at the arena but they were an entertaining diversion while the professionals were having a break and forty-five percent of the crowd went for a piss”), and gladiator fights. “[A] low-key, provincial four-day festival of games in some small town – absolutely not the top end of games here, very low- to mid-tier – … ended with an entire day of executions. … Of course that got dull.”
Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI: Provocative set of questions about vision in the age of AI. “Cultural producers have developed very good tactics and strategies for making interventions into human-human visual culture in order to challenge inequality, racism, and injustice…. There’s no obvious way to intervene in machine-machine systems using visual strategies developed from human-human culture.” Like Evgeny Morozov, Paglen advocates in favor of inefficiency—deliberately created by humans, both for self-expressive and political purposes. He also draws an analogy between the carefully crafted food products that combine flavors, textures, and sensory properties to create “craveability” and the information environment. “The goal isn’t nutritional value but neurological engagement. … Doritos aren’t food: They’re psyops in the shape of food…. The question is: Are all media becoming like Doritos?”
Disturbingly, he cites research that images that are slightly altered to fool computer vision systems—to get them to classify a gun as an alligator, for example—also slightly affect humans, biasing them in the same direction as image classifiers. Slight means slight, but, “at the scale of the internet, 2 percent is a helluva lot of people.” And AI images also turn us all into ufologists for every depicted event. “The world of UFO research is infamous for infighting, backstabbing, narcissism, disinformation, charlatanism, and tribalism. … And for a paradoxical relationship to a state that is simultaneously loathed for concealing proof of extraterrestrial visitation, while looking toward the Voice of the state as the only source from which the Truth (‘disclosure’) may come.” So that seems like it will be us unless we manage a reset (or a Butlerian jihad).
Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History: Somewhat sadly depending on one’s goals, not limited to “laws” but also covering social norms about who could wear what. Relies a lot on female historians’ accounts of specific fashions/periods; full of interesting tidbits, but at its best analyzing modern disputes over rules for fashion.
Fashion as a subject of regulation emerged only once there were enough resources and technologies around to let people express themselves through fashion. Ford suggests that “the fawning parvenu was ever-present, but the greater threat to the old social orders was a newly confident bourgeois class that insisted not on joining or aping the nobility but on its own distinctive place in society.” Sumptuary laws reserved certain forms of dress for certain people, but not always the most honored: e.g., “fourteenth-century Siena assigned to prostitutes the silks and platform shoes its sumptuary laws otherwise banned.” Similarly, in 1416, a Jewish woman in Ferrara (Italy) was arrested and fined ten ducats for appearing in public without her earrings, required for Jewish women. “[I]n an era when superfluous adornment was condemned as a sign of sin, Jews were required by law to wear conspicuous jewelry.” And “in the fifteenth century, Roman Jewish women were required to wear a red overskirt that prostitutes also wore; Jewish women in other parts of Italy had to wear a yellow veil—a sign of the prostitute in Italian cities from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.” But earrings proved popular enough with powerful people that they changed the rules. For example, “in 1521 Bologna’s Jewish women were limited by law to three finger rings and three gold pins—stripped, by law, of the earrings” previously required.
In 1746, the British Parliament prohibited “the Highland Dress,” in the name of assimilation. Unsurprisingly from today’s perspective, the backlash led to widespread Scottish identification with it instead—and here law has an interesting function: “Moreover, by enumerating the precise elements of Highland dress, the Tartan Act may have helped to create a more easily identified ethnic style than had existed before.” After it was repealed, the peasantry mainly stuck with trousers, but the Scottish elite “who had never worn the kilt nor, in all likelihood, a family tartan before … saw a reason to adopt them after the restrictive dress code was repealed.”
As codes of masculinity changed, men showed off opulence “through their wives, mistresses, and daughters, while maintaining enough distance from it to avoid any impression of vanity,” while certain “new, modern sartorial signs” were reserved for men, separating masculine and feminine fashions and insisting that the former weren’t fashion at all. I loved the point that, “while a gown exhibits its adornment on the outside of a draped garment, most of the intricate work in a suit is hidden in the seamwork, canvassing, and padding that give the ensemble its seemingly natural shape.”
Corsets can be classified as part of social or even scientific intervention on a disfavored body: “Corset advocates believed its structure provided necessary support for what they considered to be weak feminine bodies and deficient feminine morality alike…. Many insisted that the corset provided a necessary physical constraint on loose sexual appetites, but they nevertheless condemned tight lacing as evidence of female vanity.”
Modern fashion for men, Ford says, “has progressed in a straight and unbroken line toward ever more streamlined, formally refined, and unadorned styles—a modernizing coherence, punctuated by a few anachronistic details, such as vestigial lapels and pockets. By contrast, … women’s fashion has been marked by ambivalence: liberation in the shadow of the lofty pedestal of pure womanhood; refinement offset by superfluous opulent display; austere practicality embellished with dramatic flourishes.” This is fun, but it also “ensures that women’s fashion sends mixed messages, open to misinterpretation—hence the familiar misogynistic slurs that modern women are coquettish teases or conniving minxes.”
Turning to America specifically, South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740 announced that “many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves” and therefore prohibited enslavers from allowing enslaved people to wear “finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons or Scottish plaids.” Ford points out that advertised descriptions of enslaved people who’d run away also regularly included a hard-now-to-see “light mocking touch” in describing their outfits: the “odd blendings… so different from the coordinated apparel of gentility that fugitives must often have seemed to be… mocking proper attire.”
White violence based on any violation of supremacist logics could be severe. In 1919 Georgia, a Black former soldier killed by a mob for wearing his uniform for “too long” after the end of the war. Vigilantes in 1940s Los Angeles beat up pachucos for wearing zoot suits. Understandably, many civil rights activists—especially in the 1950s and 60s—dressed formally to indicate their seriousness and worthiness. That changed with a new generation who wanted to organize, among other people, “rural laborers who lacked the signs of bourgeois respectability” and claimed that equality required respecting those who weren’t outfitted in “proper” fashion, especially when, for example, “the hairstyles that counted as proper were designed for white women. If “the ideal of respectability itself was designed for white people,” then it was a false goal. But one barrier these new activists faced was that “[m]any rural and small-town residents of every race felt that ‘anybody wearing old work clothes all the time couldn’t be about very much.’” Ragged jeans might not be so liberating if you didn’t have a choice about whether to wear them.
Obviously, race and clothing discourse continued, including legal sanctions in some cities against sagging pants (that is, the fashion of young Black men). I am precisely the kind of bourgeois who would feel extremely awkward and uncomfortable wearing sagging pants and would consider it inappropriate for settings like the classroom. Ford notes that his students at Stanford mostly grew up in “professional” households, but the few who don’t— “those from ‘underprivileged backgrounds’ and ‘underrepresented groups’ who we congratulate ourselves for recruiting and admitting” are left alone to figure out that kind of tacit knowledge. “By contrast, Morehouse, like most historically Black colleges, has made upward social mobility a central part of its institutional mission; it deliberately focuses on cultivation and socialization—things that many other schools take for granted.” He’s not completely convinced that the Morehouse dress code is good, especially its gender identity aspects, but he believes “it is not simply bigoted and elitist. It seems an honest, if imperfect, effort to spare its students, who will suffer the unavoidable disadvantages of racism, the avoidable disadvantages that come with inappropriate attire and grooming.”
Respectability politics has its reasons, and Ford points out that “Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first used the idea of respectability politics in her 1994 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, to describe a fierce, uncompromising, and dignified political activism that compelled the respect of those who witnessed it.” Likewise, dress codes—when everyone has the ability to satisfy them—diminish the ability to judge people’s taste, judgment, and character based on their clothing choices. (This is also why prison uniforms dehumanize.)
“The dress codes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whether written or unwritten, represent a clash between the familiar effort to use attire to mark status, sex, and power and the increasingly widespread and jealously guarded prerogative to express individual personality.” Dress codes for female students also “insist that certain outfits are provocative”; Ford reminds us that the foot was the “heart of all male fixations” in the nineteenth century.
Ford also discusses Elena Kagan’s unappealing choices as Solicitor General; the SG traditionally wears a morning suit to argue. But “the morning suit became professional attire because it was the formal masculine attire of its era. … An indispensable part of the symbolism of masculine attire lies in the contrast with its opposite—feminine attire—which came to symbolize much of what the Masculine Renunciation renounced: ornamentation, display, fantasy, and vanity surrounding the physical body. The morning suit itself is unmistakably masculine and as a consequence, any woman who adopts it will unavoidably come off as if dressed in provocative drag, like Marlene Dietrich in the film Morocco. The symbolism of the morning suit is unmistakably masculine by design. There can be no feminine equivalent.”
This also has implications for bans on “cross-dressing,” because women’s clothing “is simply any clothing that women typically wear.” Typical mid-20th-century bans on cross-dressing in American cities “didn’t enforce any specific type of gendered attire at all. Instead, they enforced a regime of gendered symbolism. Because the definition of gendered attire is both unclear and in flux, these cross-dressing bans were unavoidably vague.”
But Ford reminds us that other gendered regimes also seemed “natural” to their enforcers. Gendered clothing can also signal reproductive role: in other periods (and even now in some communities), “prepubescent boys were dressed in gowns similar to those worn by girls, … unmarried women wore different clothing than married women, and … older women dressed differently than women of childbearing age.” Today, Europeans are at the forefront of banning headscarves and burkas; some European cities also ban full-body bathing suits used by Muslim women: it’s wrong to show too much skin and too little.
Ford defends “the fashionable Muslim woman, when she wears her hijab along with chic clothing or with makeup” because she challenges “the idea that the hijab is designed to obscure a female body that is a source of temptation.” “[B]y complicating the stereotypical meaning of the hijab as an instrument of compulsory modesty, she insists on the primacy of its other meanings: the hijab becomes a symbol of cultural pride, a sign of post-colonial resistance or of opposition to Islamophobia” while also using it to reveal her distinctive personality. This is also a challenge to religious orthodoxy: “Once the hijab becomes fashion, no hijab can ever again be an inscrutable partition; each now inevitably reveals something of its wearer, whether the wearer wants it to be revealed or not. Each becomes a fashion statement.”
What about the dress codes of wealthy whites? Ford describes “tattered oxford cloth button-down collar shirts and ‘Nantucket red’ chinos for men; nondescript flat shoes and unimaginative pearl necklaces for women” as “the choices of the preppy precisely because they are both expensive and either bland or garish: a combination that guarantees that no one outside the tribe will wear them.”
Tech bros are tempted by another code: spend no energy on frivolous fashion. But, Ford points out, that works out differently for women. “Purported indifference to appearance becomes a reason to judge based on appearance; a new dress code displaces an older one.” And it’s also unstable given the meaning of the men’s suit in Western culture—the book’s publication predated JD Vance’s attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit in the Oval Office, but he notes that Mark Zuckerberg, who like Steve Jobs claimed to ignore fashion in order to focus on more important things, wore a suit and not a hoodie to testify before Congress, because the suit “communicates seriousness of purpose. It conveys a familiarity with and respect for conventions. Because it requires at least a modicum of effort and because its tailoring gives the impression of improved stature and posture, it suggests a physical and mental discipline. Although a well-made suit can be as comfortable as jeans and a T-shirt, to say nothing of a Patagonia fleece, its true comfort comes from its ability to project competence. When Mark Zuckerberg was on his own turf he could afford to assert his status through the subtle signals of reverse snobbery. But when he was out of his element and under attack, he needed sartorial armor. … When he had to care what other people thought—and needed them to know he cared—he put on a suit.”
Meanwhile, the “Midtown Uniform” of fleece over chinos “is more immutably masculine than the suit, which women have adapted to their needs over the decades.” Ford rightly quotes Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute: “We’ve just achieved the parity of the pantsuit, and suddenly we’re told the standard pantsuit is no longer workforce attire. Women will need to find another way to achieve parity in attire.…” And a Black man in hoodie and jeans will also find it very difficult to be treated like Mark Zuckerberg in same.
Ford suggests that fashion will always engage in “cultural appropriation,” which he deems “another example of the centuries-old anxiety about the corrupting influence of fashion on symbols of group identity and social status. Fashion is ready to sacrifice any convention in the tireless quest for novelty; it is indifferent to political struggles and claims of moral prerogative. No doubt: fashion exploits and appropriates, but it doesn’t discriminate.” And he contends that complaints about cultural appropriate are “unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchy. Groups who are more secure in their social status tend to be more forgiving when outsiders borrow their fashions.”
Ford ultimately approves of some dress codes precisely because clothing matters to meaning. A dress code can shape what a group or activity is and what it means to participants: this is a particular space, and we are in agreement about its importance. Plus, “informal standards of attire can be more demanding and more treacherous than any written dress code: failure to respect conventions of good taste marks one as an ignorant and tasteless boor, but too-slavish adherence to the rules can be a sign of insecurity, and hence poor breeding. While an explicit dress code demands only simple adherence, its absence leaves one adrift, forced to navigate ineffable standards of taste, elegance, and style—many vague and unwritten or overdetermined and contested.” He wryly concludes: “since 1960—precisely when large parts of American society began to abandon explicit common norms of dress—the volume of discarded clothing has increased by 750 percent, a reflection, perhaps, of millions of frantic and ultimately failed searches for an appropriate outfit in a world free of rules but full of judgment.”
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I've been spending a lot of time again with the early days of the OTW and what we did right/didn't do right with the org and with AO3, and I mostly wish fans but also academics) would be just a bit more complex in their approaches.
Love the Ford discussion!
(Also I was catching up and really enjoyed your Stanfill review!)
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