The Feeling of Being Dressed: Affect Studies and the Clothed Body

• In Event: 577 - Section on Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Embodiment, Identity, and Representation

Abstract

In sociological and cultural studies the relationship we have with our clothes has been focussed on the ways in which we use clothing to represent ourselves to and in the world. More recently, the emphasis has shifted to the embodied aspect of clothing. However, I argue that in all these analyses one important aspect is still missing: the feelings we experience about and in our clothes when we are dressed; what do our clothes allow us to be or become?
In the paper I critically review some of the sociological contributions to the study of fashion and identity and later propose that a change of paradigm is needed if we want to incorporate in our analyses what I here call the “feeling of being dressed”.
This change can be performed by transgressing the boundaries of semiotic, structural and sociological explanations and by abandoning the mind-body dualism, which shapes the description of our relationship with clothes as mainly intellectual and our choices of garments as the result of a dialogue within our minds. Instead I turn to an emerging body of ideas and practices, variably labelled as “non-representational theory” or “affect studies”, that seems to offer more useful tools for the investigation of the body-clothes assemblage: in particular the notion of body it puts forward and the approach to practices (in this case dressing practices) as creations of fluxes, ways of becoming.

Author

• Lucia Ruggerone, Robert Gordon University