Dress and the body Sample Clauses

Dress and the body. In acknowledging the role that others have in dress, but in rejecting the assumption that it is done exclusively for others, the important relationship between dress and the body comes to the forefront. The growing interest in the body within cultural studies (Xxxxxx, 2012) has been a welcome, if complex, direction for religious studies (Xxxxxxx, 2006), unsurprising in light of Xxxxxxx’x (2000) argument that how the body is presented and given significance is profoundly religious in nature. Part of the benefit of studying dress is that, even in a seemingly disembodied online space, it reminds a researcher of the importance of the body to both gender and lived religion. In the primary sources, the relationship between the gender, the body, religion and dress is an intimate one, not only in proximity but also in mutual influence. To use Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxx’x (2007) description, dress is the ‘social skin’, both part and not-part of the body, with which we articulate our place in society. The relationship between the body and dress is consistently emphasised in contemporary dress studies. For instance, for Entwistle, studying dress without the body is a ‘barren exercise’ (2015), whereas Eicher (2010:3), giving dress primacy, describes the body as an ‘armature, a three- dimensional base for dress.’ I argue that this is especially true in religions where the emphasis is not, as it is in much Protestant Christianity, on faith, but on practice (Asad, 2009). By combining these strands, I consider dress as a lens for how gendered religious identities are enacted – a matter so important to the women whose writing I study that they choose to emphasise modest dress practices even in a potentially disembodied online space. As I began this project by investigating women’s agency over their religious practices as exemplified by religious dress, I first considered women’s religious dress as a technique of the body and then as a means of disciplining the body. In his brief but influential essay on techniques of the body, Xxxxx (2006) differentiates between conscious and unconscious techniques of the body, which I initially drew on as a way of making sense of the ways that religious dress would sometimes be written about in very specifically religious terms, and sometimes discussed in terms of how it looks or feels. While useful, it does not account for the need to write about religious dress online, or how such blogging could be part of the same practice, rather than language b...