�Because they are me�: Dress and the making of gender

dc.contributor.authorShefer, Tamara
dc.contributor.authorRatele, Kopano
dc.contributor.authorClowes, Lindsay
dc.date.accessioned29/05/2018 14:29
dc.date.available29/05/2018 14:29
dc.date.issued2018
dc.description.abstractYoung people in contemporary South Africa inhabit a multiplicity of diverse, often contradictory, economic and socio-cultural contexts. These contexts offer a range of possibilities and opportunities for the affirmation of certain identities and positionalities alongside the disavowal of others. Dress � clothes, accessories and body styling � is one of the key components through which, within specific social conditions, people perform these identities. In making statements about themselves in terms of these multiple and intersecting group (or social) historical identities, the meanings soaked into people�s dress simultaneously speak to the present and their aspirations for the future. This article reports on a study that explored how a group of third year students at a South African university use dress to negotiate the multiple and intersecting identities available to them in a context characterised by neoliberal democracy and market ideologies that continue to be mediated by the racialised legacies of apartheid. The study employed a qualitative feminist discourse analysis to consider 53 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted by third year students with other students on campus as part of an ongoing project exploring gender productions and performance. The discussion focuses on student understandings of ways in which contemporary clothes and dress signal gender. The research suggests that while there are moments in which clothes are acknowledged as expressions that can reinforce or challenge inequalities structured around gender, participants are also strongly invested in neoliberal consumerist understandings of clothes as accessories to an individualised self in ways that reinforce neoliberal market ideologies and reinstate hegemonic performances of gender.en_US
dc.identifier.citationShefer, T. et al. (2018). �Because they are me�: Dress and the making of gender. South African Review of Sociology, 48(4): 63-81en_US
dc.identifier.issn2072-1978
dc.identifier.urihttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2018.1438918
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/3745
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.privacy.showsubmitterFALSE
dc.publisherTaylor & Francisen_US
dc.rightsThis is the author-version of the article published online 07 May 2018 and is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2018.1438918
dc.status.ispeerreviewedTRUE
dc.subjectGenderen_US
dc.subjectDressen_US
dc.subjectIndividualismen_US
dc.subjectConsumerismen_US
dc.subjectYoung peopleen_US
dc.title�Because they are me�: Dress and the making of genderen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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