Introduction: Fashion, Bodies, Transgression

Abstract

In this Introduction, the authors (Mahawatte and Willson) define the book’s key conceptual framework of “Dangerous Bodies”. The rationale for the edited collection comes from Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s idea of the “performative in the political” (2013), which is the political power of embodied resistance as performed by the disenfranchised. The section will consider this idea in relation to transgressive fashioned bodies that sit “on the edge”, silenced or made invisible by the political and social homeostasis. The authors will also draw attention to the scant handling of race and colonial histories in the context of the fashioned body. Certain bodies, white raced ones for example, are allowed a “space of appearance” (Hannah Arendt) within public discourse and Other bodies are disenfranchised: silenced and made invisible within the polis. To this end, the Introduction posits the contention that it is impossible to significantly or meaningfully discuss the fashioned body without seeing it in a context of global economics, capitalism and the construction of racial categories. This opening will, therefore, offer a synthesis of embodiment and resistance as seen through Orientalist and Critical Race Theories that can be combined with the work of Butler, Athanasiou and Arendt to provide the reader with analytical tools for further analysis.