Editors
Susan B. Kaiser
University of California, Davis, USA
sbkaiser@ucdavis.edu
Anneke Smelik
Radboud University, the Netherlands
anneke.smelik@ru.nl
Associate Editors
Satarupa Bhattacharya
Exhibition Reviews Editor, Delhi, India
satarupabhattacharya00@gmail.com
Denise N. Green
Cornell University, USA
dng22@cornell.edu
Chamutal Leket
Book Reviews Editor, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
leketc@gmail.com
Michael Mamp
Central Michigan University, USA
mamp1me@cmich.edu
Kelly Reddy-Best
Iowa State University, USA
klrb@iastate.edu
Annamari Vänskä
Exhibition Reviews Editor, Aalto University, Finland
annamari.vanska@aalto.fi
Founding Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
University of Leeds, UK
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
General Call for Papers
The Field
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty employs a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary theories and methods to understand: (a) how and why people appear as they do in everyday life and communicate with others in the process of doing so, (b) the materials and products they use to fashion their appearances and (c) the labour and conditions associated with the creation and distribution of the materials and products used to style, dress and fashion diverse bodies in everyday life. The journal invites critical and creative, disciplinary and interdisciplinary and international perspectives on studies of fashion and/or beauty – locating these within their larger cultural and theoretical contexts, and interrogating their ideological underpinnings. Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty favours contributions that combine theoretical and methodological rigour.
The Journal
The journal invites critical and creative, disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and international perspectives on studies of fashion and/or beauty. Authors are invited to locate these within their larger cultural and theoretical contexts, and interrogate their ideological underpinnings: for example, deconstructing limiting (e.g., binary-gendered, oppositional, racialized assumptive, aged-associative) ways of knowing.
We are especially interested in papers that offer fresh perspectives on age-old questions regarding structure and agency, for example:
- how the body interfaces with aesthetic, cultural, economic, and social politics that become inextricably intertwined with issues of appearance, class, dis/ability, ethnicity, gender, generation/age, race, religion, sexuality, and other subject positions;
- how individuals resist structurally institutionalized constraints and express their own subjectivities despite such constraints;
- how individuals articulate agency through expressions of appearance style, using the materials (e.g., textiles, clothes, accessories, beauty products) at hand;
- how local communities negotiate identities through style in the global economy.
We are open to all innovative research in this field, and are especially interested in papers that offer fresh perspectives that challenge hegemonic and colonial discourses and structures that have historically limited understandings of fashion and beauty. We encourage submissions that foster representation from diverse age, class, cultural, ethnic, gender, geographic and sexual perspectives
Papers should be submitted online at https://www.intellectbooks.com/critical-studies-in-fashion-beauty. Prospective authors are welcome to contact the Editors in advance of submission (sbkaiser@ucdavis.edu and a.smelik@let.ru.nl).
CSFB welcomes book reviews of between 1000–1200 words. Enquiries regarding Book Reviews should be sent to the Book Reviews Editor, Chamutal Leket, at leketc@gmail.com.
Journal contributors will receive a free PDF copy of their final work upon publication. Print copies of the journal may also be purchased by contributors at half price.
Special Issue Call for Papers
Special Issue: ‘Transgender Embodiment in Fashion and Beauty’
Deadline for abstracts: 15 July 2022
Notification of abstracts: 30 July 2022
Deadline for full articles: 6 January 2023
Over the past ten years, there have been several fashion exhibitions that have looked at garments designed and worn to unsettle normative gender codes. The number of research articles on queer styles of dressing focusing on the experiences of designers, vendors, and (more rarely) wearers has increased exponentially; and collaborations between fashion brands and queer artists, activists, and thinkers (as is the well-known case of Gucci and Paul Preciado) have emerged in the public domain. Additionally, more and more trans, genderqueer and nonbinary models are walking the runway of major international shows and becoming ‘the face’ of luxury brands, and fashion media outlets have been prompt to capitalize on gender-inclusive discourse to rebrand themselves as neoliberal bastions of progressive cultural production. Within critical fashion studies, however, there is still an absence of scholarship on the politics of representation and the embodied sartorial experiences of trans folks. The field is also proving slow in engaging and keeping up with the important theorizing on the dressed body produced within trans studies. This special issue seeks to provide a cogent corrective to such critical silence. It, thus, purports to: a) highlight how transgender and gender nonconforming people from multiple contexts have been using the sartorial to intimately reckon with their subjectivity, foster affective bonds and kinship within their communities, and/or develop aestheticpolitical imaginings of a queer future; and b) expose how transness has been narrated in fashion and beauty discourses produced across different decades, geographical sites and media outlets.
Submissions are encouraged that explore trans sartorial embodiment informed by trans and queer theory, including, but not limited to:
• Discursive and visual representation of transness in fashion and beauty media (e.g. fashion periodicals, zines, weeklies, glossies, blogs, newsletters, social media platforms and YouTube channels with a focus on fashion or beauty)
• Participation in the fashion and beauty industries by transgender creatives, whose lives and work have been omitted or sidelined by mainstream fashion history
• The uses and meanings of ‘transgender’, ‘transsexual’, ‘transvestite’, ‘travesti’ and ‘cross-dresser’ in fashion and beauty discourses across temporal, linguistic and transnational boundaries
• Transgender fashion collectives and the political uses of clothing within trans activism
• The sartorial legacies of iconic trans figures in queer history
• Wardrobe stories and personal fashion archives
• Fashioning and costuming in trans artistic performance and filmmaking
• Trans fashion pedagogies: teaching fashion from a trans perspective and/ or teaching fashion in the queer and trans studies classroom
We encourage in particular submissions that look at trans fashion stories from the Global South and contributions that pay attention to the relation of transness to Blackness, Indigeneity and whiteness, as well as to racist, colonialist and heteropatriarchal ideologies in the fashion and beauty systems. We are also open to contributions that incorporate more experimental and artistic forms of writing into the academic essay.
Please submit a 250-word outline of your proposal, followed by a brief (max 150 words) author bio by 15 July 2022 to roberto.filippello@ubc.ca and erique@u.northwestern.edu. If you have questions or ideas you want to share with the editors of the special issue in advance, please do not hesitate to reach out.
