Browsing by Subject "Fashion"
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Item An assessment of fashion awareness of women based on selected demographic factors(Texas Tech University, 1980-05) Huffman, Karen EliseNot availableItem Blind items : anonymity, notoriety, and the making of eighteenth-century celebrity(2012-08) Bourque, Kevin Jordan; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Barchas, Janine; Bertelsen, Lance; Brewer, David; Hedrick, ElizabethBlind Items examines the multimedia production of celebrity through the eighteenth century, especially the way in which the same texts, images, anecdotes and poses were recycled and updated to evoke a series of public notables. In the multimedia explosion accompanying the Enlightenment, cultural productions typically read as static and self-contained – from mezzotint prints, shilling pamphlets and novels to popular songs, fashions, jokes and gestures – were instead constantly repurposed to suit successions of public figures, each passing luminary determined by the present cultural moment. Surveying three arenas in which eighteenth-century celebrity was manufactured – fashion, sex, and sport – my archive demonstrates that even canonical authors and artists of the period built their careers on the passing celebrity of others, and indeed maintained the relevance of their productions by perpetually remaking and updating their celebrity referents. Blind Items contests critical assumptions regarding the singularity of celebrity, instead focusing on interchangeability, commutability and disposability. In so doing, the project troubles ongoing assumptions regarding the rise of the individual, as it explains why modern-day celebrity still retains aspects of the Enlightenment mold that first gave it shape.Item Even in their dresses the females seem to bid us defiance : Boston women and performance 1762-1823(2008-12) Kokai, Jennifer Anne; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-This dissertation constructs a cultural history of women's performances in Boston from 1762-1823, using materialist feminism and ethnohistory. I look at how "woman" was historically understood at that time, and how women used those discourses to their advantage when constructing performances that allowed them to intervene in political culture. I examine a broad range of performance activities from white, black, and Native American women of all classes. Chapter two discusses three of Boston's elite female intellectuals: Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, and Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton. Though each woman's writings have been examined individually, I examine them as a community. With the connections and public recognition they built, they helped found the Federal Street Theatre where they could have a ventrioloquized embodied performance for their ideas on women's rights, abolition, and political parties. Chapter three looks at the construction of three solo performances: Phillis Wheatley performing her poetry in 1772; the 1802 theatre tour of Deborah Sampson Gannett, who fought as a man in the revolution; and the monologues and wax effigy creations of Patience Lovell Wright circa 1772. These women depended on their performances for sustenance, and in Wheatley's case, to secure her freedom from bondage. I look at the way these women created a mythology about themselves and crafted a marketable image, both on and off the stage. In particular, I examine the ways each grappled with a charged discourse surrounding their bodies. In chapter four I look at fashion as performance. I explore homespun dresses as political propaganda, Native American and black women's use of clothing to express cultural pride that white Anglo society had attempted to erase, and the way that women used mourning costumes to perform and create nationalism at the mock funerals held for Washington after he died in 1799. In my conclusion I contrast the 2008 miniseries John Adams with a solo performance of Phillis Wheatley. I briefly trace the trajectory of the history of women during this time. I argue that focusing on performance identifies and legitimizes other sources of evidence and locates examples of women's agency in shaping popular culture.Item Fashion designer competencies desired by apparel manufacturers: as related to academic and vocational fashion design programs(Texas Tech University, 1973-08) Flaxman, Barbara JoanNot availableItem Illegible women : feminine fakes, façades, and counterfeits in nineteenth-century literature and culture(2013-05) Eure, Heather Latiolais; Wettlaufer, AlexandraExamining periodicals and novels from 1847 to 1886, I analyze the feminine fake to argue that individuals were beginning during this period to grapple with the discomforting idea that identity, especially gender, might be a social construct. Previously, scholars have contended that this ideological shift did not occur until the 1890s. I apply the term "feminine fake" to the tools that women use to falsify their identities and to the women who counterfeit their identities. Equally, I consider the fake as a theatrical moment of falsifying one's identity. In my first chapter, I set up my theoretical framework, which draws from Laqueur's writings on the cultural history of sex and gender, Poovey's work on the "uneven development" of gender ideology, and Baudrillard and Eco's respective concepts of the simulacra and the hyperreal. Chapter II examines issues of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and La Mode illustrée to analyze the feminine fake during the period surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. Using Fraser, Green, and Johnston's writing on the periodical alongside Hiner's theories of the ideological work of the accessory, I argue that the women's magazine, particularly via the "rhetoric of the fake" therein, fashion, and the accessory were crucial sites for the construction of gender at the time. Chapter III looks at performance and the feminine fake in Vanity Fair and La Curée. I re-evaluate Voskuil's theories of "acting naturally" to analyze the charades and tableaux vivants within the novels and illustrate how these performances metaphorically function as society's failed efforts to render feminine identities legible. In Chapter IV, I analyze Lady Audley's Secret and L'Eve future, situating Lady Audley and the android as hyperfeminine, or marked by an identificatory excess rendering them more feminine than any real woman. The threat they pose to legible feminine and human identity drives the need to control their unmanageable identities: at the ends of the novels, the women, along with what I characterize as their inhuman fakery, are irreversibly contained.Item Modesty attitudes related to current fashions as expressed by undergraduate university women(Texas Tech University, 1973-05) Jackson, Patricia Ann,Not availableItem Performing 21st-century girlhood : girls, postfeminist discourse, and the Disney star machine(2013-08) Blue, Morgan Genevieve; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-"Performing 21st-Century Girlhood: Girls, Postfeminist Discourse, and the Disney Star Machine," explores the economic and discursive functions of contemporary girlhood within Disney Channel's talent-driven transmedia franchises. Ideological, discursive, and narrative textual analyses of Disney Channel programs and paratexts are augmented by examination of the corporate motives and dominant discourses reproduced by Disney personnel in annual reports and in popular and trade publications referencing Disney's stars and girl-driven franchises. This exploration of girls' visibility as Disney performers, media producers, and public citizens brings several disciplines into conversation with one another, addressing issues in girls' cultural studies, media industries scholarship, celebrity studies, and theories of postfeminism. I take an intersectional feminist and critical cultural studies approach to media texts and meaning-making, with particular attention to power relations and cultural contexts. The political and economic aspects of this research demand that I also work to illuminate the significance of media industry logics within the production and distribution of media for girl audiences. I argue that the Walt Disney Company has a vested interest in reproducing certain postfeminist and subjectifying discourses of girlhood, which have become integral to its success in an ever-expanding web of media and consumer markets. While Disney Channel's girl-driven franchises constitute the case studies, my analysis reaches beyond the clear focus on gender and age to theorize girls' increasing visibility in the context of contemporary consumer culture and issues of postracism, citizenship, subjectification, and agency--issues that require continued interrogation as Disney distributes and expands its franchise properties globally.Item Sociological and cultural reflections upon women's fashion from 1919 to 1929 in the United States.(Texas Tech University, 1975-12) Tindel, Cynthia JeanNot availableItem Tearing up the nun : Charlotte Brontë's gothic self-fashioning(2013-05) Sloan, Casey Lauren; MacKay, Carol HanberyThis report explores the ideological motivations behind Charlotte Brontë's inclusion of and alterations to gothic conventions in Villette (1853). By building on an account of the recent critical conversation concerning the conservative Enlightenment force of the gothic, this report seeks to explain the political significance of a specific, nineteenth-century mutation in the genre: Lucy Snowe as an experiment in the bourgeois paradigm. Lucy Snowe's sophisticated consciousness of genre manifests in her minute attention to dress, but the persistence of her personal gothic history means that Villette enacts political tension between individualistic "self-fashioning" and historical determinism as clashing models for the origin of identity.