Fashion as Cultural Translation
Content
Social Semiotics Vol. 20, No. 4, September 2010, 343Á355
RESEARCH ARTICLE Fashion as cultural translation: knowledge, constrictions and transgressions on/of the female body
Patrizia Calefato*$
Sociolinguistica e Linguistica Informatica, Facolta di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Universita ` ` degli Studi di Bari ‘‘Aldo Moro’’, Italy (Received March 2010) In the last chapter of her book Primitive passions, Rey Chow focuses on cinema as a form of ethnography where cultural translation occurs in the postcolonial world. Chow develops Mulvey’s perspective on visuality and gender in classical Hollywood film. In Mulvey’s opinion, the act of looking at generates a male position where women are in the condition of being looked at. Similarly, in Chow’s view, to look at corresponds to the western gaze, while non-western cultures are in the position of being looked at. This view lets Chow argue about the relation between the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘translation’’ among cultures: any such supposed ‘‘original’’ is but a construction founded on a sort of ‘‘to-belooked-at-ness’’ that acts as an optical unconscious. I use Chow’s model in relation to fashion, considered as the sociosemiotic performance of the clothed body. The clothed body is both a subject and an object of visuality: it looks at other bodies in the movement of imitation, and is looked at as a model of distinction. In this sense, clothing represents a sort of translation among bodies and among cultures. Keywords: visuality; fashion; body; women; cultural translation; orientalism; sari; veil
1. Visuality and cultural translation In her book Primitive passions, Rey Chow considers cinema as a form of ethnography within which translation between cultures in the postcolonial world is produced (Chow 1995a, 175Á202). Her starting point is one of the landmark writings on visual and feminist studies, Laura Mulvey’s ‘‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’’ (1975). According to Mulvey, ‘‘to look at’’ and ‘‘to be looked at’’ are two conditions with uneven hierarchical positions: the former being proper to men, the latter to women. Moving onto the study of cultures, Chow extends this model of vision to the way western cultures relate with non-western ones: the western world looks at, and the ‘‘non-western’’ world is looked at. However, this statement is not enough. According to Chow, we should also mention that ‘‘the state of being looked at not only is built into the way non-Western cultures are viewed by Western ones; more significantly it is part of the active manner in which such cultures represent Á ethnographize Á themselves’’ (Chow 1995a, 180).
*Email: [email protected] $Translated by Leonardo Blonda (Roehampton University, UK).
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2010.494388 http://www.informaworld.com
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This hypothesis allows Chow to tackle the problem of the relationship between the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘translation’’ between cultures. She states that the assumed ‘‘original’’ of cultures is a construction based on the condition of ‘‘to-be-looked-atness’’, which acts like an ‘‘optical unconscious’’ (Chow 1995a, 180). The author borrows this last expression from Walter Benjamin, who uses it in relation to photography and cinema (Benjamin 1931, 1936) Á technologies that are able to substitute ‘‘a space informed by human consciousness’’ with ‘‘a space informed by the unconscious’’. This space arises from the technological devices that can slow down, magnify, go up and down within the shot, shrink, enlarge and contract the process of looking at (Benjamin 1931, 510). Talking about photography, Benjamin claims:
photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things Á meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable. (Benjamin 1931, 512)
Thus vision builds up as a ‘‘projection’’, in the twofold sense that this word borrows from psychoanalysis Á as a transfer to the outside of ‘‘impulses, feelings and frames of mind that the subject rejects or does not recognise as his, ascribing them to other people or objects’’ (De Mauro 1999) Á and from technology, when intended as something that is projected on the screen like a film. Chow dedicated the essay ‘‘The fascist longings in our midst’’ (Chow 1995b) to this twofold but complementary sense of the word ‘‘projection’’. In an interesting passage she argues:
What is ‘‘internalised’’ in the age of film is the very projectional mechanism of projection. If individuals are, to use Althusser’s term, ‘‘interpellated,’’ they are interpellated not simply as watchers of film but also as film itself. They ‘‘know’’ themselves not only as the subject, the audience, but as the object, the spectacle, the movie. (Chow 1995, 30)
Therefore, the mechanism of projection is itself translating and ‘‘self-translating’’. The reproduction of the images does not take place between an ‘‘original’’ and a ‘‘copy’’ in which the original is ‘‘translated’’, but this assumed original already contains in itself the condition of being translated as it is looked at. Projection is connected to the generation of the image and of the imagery through reproducible technologies: cinema and photography, then video, pixels, and finally the impulses of digitalised information. The optical unconscious, as defined by Benjamin, is today part of the digital technologies that transform visual signs into images of the world. In my opinion, the model built by Chow to analyse cinema can also be applied to another important system of sign reproduction: fashion, intended as the social representation of the clothed body. Fashion is vision, because it celebrates the aesthetic dimension of bodies and forms, certainly a deeper aesthetic that is not limited to mere appearances. The clothed body is both object and subject of the gaze as it looks at other bodies to imitate them and allows itself to be looked at, thus becoming a model of distinction.1 Clothes and bodily coverings ‘‘touch’’ the body and at the same time they define its appearance, its public visibility. When through this visibility we interpret a social role or an ethnic identity, for example, we are using clothes as a true vehicle of translation. Sometimes this also happens through
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stereotyped reasoning. A woman wearing the chador, for example, will be naturally ‘‘translated’’ by a viewer, according to the public context in which she appears and depending on who is looking at her, as ‘‘immigrant’’, ‘‘prudish’’, ‘‘submissive’’, ‘‘charming’’, and so forth. At the same time, by dressing up, she also ‘‘translates’’ herself as an object of the gaze and of social representation. A woman wearing a fur coat, to give another example, will appear ‘‘chilly’’, ‘‘capitalist’’ or ‘‘typical’’, depending on whether the interpretative context is, respectively, a city in Southern Italy, the first night of the season at La Scala in Milan in 1968, or an Eskimo met by a tourist in Greenland.
2. Orientalisms Fashion is a system that goes beyond the mere dimension of an individual’s dressing habits; it is ‘‘costume’’, in other words a social institution (Barthes 1959) that regulates and reproduces the clothed body. Fashion ‘‘projects’’ the human body, in the twofold sense of projection as identified by Chow: because it is actually worn, and because it is a reproducible image that establishes a syncretic relation with photography, with cinema and with all visual technologies. Also, verbal signs that are related to fashion become truly visual signs, as Roland Barthes (1967) demonstrated in The fashion system when considering specialised magazines where fashion lives as ‘‘description’’.2 This also happens with the use of verbal signs in advertising; in the role that the word, the number and the logo acquire in brands; and in the semiotic function of writings on T-shirts Á that is to say, in all the forms where textuality is written on the body through clothes (Calefato 2004b, 61Á86; 2007a, 73Á88). In the following paragraphs, I will consider some forms of representation of the clothed body and some garments that have become meaningful and salient places of cultural translation. The expression ‘‘cultural translation’’ is intended here in the sense of a subordinate culture being forcedly transferred into a dominant culture, and in the sense of the construction of a space of interaction Á a ‘‘Third Space’’ as Bhabha (1994)3 calls it, or a ‘‘Third Term’’ as Chow (1995a) defines it Á between cultures. Fashion as visual and mass culture is a system that reproduces this ‘‘third’’ dimension in an exemplary way. The signs of ‘‘non-western’’ clothing have been constructed as signs of alterity opposed to fashion, which is instead considered a heritage of the western world. If it is true that historically the production of a system of social cohesion that we call ‘‘fashion’’ is intimately linked to ‘‘modernity’’ as the primal characteristic of European bourgeois societies (Paulicelli 2006), it is also true that this modernity, the birth of European bourgeoisies and the creation of western capitalistic states and economies have fed themselves since their origins on raw materials, human beings and goods that other areas of the world supplied to Europe. The textile industry, for example Á the engine and basis for the very possibility to create a fashion Á was born and strongly developed in eighteenth-century England in close relation with the rise of the British colonial empire. The ‘‘exoticisms’’, ‘‘chinoiseries’’ and ‘‘japaniseries’’ have fed for centuries the refined tastes of clothes, porcelain, furnishing and tapestry in Europe, and later in North America. In the same way, the slaves taken from Africa worked in American plantations to produce the cotton destined for the clothing industry.
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Therefore, there has always been a close interaction between fashion, as a system also based geographically in capitals such as London and Paris, and the system of production of goods and signs in the non-western world. Furthermore, also in this world, or even better in these ‘‘worlds’’, the clothed body is not a body always identical to itself by virtue of alleged ‘‘traditions’’ or of the ‘‘originariety’’ of cultures. Even the garments that we wrongly consider more traditional and always the same, such as the kimono and the sari, are regulated by the cycles of fashion and of tastes. Therefore, common-sense in relation to fashion has been for a long time compromised by an orientalism, in Edward Said’s (1978) sense, that the postcolonial vision instead criticises (Puwar and Bhathia 2003; Segre-Reinach 2006). Gayatri Spivak has applied this critique to fashion, upon which she focuses some of her reflexions, especially in relation to the stylist Rey Kawakubo. With a Japanese background and born in 1943, Kawakubo was introduced to the western press at the beginning of the 1980s within the logic of the relation between ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity’’, where the former would be represented by Japan and the latter by Euro-American culture. Spivak quotes an article that appeared in the liberal Village Voice in 1984 (Spivak 1999, 338), where the adjectives used to define the stylist Á ‘‘tough’’, ‘‘independent’’, ‘‘minimalist’’, and so forth Á are all included within stereotypes on cultural identity/difference: ‘‘the-same-yet-not-the-same, different-but-not-different’’, Spivak writes (1999, 340), building a plausible narrative passed off as ‘‘truth of culture’’. The ‘‘ethnicisation’’ of Asian and African stylists, the ‘‘exotic typicisation’’ of some vestimentary signs and the invention of ‘‘ethnochic’’ are all ways to avoid the theme of cultural translation and assimilate it within the relativism that considers the ‘‘tradition of costumes’’ and the ‘‘modernity of fashion’’ as unassimilatable wholes, exactly in the same way as the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘copy,’’ the ‘‘source text’’ and its ‘‘translation’’, and ‘‘West’’ and ‘‘East’’ would be presumed unassimilatable and selfsubsistent from within. According to Chow:
genuine cultural translation is possible only when we move beyond the seemingly infinite but actually reductive permutations of the two terms Á East and West, original and translation Á and instead see both as full, materialist, and most likely equally corrupt, equally decadent participants in contemporary world culture. (Chow 1995a, 195)
When one considers the so-called ‘‘real’’ fashion, it is difficult to show translating mechanisms explicitly. There are hidden stereotypes and categorisations, even unconsciously soaked with prejudice that tends to entrap us. It is then the garment that becomes language, to use Barthes’s (1967) image, to which we should refer; to the clothed body as a crossing place for a complexity of signs: a place to which we are driven by writing, visual culture, narrations. I will try to use these languages to lead me in the following pages.
3. Saris, bodices and bras The term ‘‘sari’’ comes from the Sanskrit chaira, which simply means ‘‘piece to wear’’, and it essentially refers to ‘‘a cloth with no seams, no cuts, to drape in different ways’’ (Segre-Reinach 2006, 191). In spite of its ‘‘orientalist’’ image Á which considers this garment as one of the signs of the vestimentary ‘‘tradition’’ and
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‘‘identity’’ of Indian women, an element of the traditional costume always identical to itself Á the sari, being the dominant piece of clothing for Hindu women, has instead undergone throughout the centuries varying degrees of modification, ‘‘depending upon the caste, religious sect, regional affiliation or social status of the wearer as well as ongoing changing in fashion’’ (Bhatia 2003, 331). In the Indian epic sang in the Mahabharata there appears a sacred sari belonging to Draupadi, daughter of King Drupada of Panchala and bride of the five Pandava ¯ brothers. The eldest of them loses her in a game of dice that his rival cousins, the Kaurava, had tampered with and then they humiliate Draupadi by bringing her to the assembly like a prostitute where her sari is pulled from every side:
The enemy chief begins to pull at Draupadi’s sari. Draupadi silently prays to the incarnate Krishna. The Idea of Sustaining Law (Dharma) materializes itself as clothing, and as the king pulls and pulls at her sari, there seems to be more and more of it. Draupadi is infinitely clothed and cannot be publicly stripped. It is one of Krishna’s miracles. (Spivak 1987, 183)
The powerful image of the literary Sanskrit Draupadi changes into a literary contemporary Draupadi, who becomes the title character and protagonist of the Bengalese writer Mahasweta Devi’s (1978) story ‘‘Draupadi’’, included in her book Breast stories (Devi 1997). Draupadi, whose first name is shortened to Dopdi, is a Naxalite guerrilla4 captured by the armed forces of the Indian government and gangraped by the soldiers. The strongest image of the story is in the final scene, when Draupadi stands in front of her persecutor Senanayak with her breast uncovered and wounded, powerful and authoritative in her lacerated nudity. In this scene, Draupadi is naked because she tore off her white sari with her teeth before she stood up again. Her torturers had given the sari back to Draupadi for her to wear and be dressed and ‘‘presentable’’ in front of the army chief. Instead, naked, with her black body and scarified nipples, she offensively spits a clot of blood on Senanayak and challenges him to a sort of symbolic and verbal fight that she wins in a way both unconceivable and beyond measure from the perspective of the authoritative male logic. Spivak argues that Devi’s story rewrites the episode of Draupadi of the Mahabharata; in particular her passage from a monogamous singularity (Naxalite Draupadi is in fact the widow of the guerrilla Dulna Majhi) to an ‘‘exposition’’ to a number of men in the multiple rape by the soldiers, where in its turn the polyandry with the Pandava of the Draupadi of the myth is reproduced as well as the attempt of the Kauravas to humiliate her in front of many men by taking the sari off her body (Spivak 1987, 183). But the sari of Devi’s Dopdi-Draupadi is shortened like her name, reduced to a few white cloths that she tears off with her teeth before standing in front of her persecutor.
The men easily succeed in stripping Dopdi Á in the narrative it is the culmination of her political punishment by the representatives of the law. She remains publicly naked at her own insistence. Rather than save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and divine (in this case it would have been godlike) comrade, the story insists that is the place where male leadership stops. (Spivak 1987, 183Á184)
Dopdi’s sari is unclassifiable, ‘‘denotified’’, as some populations in the Indian forests are defined,5 a sari deprived of her body, but that in this absence identifies her and
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makes her strong, considerably more than what the uniforms of the soldiers, all identical in themselves, can do. Devi refers to the two soldiers that talk about Dopdi at the beginning of the story not with proper names, but as ‘‘First Livery’’ and ‘‘Second Livery’’ (Devi 1978, 19). Chief Senanayak himself has a meaningless name as it literally means ‘‘army chief’’, thus identifying his function (Spivak 1987, 185). For him there is no distinction between common noun and proper name, between his individuality and the function that he covers when wearing his uniform (Spivak 1987, 185) or ‘‘his livery’’. Uniform and livery are both words that recall the inclusion of an individual’s body within a hierarchical and social order. In the history of costume, the uniform represents a meaningful manifestation of how clothing can become for the body a regulatory apparatus that determines a closed system of correspondences between the external appearance and social order (Calefato 2007b). For this reason, uniforms are the distinguishing marks of those who belong to total institutions Á the army, schools, jails, hospitals Á upon which the deepest guarantees of the social order of the discourse are based. The uniform is the emblem of the separation between the inside and the outside of a culture that is hierarchically ordered, between the ‘‘normal’’ and the ‘‘topsy-turvy’’ world, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between what is ‘‘ours’’ and what is ‘‘theirs’’, between identity and alterity. The uniform can be conceived as an impersonal sign, a sign that does not consider what could make it unique and irreplaceable. If, on the one hand, it identifies certain stable meanings regarding the role of the wearer, on the other it is indifferent to any individual specificity, and is fundamentally indifferent to the element of corporeality intended as materiality ‘‘resistant’’ to universal exchangeability. In fact, it was exactly in the uniform par excellence Á the military uniform Á where the sizes were introduced even before fashion invented mass production or the pret-a-porter (Calefato 2000, 193). ˆ ` The livery Á the term Spivak uses in her English translation from Devi’s Bengalese Á has instead an etymology in which the element of ‘‘liberation’’ is implicit. Originally, it was the garment (but formerly also the room and board) that a lord, prince, or king would give, release, liberate, so to speak, during some periods of the year to the members of his family and to the servants of his house. The livery is, therefore, that which simultaneously inscribes a subject within a hierarchical order and the laws of etiquette, on one hand, but, in that element of ‘‘liberation’’, it also evokes the problematic definition of bourgeois ‘‘freedom’’ on the other. At the origin of the male bourgeois costume there is always an element taken from the uniform, whether it is the jacket, the tie, the shirt, the hat or a particular way of wearing the trousers (Barthes 1959, 23; Calefato 2003, 53). There is always a military uniform. Spivak considers the aptly-named Senanayak to be a pragmatist, a pluralist aesthete, a revolutionary gentleman who can theoretically identify with the enemy, but willy-nilly, participate in the production of an exploitative society (Spivak 1987, 179). He is seriously scared when facing the naked Dopdi, ‘‘afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid’’ (Devi 1978, 38). If the sari of the epic Draupadi is an endless one, that of tribal Dopdi is an absent marker that signals the passage through the ‘‘sexual differential into the field of what could only happen to a woman’’ (Spivak 1987, 184). And it is at this point that Dopdi emerges as the most powerful ‘‘subject’’ (Spivak 1987, 184). Devi’s Breast stories also includes the story ‘‘Behind the bodice’’, where the protagonist is the breast of Gangor, an extremely poor dancer from a village in
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Bengal. Upin, a photographer, falls in love with this part of her body and, without any concupiscence, photographs her beautiful breast for international glamour magazines with the intention of keeping intact through images the tradition of the devadasi, the Hindu ritual dancers that today have become just an element of ‘‘folklore’’ for tourists. Unfortunately, Upin’s illusion clashes with reality; when he meets Gangor for the last time, in fact, her beautiful breast has been devastated in a rape, probably committed by the police. Upin’s attempt to transform the woman’s breast into a fashion icon, thus ‘‘saving’’ it, is defeated and he kills himself in desperation. The writer, an old fighter for the dignity and freedom of the southern people of the world, makes us infer that behind Gangor’s bodice, the ‘‘typical’’ choli of Indian women that leaves the stomach uncovered, there are the signs of a rape that is metaphorically the expression of the rape of the people, of the poorest people in the world and of the poorest women of the South in the first place. The breast well represents this metaphor: it is a sign that characterises the female body, provides nourishment and at the same time is an erotic enticement that in our time has become a media fetish. In this last representation, the image of the breast is charged with an additional value if it plays with its covering Á the choli in Upin’s photographic fixation, the bra in the case of fashion Á for at least the past 100 years.6 Gangor’s choli has a lot in common with the bra as it is worn in direct contact with the breast, even if usually it is not an item of underclothing. However, how many times in modern fashion and in imagery practices are bras used to be seen, exposed and charged with metaphorical meaning? The indiscreet fascination of objects that we wear mainly comes from their manifest fetishism. As it happens in Devi’s story, the imagery connected to a garment, whether it is the choli or the bra, well defines the confusion between the body and its covering. It is through this confusion that we understand the power and the limits of the female body, being both an object of representations and the subject of actions and stories.
4. Veils The veil is not just a simple piece of cloth. According to Giuliana Sgrena: ‘‘While women in Muslim countries are dealing with a re-Islamification that introduces also a new way of wearing the veil, the hijab has also burst into the West, catching countries of new and old immigration unprepared’’ (2008, 37). The Italian journalist Á an expert on Muslim countries and herself a victim of a dramatic kidnapping in Iraq in 2005 Á is, in her 2008 book Il prezzo del velo, adamantly against all that this garment, in its variations more or less invasive to the body, represents for women. In particular, the negative symbolism has worsened, according to Sgrena, since the process of integralist re-Islamification that crosses the Muslim world, at least starting from the Khomeinist revolution of 1978 Iran, and has further exacerbated after 11 September 2001, in the context of the ‘‘civilisation clash’’ that plays on female bodies a symbolic exchange between men and unprecedented patriarchal violence. Sgrena’s point of view is that of a woman who has encountered many women and many stories, in the context of countries quite different to each other such as Egypt, Iraq, Turkey,7 Pakistan and Iran. Her position is taken in the context of a perspective ‘‘internal’’ to these experiences, many of which are told in this book, and in the context of a radical
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dissolution of the assumption of superiority that the democratic ‘‘Christian West’’, respectful of women, would have towards a sexist ‘‘Islamic East’’. The question of the veil, if the veil is not just a piece of cloth, is common to both East and West, and it is possible to address in terms of cultural translation in a postcolonial sense. It allows the deconstruction of the model of ‘‘authenticity and fixity’’ of tradition. A tradition that can be identified with a religious integralism (Muslim or Christian), or with democracy, considered as an absolute value embedded in the West that should be ‘‘exported’’, even with a war. A value in whose spirit, during the colonialist era Á Spivak (1999) argues Á Britons should have ‘‘saved’’ Indian women from the obligation of the sati, the ritual suicide of widows. In her comic series Persepolis, the Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi (2001) makes a constant reflection on costumes and fashion that is often focused on the theme of the veil, a garment that has overwhelmingly entered the wardrobes of Iranian women following the Khomeinist revolution. Through the genre of comics, Satrapi is able to lead her readers with irony and depth into the problem of the veil from a point of view, so to speak, both ‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’. Her mother, her group of female friends and schoolmates, and Satrapi herself, all wear and hate this garment that, together with the whole ‘‘religiously correct’’ clothing, has deeply entered during the decades the experience of different generations of Iranian women. From this critical perspective, Satrapi’s position destroys in a simple but evident way the ‘‘orientalist’’ vision through which the question of the veil is posed above all today, as the element of a contrast that presumes to oppose the East to the West, archaicism to modernity, or Á even worse Á Islam to democracy. This assumed dichotomy creates the stereotype upon which, as Antonella Giannone writes, ‘‘the woman wearing the veil calls into question a corporeality that shapes itself as opposed to the corporeality of the West’’. Giannone adds:
When we speak about the veil, we never talk about a charming exoticism. On the contrary, we refer to it as a simple square of cloth, as it is called in Germany, that on its own can lead us to the molten core of these intercultural issues and can call into question all the ghosts and polarisations between the West and the East that took form in the last few years. The veil becomes the symbol of the frightening side of an Islam that, for a number of reasons, escapes any categorisation even as a sign of fashion. It is a religious symbol, a vestimentary act that assumes a political meaning that has to be looked upon suspiciously, an alarming signal, as Goffman defines it . . . that warns us and interrupts the automatic flow of everyday signs (Giannone and Calefato 2007, 115Á116).
In the Iran described in Persepolis, the veil has the function of regulating female corporeality; it is the sign of a power that reaches the individual body, thus sanctioning its characteristics and its visible appearance. However, given that the body always possesses uncontrollable traits and a constitutive excess, the vestimentary performances constantly undermine prescriptions and become a field of conflict; a place where the expression of desire is disguised, a sort of daily masquerade that uses the signs of power and sabotages them from within, whether they are the veil for women or the beard for men. Thus the opposition between an assumed ‘‘archaic’’ monolithic Iran and a ‘‘modern’’ West tout-court becomes ludicrous. In this sense, Satrapi shows us explicit aspects of resistance; like the demonstrations against the headscarf that, unfortunately, were violently suppressed, and others that are more
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hidden although clearly visible if one knows how to see them Á for example, those that allow us to distinguish the ‘‘emancipated’’ woman because she has a tuft of hair that comes out of the headscarf. The cartoonist represents herself aged 13, at the beginning of the 1980s, happily wearing some objects that her parents have just given her from a brief journey in Turkey: Nike’s latest trainers, Michael Jackson’s badge from the music video of Thriller and a denim jacket. Marjane has just hung in her room posters of Iron Maiden and Kim Wilde, presents from the same journey, and has completed her outfit with the black headscarf compulsory when out on the street. During the past 30 years, since the tragic experience of the war against Iraq (1980Á1988) until today’s status under Ahmadinejad, varying forms of resistance to obscurantism have spread in Iran, above all among youths and women. Today’s situation in Iran has been described very well by the Italian journalist and scholar of Iranian origins Farian Sabahi (2007) in her book Un’estate a Teheran, in which she makes us breathe the air of an Iran where Á despite the limitations to freedom in politics, to the individual and, above all, to women Á women are protagonists and excellent workers in, for example, information and technology and engineering, where there is a widespread opposition to religious hierarchies, manifest in everyday apparently harmless actions, such as those of the cab drivers who refuse to take mullahs on board. In short, an Iran with a popular culture that differs from the one spread by the aggressive stereotypes propagandised by the rhetoric of the government (Sabahi 2007). 5. Signs and pop icons In her book, Sgrena takes into consideration the use that many Muslim women wearing the veil make of heavy and thorough make-up or sexy high-quality lingerie, even underneath the veil or the most prudish dress. In luxurious boutiques in Cairo or Abu Dhabi, branded veils are appearing. In the heart of Europe Á in Paris or Berlin Á young women wear their headscarf, changing colors and patterns every day, matching them to the style of their dress and wrapping them up according to the inspiration and the street trends they have themselves invented. In 2006 the Ikea store in Edmonton, North London, commissioned the online store The Hijab Shop to create a model of hijab for its Muslim employees who had requested one. One of the first company hijab was thus realised; easy to wear because it does not need any pins, without any frills and ‘‘modest’’, as the hijab in itself requires, this was made up of two navy blue pieces and ‘‘branded’’ with the golden yellow logo of the well-known Swedish furniture chain on the back. The consequent fusion between religious signs and the logo of the multinational company is an example of how in our era it is becoming increasingly difficult to state whether signs belong to ‘‘tradition’’ or to ‘‘modernity’’, to religion or to secularity (Akou 2007; Lewis 2007). To what extent is a glamorous veil like those sold by The Hijab Shop traditional or religious? How modern or secular is a symbol used on a label on a working uniform? The ‘‘clothed’’ body is a place where tastes and fashions are represented and shared, a place of edification of the myth, where desires and values are expressed, where power is noticeably ‘‘enforced’’ and manifested. This all occurs at the same time, all in a conflicting way, even more so if it is the body of a woman where the signs of power that define gender in a coercive way, such as the veil, mix with signs
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that are instead perceived by the wearer as expressions of freedom, with myths of mass culture and with fashion cult-objects, thus generating a third space, which is possible for the body, and a semiotic tension between elements in mutual opposition. Such tension is difficult to represent or express, as often there are no words that can translate it. For this reason, only literature such as a specific participated essay writing like those of Sgrena and Sabahi, or comics, greatly succeed. Why in Europe today is there a heated discussion focused on particular religious and cultural signs, like the veil, which may supposedly represent strong, confessional and integralist signs? The discussion caused by the French law that bans religious signs in public places, such as the Islamic veil in schools, carries in itself deep reasons for today’s way of considering questions such as the female body, intercultural contact, fashion and even freedom and equality Á values that are historically foundations of the French republic and of western democracies. Engaged intellectuals and feminist historians have welcomed this ban, because the veil is considered a sign of female submission and of cancellation of the woman’s physicality, through the covering of parts of the body such as the hair, and in the case of munaqqaba8 women, of their face as well. On the other hand, the streets of Paris filled with Muslim women who, together with many men, protested and claimed their ‘‘freedom’’ of choice about the veil. Over the past few years the question of the veil has bounced from France all over Europe, to countries where the presence of Muslims is extremely high. This has been the case in Germany, for example, where out of seven million foreigners, one-half are Muslims; more than two million of them Turkish, largely based in the capital Berlin. We are therefore talking about countries where the presence of women wearing the veil is everywhere a daily widespread reality: in streets, undergrounds, shops and workplaces. Following the French law, the German region of Schleswig-Holstein has also banned religious signs and has prevented them being worn in schools. It is clear that the veil and the cross will be the first to be banned; the Star of David will follow, and probably also the representations of Rama, Shiva and Visnu that decorate T-shirts and accessories with an ‘‘ethnic’’ inspiration. But what will happen to those tattoos with Celtic patterns so popular within some youth ‘‘street styles’’? Or Che Guevara T-shirts? Or those badges portraying rock stars? Or Nike and Adidas logos on trainers? ‘‘But these are secular symbols, consumerist at most, not religious’’, one might object. Nevertheless, it is important to question where religion tout-court ends and where the ‘‘secular mythology’’ of our present begins, a mythology made of stars, pop icons, logotypes of goods and cult objects. Let us consider also how language purloins a religious terminology when symbols that express a deep identification with someone or something are at stake. In these cases we rightfully use, in contexts that we usually consider laic and secularised, words such as icon, cult, or diva, which comes from divus, meaning god. Let us consider how brands and the names of goods are truly sacred names of our contemporaneity, which, like the name of the Jewish or Christian God, cannot be named in vain because the trademarkTM certifies its identity and uniqueness. 6. Conclusions I began this article by considering the concept of cultural translation in the sense intended by Bhabha, as the construction of a ‘‘Third Space’’, as well as in the sense
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intended by Chow, as an interrelation between cultural ‘‘ethnographies’’ such as cinema and visual culture, to which in this case we add fashion. Fashion represents both a field where cultures meet and a language in constant translation. If on the one hand it travels along the channels of global communication of famous brands, fairs and catwalks, then on the other hand the ‘‘local’’ characteristics of fashion today travel more and more intensively through street styles, hybrid tastes, unexpected changes and fusions. Specifically, I have analysed some ways in which on female bodies, through clothes, make-up and accessories, knowledge and forms of exploitation gradually form at the same time and signs of resistance are produced. Not only conditioned by power, desire, mass culture and fashion, the clothed body Á and in particular the female body Á presents an irreducible excess, a tension that absorbs and goes beyond all these sometimes even contrasting elements. Acknowledgements
With thanks to Leonardo Blonda (Roehampton University, UK), who translated this work.
Notes
1. I am applying the categories of imitation and distinction identified by Georg Simmel (1895) as fundamental in fashion. 2. Barthes argues that described fashion provides the analyst what human languages deny the linguist: that is to say, ‘‘pure synchrony’’ (Barthes 1967, 8). In this sense, clothes are not analysed like languages, but their existence is conceived by virtue of the language and of its modality of functioning. 3. Bhabha states: ‘‘The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People’’ (1994, 37). 4. In 1967, in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal, a peasant rebellion supported by the guerrilla style movement of the Naxalites took place, which the Indian government cracked down on with exceptional severity in 1971. Draupadi’s story is set in this context (Spivak 1987, 181Á182). 5. Spivak states: ‘‘Among Indian Aboriginals, I know a very small percentage of a small percentage that was ‘denotified’ in 1952. These forest-dwelling tribals, defined by the British as ‘criminal tribes,’ had been left alone not just by the British, but also by the Hindu and Muslim civilizations of India. They are not ‘radicals.’ But because they (unlike the larger ethnic groups) were left alone, they conform to certain cultural norms, thinking, like us, that culture is nature, and instantiate certain attitudes that can be extremely useful for us, who have lost them, in our global predicament. Their active cultural script is as much on the unravel, as ungraspable, as anyone else’s’’ (Spivak 1999, 384Á385). 6. The year 1907 is usually regarded as the birth of the first modern bra, with the publication in Vogue of pictures and drawings of a similar garment. 7. On the question of the veil in Turkey, see Saracgil (2004). 8. With the face covered.
Notes on contributor
Patrizia Calefato is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistica and Linguistica Informatica in the Facolta di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Universita degli Studi di Bari ‘‘Aldo Moro’’. She ` ` teaches Analisi socio-antropologica del prodotto di moda in the Corso di laurea in Scienze e
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tecnologie della moda, Bari. She has taught in many universities, including Helsinki, New Bulgarian University Á Sofia, Macerata, and Stockholm. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. She edited the Italian book Il sogno di butterfly (Rome: Meltemi, 2004), which includes some of the most important essays by Rey Chow.
References
Akou, H.M. 2007. Building a new ‘‘world fashion’’. Islamic dress in the twenty-first century. Fashion Theory 11, no. 4: 403Á21. Barthes, R. 1959. Langages et vetement. Critique. 42; Language and clothing. In The language ˆ of fashion, ed. A. Stafford and M. Carter, 21Á32. Trans. A. Stafford. Oxford: Berg. Barthes, R. 1967. Systeme de la mode. Seuil: Paris. Trans. M. Ward and R. Howard. 1983. The ` fashion system. New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, W. 1931. Kleine Geschichte der Photographie. In Die literarische Welt. 1931; Little history of photography. Selected writings volume 2 1927Á1934, ed. M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, 507Á30. Trans. R. Livingstone et al. 2002. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. 1936. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit. In Zeitschrift fur ¨ Sozialforschung. The work of art in the age of its reproducibility. Selected writings volume 3 1935Á1938, ed. M.W. Jennings, 101Á33. Trans. E. Jephcott, H. Eiland et al. 2002. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bhabha, H.K. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bhatia, N. 2003. Fashioning women in colonial India. Fashion Theory 7, nos. 3Á4: 327Á44. Calefato, P., ed. 2000. Cartografie dell’immaginario. Rome: Sossella. Calefato, P. 2003. Lusso. Rome: Meltemi. Calefato, P. 2004a. The clothed body. Oxford: Berg. Calefato, P. 2004b. Nel linguaggio. Rome: Meltemi. Calefato, P. 2007a. Mass moda. Linguaggio e immaginario del corpo rivestito. Rome: Meltemi. Calefato, P. 2007b. Semiotica del uniforme. Semiotics of the uniform. Exit 27: 22Á39. ´ Chow, R. 1995a. Primitive passions. New York: Columbia University Press. Chow, R. 1995b. The fascist longings in our midst. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 26, no. 1: 23Á50. De Mauro, T. 1999. Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso. Torino: Utet. http://www. demauroparavia.it. Devi, M. 1978. Draupadi. In Breast stories, 19Á38. Trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak. Calcutta: Seagull. Devi, M. 1997. Breast stories. Trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak. Calcutta: Seagull. Giannone, A., and P. Calefato. 2007. Manuale di comunicazione, sociologia e cultura della moda, vol 5: Performance. Rome: Meltemi. Lewis, R. 2007. Veils and sales: Muslims and the spaces of postcolonial fashion retail. Fashion Theory 11, no. 4: 423Á41. Mulvey, L. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16: 6Á18. Paulicelli, E., ed. 2006. Moda e moderno. Rome: Meltemi. Puwar, N., and N. Bhatia, eds. 2003. Fashion and orientalism monographic issue. Fashion Theory 7, nos 3Á4: 249Á434. Sabahi, F. 2007. Un’estate a Teheran. Rome: Laterza. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge. Saracgil, A. 2004, Interno versus esterno. Il velo nella Turchia contemporanea. In La nuova Shahrazad. Donne e multiculturalismo, ed. L. Curti, S. Carotenuto, A. DeMeo, and S. Marinelli, 71Á82. Napoli: Liguori. Satrapi, M. 2001. Persepolis. Paris: L’Association. Segre-Reinach, S. 2006. Manuale di comunicazione e cultura della moda, vol. 4. Orientalismi. Rome: Meltemi.
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Sgrena, G. 2008. Il prezzo del velo. Milano: Feltrinelli. Simmel, G. 1895. Zur psychologie der mode. Die Zeit. Trans. 1904. Fashion. International Quarterly 10, no. 1: 130Á55. Spivak Chakravorty, G. 1987. In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York: Methuen. Spivak Chakravorty, G. 1999. A critique of postcolonial reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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RESEARCH ARTICLE Fashion as cultural translation: knowledge, constrictions and transgressions on/of the female body
Patrizia Calefato*$
Sociolinguistica e Linguistica Informatica, Facolta di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Universita ` ` degli Studi di Bari ‘‘Aldo Moro’’, Italy (Received March 2010) In the last chapter of her book Primitive passions, Rey Chow focuses on cinema as a form of ethnography where cultural translation occurs in the postcolonial world. Chow develops Mulvey’s perspective on visuality and gender in classical Hollywood film. In Mulvey’s opinion, the act of looking at generates a male position where women are in the condition of being looked at. Similarly, in Chow’s view, to look at corresponds to the western gaze, while non-western cultures are in the position of being looked at. This view lets Chow argue about the relation between the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘translation’’ among cultures: any such supposed ‘‘original’’ is but a construction founded on a sort of ‘‘to-belooked-at-ness’’ that acts as an optical unconscious. I use Chow’s model in relation to fashion, considered as the sociosemiotic performance of the clothed body. The clothed body is both a subject and an object of visuality: it looks at other bodies in the movement of imitation, and is looked at as a model of distinction. In this sense, clothing represents a sort of translation among bodies and among cultures. Keywords: visuality; fashion; body; women; cultural translation; orientalism; sari; veil
1. Visuality and cultural translation In her book Primitive passions, Rey Chow considers cinema as a form of ethnography within which translation between cultures in the postcolonial world is produced (Chow 1995a, 175Á202). Her starting point is one of the landmark writings on visual and feminist studies, Laura Mulvey’s ‘‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’’ (1975). According to Mulvey, ‘‘to look at’’ and ‘‘to be looked at’’ are two conditions with uneven hierarchical positions: the former being proper to men, the latter to women. Moving onto the study of cultures, Chow extends this model of vision to the way western cultures relate with non-western ones: the western world looks at, and the ‘‘non-western’’ world is looked at. However, this statement is not enough. According to Chow, we should also mention that ‘‘the state of being looked at not only is built into the way non-Western cultures are viewed by Western ones; more significantly it is part of the active manner in which such cultures represent Á ethnographize Á themselves’’ (Chow 1995a, 180).
*Email: [email protected] $Translated by Leonardo Blonda (Roehampton University, UK).
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2010.494388 http://www.informaworld.com
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This hypothesis allows Chow to tackle the problem of the relationship between the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘translation’’ between cultures. She states that the assumed ‘‘original’’ of cultures is a construction based on the condition of ‘‘to-be-looked-atness’’, which acts like an ‘‘optical unconscious’’ (Chow 1995a, 180). The author borrows this last expression from Walter Benjamin, who uses it in relation to photography and cinema (Benjamin 1931, 1936) Á technologies that are able to substitute ‘‘a space informed by human consciousness’’ with ‘‘a space informed by the unconscious’’. This space arises from the technological devices that can slow down, magnify, go up and down within the shot, shrink, enlarge and contract the process of looking at (Benjamin 1931, 510). Talking about photography, Benjamin claims:
photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things Á meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable. (Benjamin 1931, 512)
Thus vision builds up as a ‘‘projection’’, in the twofold sense that this word borrows from psychoanalysis Á as a transfer to the outside of ‘‘impulses, feelings and frames of mind that the subject rejects or does not recognise as his, ascribing them to other people or objects’’ (De Mauro 1999) Á and from technology, when intended as something that is projected on the screen like a film. Chow dedicated the essay ‘‘The fascist longings in our midst’’ (Chow 1995b) to this twofold but complementary sense of the word ‘‘projection’’. In an interesting passage she argues:
What is ‘‘internalised’’ in the age of film is the very projectional mechanism of projection. If individuals are, to use Althusser’s term, ‘‘interpellated,’’ they are interpellated not simply as watchers of film but also as film itself. They ‘‘know’’ themselves not only as the subject, the audience, but as the object, the spectacle, the movie. (Chow 1995, 30)
Therefore, the mechanism of projection is itself translating and ‘‘self-translating’’. The reproduction of the images does not take place between an ‘‘original’’ and a ‘‘copy’’ in which the original is ‘‘translated’’, but this assumed original already contains in itself the condition of being translated as it is looked at. Projection is connected to the generation of the image and of the imagery through reproducible technologies: cinema and photography, then video, pixels, and finally the impulses of digitalised information. The optical unconscious, as defined by Benjamin, is today part of the digital technologies that transform visual signs into images of the world. In my opinion, the model built by Chow to analyse cinema can also be applied to another important system of sign reproduction: fashion, intended as the social representation of the clothed body. Fashion is vision, because it celebrates the aesthetic dimension of bodies and forms, certainly a deeper aesthetic that is not limited to mere appearances. The clothed body is both object and subject of the gaze as it looks at other bodies to imitate them and allows itself to be looked at, thus becoming a model of distinction.1 Clothes and bodily coverings ‘‘touch’’ the body and at the same time they define its appearance, its public visibility. When through this visibility we interpret a social role or an ethnic identity, for example, we are using clothes as a true vehicle of translation. Sometimes this also happens through
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stereotyped reasoning. A woman wearing the chador, for example, will be naturally ‘‘translated’’ by a viewer, according to the public context in which she appears and depending on who is looking at her, as ‘‘immigrant’’, ‘‘prudish’’, ‘‘submissive’’, ‘‘charming’’, and so forth. At the same time, by dressing up, she also ‘‘translates’’ herself as an object of the gaze and of social representation. A woman wearing a fur coat, to give another example, will appear ‘‘chilly’’, ‘‘capitalist’’ or ‘‘typical’’, depending on whether the interpretative context is, respectively, a city in Southern Italy, the first night of the season at La Scala in Milan in 1968, or an Eskimo met by a tourist in Greenland.
2. Orientalisms Fashion is a system that goes beyond the mere dimension of an individual’s dressing habits; it is ‘‘costume’’, in other words a social institution (Barthes 1959) that regulates and reproduces the clothed body. Fashion ‘‘projects’’ the human body, in the twofold sense of projection as identified by Chow: because it is actually worn, and because it is a reproducible image that establishes a syncretic relation with photography, with cinema and with all visual technologies. Also, verbal signs that are related to fashion become truly visual signs, as Roland Barthes (1967) demonstrated in The fashion system when considering specialised magazines where fashion lives as ‘‘description’’.2 This also happens with the use of verbal signs in advertising; in the role that the word, the number and the logo acquire in brands; and in the semiotic function of writings on T-shirts Á that is to say, in all the forms where textuality is written on the body through clothes (Calefato 2004b, 61Á86; 2007a, 73Á88). In the following paragraphs, I will consider some forms of representation of the clothed body and some garments that have become meaningful and salient places of cultural translation. The expression ‘‘cultural translation’’ is intended here in the sense of a subordinate culture being forcedly transferred into a dominant culture, and in the sense of the construction of a space of interaction Á a ‘‘Third Space’’ as Bhabha (1994)3 calls it, or a ‘‘Third Term’’ as Chow (1995a) defines it Á between cultures. Fashion as visual and mass culture is a system that reproduces this ‘‘third’’ dimension in an exemplary way. The signs of ‘‘non-western’’ clothing have been constructed as signs of alterity opposed to fashion, which is instead considered a heritage of the western world. If it is true that historically the production of a system of social cohesion that we call ‘‘fashion’’ is intimately linked to ‘‘modernity’’ as the primal characteristic of European bourgeois societies (Paulicelli 2006), it is also true that this modernity, the birth of European bourgeoisies and the creation of western capitalistic states and economies have fed themselves since their origins on raw materials, human beings and goods that other areas of the world supplied to Europe. The textile industry, for example Á the engine and basis for the very possibility to create a fashion Á was born and strongly developed in eighteenth-century England in close relation with the rise of the British colonial empire. The ‘‘exoticisms’’, ‘‘chinoiseries’’ and ‘‘japaniseries’’ have fed for centuries the refined tastes of clothes, porcelain, furnishing and tapestry in Europe, and later in North America. In the same way, the slaves taken from Africa worked in American plantations to produce the cotton destined for the clothing industry.
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Therefore, there has always been a close interaction between fashion, as a system also based geographically in capitals such as London and Paris, and the system of production of goods and signs in the non-western world. Furthermore, also in this world, or even better in these ‘‘worlds’’, the clothed body is not a body always identical to itself by virtue of alleged ‘‘traditions’’ or of the ‘‘originariety’’ of cultures. Even the garments that we wrongly consider more traditional and always the same, such as the kimono and the sari, are regulated by the cycles of fashion and of tastes. Therefore, common-sense in relation to fashion has been for a long time compromised by an orientalism, in Edward Said’s (1978) sense, that the postcolonial vision instead criticises (Puwar and Bhathia 2003; Segre-Reinach 2006). Gayatri Spivak has applied this critique to fashion, upon which she focuses some of her reflexions, especially in relation to the stylist Rey Kawakubo. With a Japanese background and born in 1943, Kawakubo was introduced to the western press at the beginning of the 1980s within the logic of the relation between ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity’’, where the former would be represented by Japan and the latter by Euro-American culture. Spivak quotes an article that appeared in the liberal Village Voice in 1984 (Spivak 1999, 338), where the adjectives used to define the stylist Á ‘‘tough’’, ‘‘independent’’, ‘‘minimalist’’, and so forth Á are all included within stereotypes on cultural identity/difference: ‘‘the-same-yet-not-the-same, different-but-not-different’’, Spivak writes (1999, 340), building a plausible narrative passed off as ‘‘truth of culture’’. The ‘‘ethnicisation’’ of Asian and African stylists, the ‘‘exotic typicisation’’ of some vestimentary signs and the invention of ‘‘ethnochic’’ are all ways to avoid the theme of cultural translation and assimilate it within the relativism that considers the ‘‘tradition of costumes’’ and the ‘‘modernity of fashion’’ as unassimilatable wholes, exactly in the same way as the ‘‘original’’ and the ‘‘copy,’’ the ‘‘source text’’ and its ‘‘translation’’, and ‘‘West’’ and ‘‘East’’ would be presumed unassimilatable and selfsubsistent from within. According to Chow:
genuine cultural translation is possible only when we move beyond the seemingly infinite but actually reductive permutations of the two terms Á East and West, original and translation Á and instead see both as full, materialist, and most likely equally corrupt, equally decadent participants in contemporary world culture. (Chow 1995a, 195)
When one considers the so-called ‘‘real’’ fashion, it is difficult to show translating mechanisms explicitly. There are hidden stereotypes and categorisations, even unconsciously soaked with prejudice that tends to entrap us. It is then the garment that becomes language, to use Barthes’s (1967) image, to which we should refer; to the clothed body as a crossing place for a complexity of signs: a place to which we are driven by writing, visual culture, narrations. I will try to use these languages to lead me in the following pages.
3. Saris, bodices and bras The term ‘‘sari’’ comes from the Sanskrit chaira, which simply means ‘‘piece to wear’’, and it essentially refers to ‘‘a cloth with no seams, no cuts, to drape in different ways’’ (Segre-Reinach 2006, 191). In spite of its ‘‘orientalist’’ image Á which considers this garment as one of the signs of the vestimentary ‘‘tradition’’ and
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‘‘identity’’ of Indian women, an element of the traditional costume always identical to itself Á the sari, being the dominant piece of clothing for Hindu women, has instead undergone throughout the centuries varying degrees of modification, ‘‘depending upon the caste, religious sect, regional affiliation or social status of the wearer as well as ongoing changing in fashion’’ (Bhatia 2003, 331). In the Indian epic sang in the Mahabharata there appears a sacred sari belonging to Draupadi, daughter of King Drupada of Panchala and bride of the five Pandava ¯ brothers. The eldest of them loses her in a game of dice that his rival cousins, the Kaurava, had tampered with and then they humiliate Draupadi by bringing her to the assembly like a prostitute where her sari is pulled from every side:
The enemy chief begins to pull at Draupadi’s sari. Draupadi silently prays to the incarnate Krishna. The Idea of Sustaining Law (Dharma) materializes itself as clothing, and as the king pulls and pulls at her sari, there seems to be more and more of it. Draupadi is infinitely clothed and cannot be publicly stripped. It is one of Krishna’s miracles. (Spivak 1987, 183)
The powerful image of the literary Sanskrit Draupadi changes into a literary contemporary Draupadi, who becomes the title character and protagonist of the Bengalese writer Mahasweta Devi’s (1978) story ‘‘Draupadi’’, included in her book Breast stories (Devi 1997). Draupadi, whose first name is shortened to Dopdi, is a Naxalite guerrilla4 captured by the armed forces of the Indian government and gangraped by the soldiers. The strongest image of the story is in the final scene, when Draupadi stands in front of her persecutor Senanayak with her breast uncovered and wounded, powerful and authoritative in her lacerated nudity. In this scene, Draupadi is naked because she tore off her white sari with her teeth before she stood up again. Her torturers had given the sari back to Draupadi for her to wear and be dressed and ‘‘presentable’’ in front of the army chief. Instead, naked, with her black body and scarified nipples, she offensively spits a clot of blood on Senanayak and challenges him to a sort of symbolic and verbal fight that she wins in a way both unconceivable and beyond measure from the perspective of the authoritative male logic. Spivak argues that Devi’s story rewrites the episode of Draupadi of the Mahabharata; in particular her passage from a monogamous singularity (Naxalite Draupadi is in fact the widow of the guerrilla Dulna Majhi) to an ‘‘exposition’’ to a number of men in the multiple rape by the soldiers, where in its turn the polyandry with the Pandava of the Draupadi of the myth is reproduced as well as the attempt of the Kauravas to humiliate her in front of many men by taking the sari off her body (Spivak 1987, 183). But the sari of Devi’s Dopdi-Draupadi is shortened like her name, reduced to a few white cloths that she tears off with her teeth before standing in front of her persecutor.
The men easily succeed in stripping Dopdi Á in the narrative it is the culmination of her political punishment by the representatives of the law. She remains publicly naked at her own insistence. Rather than save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and divine (in this case it would have been godlike) comrade, the story insists that is the place where male leadership stops. (Spivak 1987, 183Á184)
Dopdi’s sari is unclassifiable, ‘‘denotified’’, as some populations in the Indian forests are defined,5 a sari deprived of her body, but that in this absence identifies her and
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makes her strong, considerably more than what the uniforms of the soldiers, all identical in themselves, can do. Devi refers to the two soldiers that talk about Dopdi at the beginning of the story not with proper names, but as ‘‘First Livery’’ and ‘‘Second Livery’’ (Devi 1978, 19). Chief Senanayak himself has a meaningless name as it literally means ‘‘army chief’’, thus identifying his function (Spivak 1987, 185). For him there is no distinction between common noun and proper name, between his individuality and the function that he covers when wearing his uniform (Spivak 1987, 185) or ‘‘his livery’’. Uniform and livery are both words that recall the inclusion of an individual’s body within a hierarchical and social order. In the history of costume, the uniform represents a meaningful manifestation of how clothing can become for the body a regulatory apparatus that determines a closed system of correspondences between the external appearance and social order (Calefato 2007b). For this reason, uniforms are the distinguishing marks of those who belong to total institutions Á the army, schools, jails, hospitals Á upon which the deepest guarantees of the social order of the discourse are based. The uniform is the emblem of the separation between the inside and the outside of a culture that is hierarchically ordered, between the ‘‘normal’’ and the ‘‘topsy-turvy’’ world, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between what is ‘‘ours’’ and what is ‘‘theirs’’, between identity and alterity. The uniform can be conceived as an impersonal sign, a sign that does not consider what could make it unique and irreplaceable. If, on the one hand, it identifies certain stable meanings regarding the role of the wearer, on the other it is indifferent to any individual specificity, and is fundamentally indifferent to the element of corporeality intended as materiality ‘‘resistant’’ to universal exchangeability. In fact, it was exactly in the uniform par excellence Á the military uniform Á where the sizes were introduced even before fashion invented mass production or the pret-a-porter (Calefato 2000, 193). ˆ ` The livery Á the term Spivak uses in her English translation from Devi’s Bengalese Á has instead an etymology in which the element of ‘‘liberation’’ is implicit. Originally, it was the garment (but formerly also the room and board) that a lord, prince, or king would give, release, liberate, so to speak, during some periods of the year to the members of his family and to the servants of his house. The livery is, therefore, that which simultaneously inscribes a subject within a hierarchical order and the laws of etiquette, on one hand, but, in that element of ‘‘liberation’’, it also evokes the problematic definition of bourgeois ‘‘freedom’’ on the other. At the origin of the male bourgeois costume there is always an element taken from the uniform, whether it is the jacket, the tie, the shirt, the hat or a particular way of wearing the trousers (Barthes 1959, 23; Calefato 2003, 53). There is always a military uniform. Spivak considers the aptly-named Senanayak to be a pragmatist, a pluralist aesthete, a revolutionary gentleman who can theoretically identify with the enemy, but willy-nilly, participate in the production of an exploitative society (Spivak 1987, 179). He is seriously scared when facing the naked Dopdi, ‘‘afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid’’ (Devi 1978, 38). If the sari of the epic Draupadi is an endless one, that of tribal Dopdi is an absent marker that signals the passage through the ‘‘sexual differential into the field of what could only happen to a woman’’ (Spivak 1987, 184). And it is at this point that Dopdi emerges as the most powerful ‘‘subject’’ (Spivak 1987, 184). Devi’s Breast stories also includes the story ‘‘Behind the bodice’’, where the protagonist is the breast of Gangor, an extremely poor dancer from a village in
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Bengal. Upin, a photographer, falls in love with this part of her body and, without any concupiscence, photographs her beautiful breast for international glamour magazines with the intention of keeping intact through images the tradition of the devadasi, the Hindu ritual dancers that today have become just an element of ‘‘folklore’’ for tourists. Unfortunately, Upin’s illusion clashes with reality; when he meets Gangor for the last time, in fact, her beautiful breast has been devastated in a rape, probably committed by the police. Upin’s attempt to transform the woman’s breast into a fashion icon, thus ‘‘saving’’ it, is defeated and he kills himself in desperation. The writer, an old fighter for the dignity and freedom of the southern people of the world, makes us infer that behind Gangor’s bodice, the ‘‘typical’’ choli of Indian women that leaves the stomach uncovered, there are the signs of a rape that is metaphorically the expression of the rape of the people, of the poorest people in the world and of the poorest women of the South in the first place. The breast well represents this metaphor: it is a sign that characterises the female body, provides nourishment and at the same time is an erotic enticement that in our time has become a media fetish. In this last representation, the image of the breast is charged with an additional value if it plays with its covering Á the choli in Upin’s photographic fixation, the bra in the case of fashion Á for at least the past 100 years.6 Gangor’s choli has a lot in common with the bra as it is worn in direct contact with the breast, even if usually it is not an item of underclothing. However, how many times in modern fashion and in imagery practices are bras used to be seen, exposed and charged with metaphorical meaning? The indiscreet fascination of objects that we wear mainly comes from their manifest fetishism. As it happens in Devi’s story, the imagery connected to a garment, whether it is the choli or the bra, well defines the confusion between the body and its covering. It is through this confusion that we understand the power and the limits of the female body, being both an object of representations and the subject of actions and stories.
4. Veils The veil is not just a simple piece of cloth. According to Giuliana Sgrena: ‘‘While women in Muslim countries are dealing with a re-Islamification that introduces also a new way of wearing the veil, the hijab has also burst into the West, catching countries of new and old immigration unprepared’’ (2008, 37). The Italian journalist Á an expert on Muslim countries and herself a victim of a dramatic kidnapping in Iraq in 2005 Á is, in her 2008 book Il prezzo del velo, adamantly against all that this garment, in its variations more or less invasive to the body, represents for women. In particular, the negative symbolism has worsened, according to Sgrena, since the process of integralist re-Islamification that crosses the Muslim world, at least starting from the Khomeinist revolution of 1978 Iran, and has further exacerbated after 11 September 2001, in the context of the ‘‘civilisation clash’’ that plays on female bodies a symbolic exchange between men and unprecedented patriarchal violence. Sgrena’s point of view is that of a woman who has encountered many women and many stories, in the context of countries quite different to each other such as Egypt, Iraq, Turkey,7 Pakistan and Iran. Her position is taken in the context of a perspective ‘‘internal’’ to these experiences, many of which are told in this book, and in the context of a radical
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dissolution of the assumption of superiority that the democratic ‘‘Christian West’’, respectful of women, would have towards a sexist ‘‘Islamic East’’. The question of the veil, if the veil is not just a piece of cloth, is common to both East and West, and it is possible to address in terms of cultural translation in a postcolonial sense. It allows the deconstruction of the model of ‘‘authenticity and fixity’’ of tradition. A tradition that can be identified with a religious integralism (Muslim or Christian), or with democracy, considered as an absolute value embedded in the West that should be ‘‘exported’’, even with a war. A value in whose spirit, during the colonialist era Á Spivak (1999) argues Á Britons should have ‘‘saved’’ Indian women from the obligation of the sati, the ritual suicide of widows. In her comic series Persepolis, the Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi (2001) makes a constant reflection on costumes and fashion that is often focused on the theme of the veil, a garment that has overwhelmingly entered the wardrobes of Iranian women following the Khomeinist revolution. Through the genre of comics, Satrapi is able to lead her readers with irony and depth into the problem of the veil from a point of view, so to speak, both ‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’. Her mother, her group of female friends and schoolmates, and Satrapi herself, all wear and hate this garment that, together with the whole ‘‘religiously correct’’ clothing, has deeply entered during the decades the experience of different generations of Iranian women. From this critical perspective, Satrapi’s position destroys in a simple but evident way the ‘‘orientalist’’ vision through which the question of the veil is posed above all today, as the element of a contrast that presumes to oppose the East to the West, archaicism to modernity, or Á even worse Á Islam to democracy. This assumed dichotomy creates the stereotype upon which, as Antonella Giannone writes, ‘‘the woman wearing the veil calls into question a corporeality that shapes itself as opposed to the corporeality of the West’’. Giannone adds:
When we speak about the veil, we never talk about a charming exoticism. On the contrary, we refer to it as a simple square of cloth, as it is called in Germany, that on its own can lead us to the molten core of these intercultural issues and can call into question all the ghosts and polarisations between the West and the East that took form in the last few years. The veil becomes the symbol of the frightening side of an Islam that, for a number of reasons, escapes any categorisation even as a sign of fashion. It is a religious symbol, a vestimentary act that assumes a political meaning that has to be looked upon suspiciously, an alarming signal, as Goffman defines it . . . that warns us and interrupts the automatic flow of everyday signs (Giannone and Calefato 2007, 115Á116).
In the Iran described in Persepolis, the veil has the function of regulating female corporeality; it is the sign of a power that reaches the individual body, thus sanctioning its characteristics and its visible appearance. However, given that the body always possesses uncontrollable traits and a constitutive excess, the vestimentary performances constantly undermine prescriptions and become a field of conflict; a place where the expression of desire is disguised, a sort of daily masquerade that uses the signs of power and sabotages them from within, whether they are the veil for women or the beard for men. Thus the opposition between an assumed ‘‘archaic’’ monolithic Iran and a ‘‘modern’’ West tout-court becomes ludicrous. In this sense, Satrapi shows us explicit aspects of resistance; like the demonstrations against the headscarf that, unfortunately, were violently suppressed, and others that are more
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hidden although clearly visible if one knows how to see them Á for example, those that allow us to distinguish the ‘‘emancipated’’ woman because she has a tuft of hair that comes out of the headscarf. The cartoonist represents herself aged 13, at the beginning of the 1980s, happily wearing some objects that her parents have just given her from a brief journey in Turkey: Nike’s latest trainers, Michael Jackson’s badge from the music video of Thriller and a denim jacket. Marjane has just hung in her room posters of Iron Maiden and Kim Wilde, presents from the same journey, and has completed her outfit with the black headscarf compulsory when out on the street. During the past 30 years, since the tragic experience of the war against Iraq (1980Á1988) until today’s status under Ahmadinejad, varying forms of resistance to obscurantism have spread in Iran, above all among youths and women. Today’s situation in Iran has been described very well by the Italian journalist and scholar of Iranian origins Farian Sabahi (2007) in her book Un’estate a Teheran, in which she makes us breathe the air of an Iran where Á despite the limitations to freedom in politics, to the individual and, above all, to women Á women are protagonists and excellent workers in, for example, information and technology and engineering, where there is a widespread opposition to religious hierarchies, manifest in everyday apparently harmless actions, such as those of the cab drivers who refuse to take mullahs on board. In short, an Iran with a popular culture that differs from the one spread by the aggressive stereotypes propagandised by the rhetoric of the government (Sabahi 2007). 5. Signs and pop icons In her book, Sgrena takes into consideration the use that many Muslim women wearing the veil make of heavy and thorough make-up or sexy high-quality lingerie, even underneath the veil or the most prudish dress. In luxurious boutiques in Cairo or Abu Dhabi, branded veils are appearing. In the heart of Europe Á in Paris or Berlin Á young women wear their headscarf, changing colors and patterns every day, matching them to the style of their dress and wrapping them up according to the inspiration and the street trends they have themselves invented. In 2006 the Ikea store in Edmonton, North London, commissioned the online store The Hijab Shop to create a model of hijab for its Muslim employees who had requested one. One of the first company hijab was thus realised; easy to wear because it does not need any pins, without any frills and ‘‘modest’’, as the hijab in itself requires, this was made up of two navy blue pieces and ‘‘branded’’ with the golden yellow logo of the well-known Swedish furniture chain on the back. The consequent fusion between religious signs and the logo of the multinational company is an example of how in our era it is becoming increasingly difficult to state whether signs belong to ‘‘tradition’’ or to ‘‘modernity’’, to religion or to secularity (Akou 2007; Lewis 2007). To what extent is a glamorous veil like those sold by The Hijab Shop traditional or religious? How modern or secular is a symbol used on a label on a working uniform? The ‘‘clothed’’ body is a place where tastes and fashions are represented and shared, a place of edification of the myth, where desires and values are expressed, where power is noticeably ‘‘enforced’’ and manifested. This all occurs at the same time, all in a conflicting way, even more so if it is the body of a woman where the signs of power that define gender in a coercive way, such as the veil, mix with signs
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that are instead perceived by the wearer as expressions of freedom, with myths of mass culture and with fashion cult-objects, thus generating a third space, which is possible for the body, and a semiotic tension between elements in mutual opposition. Such tension is difficult to represent or express, as often there are no words that can translate it. For this reason, only literature such as a specific participated essay writing like those of Sgrena and Sabahi, or comics, greatly succeed. Why in Europe today is there a heated discussion focused on particular religious and cultural signs, like the veil, which may supposedly represent strong, confessional and integralist signs? The discussion caused by the French law that bans religious signs in public places, such as the Islamic veil in schools, carries in itself deep reasons for today’s way of considering questions such as the female body, intercultural contact, fashion and even freedom and equality Á values that are historically foundations of the French republic and of western democracies. Engaged intellectuals and feminist historians have welcomed this ban, because the veil is considered a sign of female submission and of cancellation of the woman’s physicality, through the covering of parts of the body such as the hair, and in the case of munaqqaba8 women, of their face as well. On the other hand, the streets of Paris filled with Muslim women who, together with many men, protested and claimed their ‘‘freedom’’ of choice about the veil. Over the past few years the question of the veil has bounced from France all over Europe, to countries where the presence of Muslims is extremely high. This has been the case in Germany, for example, where out of seven million foreigners, one-half are Muslims; more than two million of them Turkish, largely based in the capital Berlin. We are therefore talking about countries where the presence of women wearing the veil is everywhere a daily widespread reality: in streets, undergrounds, shops and workplaces. Following the French law, the German region of Schleswig-Holstein has also banned religious signs and has prevented them being worn in schools. It is clear that the veil and the cross will be the first to be banned; the Star of David will follow, and probably also the representations of Rama, Shiva and Visnu that decorate T-shirts and accessories with an ‘‘ethnic’’ inspiration. But what will happen to those tattoos with Celtic patterns so popular within some youth ‘‘street styles’’? Or Che Guevara T-shirts? Or those badges portraying rock stars? Or Nike and Adidas logos on trainers? ‘‘But these are secular symbols, consumerist at most, not religious’’, one might object. Nevertheless, it is important to question where religion tout-court ends and where the ‘‘secular mythology’’ of our present begins, a mythology made of stars, pop icons, logotypes of goods and cult objects. Let us consider also how language purloins a religious terminology when symbols that express a deep identification with someone or something are at stake. In these cases we rightfully use, in contexts that we usually consider laic and secularised, words such as icon, cult, or diva, which comes from divus, meaning god. Let us consider how brands and the names of goods are truly sacred names of our contemporaneity, which, like the name of the Jewish or Christian God, cannot be named in vain because the trademarkTM certifies its identity and uniqueness. 6. Conclusions I began this article by considering the concept of cultural translation in the sense intended by Bhabha, as the construction of a ‘‘Third Space’’, as well as in the sense
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intended by Chow, as an interrelation between cultural ‘‘ethnographies’’ such as cinema and visual culture, to which in this case we add fashion. Fashion represents both a field where cultures meet and a language in constant translation. If on the one hand it travels along the channels of global communication of famous brands, fairs and catwalks, then on the other hand the ‘‘local’’ characteristics of fashion today travel more and more intensively through street styles, hybrid tastes, unexpected changes and fusions. Specifically, I have analysed some ways in which on female bodies, through clothes, make-up and accessories, knowledge and forms of exploitation gradually form at the same time and signs of resistance are produced. Not only conditioned by power, desire, mass culture and fashion, the clothed body Á and in particular the female body Á presents an irreducible excess, a tension that absorbs and goes beyond all these sometimes even contrasting elements. Acknowledgements
With thanks to Leonardo Blonda (Roehampton University, UK), who translated this work.
Notes
1. I am applying the categories of imitation and distinction identified by Georg Simmel (1895) as fundamental in fashion. 2. Barthes argues that described fashion provides the analyst what human languages deny the linguist: that is to say, ‘‘pure synchrony’’ (Barthes 1967, 8). In this sense, clothes are not analysed like languages, but their existence is conceived by virtue of the language and of its modality of functioning. 3. Bhabha states: ‘‘The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People’’ (1994, 37). 4. In 1967, in the Naxalbari area of West Bengal, a peasant rebellion supported by the guerrilla style movement of the Naxalites took place, which the Indian government cracked down on with exceptional severity in 1971. Draupadi’s story is set in this context (Spivak 1987, 181Á182). 5. Spivak states: ‘‘Among Indian Aboriginals, I know a very small percentage of a small percentage that was ‘denotified’ in 1952. These forest-dwelling tribals, defined by the British as ‘criminal tribes,’ had been left alone not just by the British, but also by the Hindu and Muslim civilizations of India. They are not ‘radicals.’ But because they (unlike the larger ethnic groups) were left alone, they conform to certain cultural norms, thinking, like us, that culture is nature, and instantiate certain attitudes that can be extremely useful for us, who have lost them, in our global predicament. Their active cultural script is as much on the unravel, as ungraspable, as anyone else’s’’ (Spivak 1999, 384Á385). 6. The year 1907 is usually regarded as the birth of the first modern bra, with the publication in Vogue of pictures and drawings of a similar garment. 7. On the question of the veil in Turkey, see Saracgil (2004). 8. With the face covered.
Notes on contributor
Patrizia Calefato is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistica and Linguistica Informatica in the Facolta di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Universita degli Studi di Bari ‘‘Aldo Moro’’. She ` ` teaches Analisi socio-antropologica del prodotto di moda in the Corso di laurea in Scienze e
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tecnologie della moda, Bari. She has taught in many universities, including Helsinki, New Bulgarian University Á Sofia, Macerata, and Stockholm. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. She edited the Italian book Il sogno di butterfly (Rome: Meltemi, 2004), which includes some of the most important essays by Rey Chow.
References
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