scholarly journals Shaping Toronto: female economy and agency in the corset industry, 1871-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Consumers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Relationship

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.

scholarly journals Shaping Toronto: female economy and agency in the corset industry, 1871-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Consumers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Relationship

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.

Embodiment in Ezekiel

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Graybill
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Bodies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The People ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Constructing Meaning ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter shows how embodiment plays an important role in constructing meaning in the book of Ezekiel. The text contains a number of bodies, including human bodies (Ezekiel, the people of Judah), supernatural or divine bodies (Yahweh, the cherubim, various divine messengers), metaphorical bodies (the female bodies in Ezekiel 16 and 23), foreign bodies (various foreign nations), and animate “dry bones” in Ezekiel 37. The body is central to the practice of prophecy in the book. It is likewise fundamental to performances of gender and to the negotiation of the relationship between Yahweh and the people, including Ezekiel himself. Focusing on the body also highlights the significance of masculinity in the text, as well as its instability.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

Gaze-related activity of putative inhibitory burst neurons in the head-free cat

1993 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 2678-2683 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. E. Cullen ◽  
D. Guitton ◽  
C. G. Rey ◽  
W. Jiang
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Head Movements ◽  
Related Activity ◽  
Visual Axis ◽  
Abducens Nucleus ◽  
Gaze Shifts ◽  
Burst Neurons ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Output Neurons ◽  
The Relationship

1. Previous studies in the cat have demonstrated that output neurons of the superior collicular as well as brain stem omnipause neurons have discharges that are best correlated, not with the trajectory of the eye in the head but, with the trajectory of the visual axis in space (gaze = eye-in-head + head-in-space) during rapid orienting coordinated eye and head movements. In this study, we describe the gaze-related activity of cat premotor “inhibitory burst neurons”(IBNs) identified on the basis of their position relative to the abducens nucleus. 2. The firing behavior of IBNs was studied during 1) saccades made with the head stationary, 2) active orienting combined eye-head gaze shifts, and 3) passive movements of the head on the body. IBN discharges were well correlated with the duration and amplitude of saccades made when the head was stationary. In both head-free paradigms, the behavior of cat IBNs differed from that of previously described primate “saccade bursters”. The duration of their burst was better correlated with gaze than saccade duration, and the total number of spikes in a burst was well correlated with gaze amplitude and generally poorly correlated with saccade amplitude. The behavior of cat IBNs also differed from that of previously described primate “gaze bursters”. The slope of the relationship between the total number of spikes and gaze amplitude observed during head-free gaze shifts was significantly lower than that observed during head-fixed saccades. 3. These studies suggest that cat IBNs do not fit into the categories of gaze-bursters or saccade-bursters that have been described in primate studies.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

scholarly journals Adjusting Swedish gymnastics to the female nature: Discrepancies in the gendering of girls’ physical education in the mid-nineteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Johannes Westberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Differences ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western World ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Relationship

During the nineteenth century, Swedish gymnastics became one of the main models of physical education in the Western world. The purpose of this article is to explore how Swedish gymnastics was adjusted to the female body and mind in the mid-nineteenth century. Using handbooks published by the Swedish educationalist Anton Santesson as an empirical starting point, this article shows how the relationship between gender and gymnastics was complicated and exhibited significant discrepancies. In part, Swedish gymnastics was marked by a one-sex model of gender differences, which meant that gymnastics was perceived as a method for catering to the deficiencies and weaknesses of the feminine nature, in an attempt to make girls and young women more similar to boys. Swedish gymnastics had, nevertheless, vital elements of a two-sex model, according to which gymnastics was supposed to realise the true feminine nature of girls. Following this line of thought, Santesson claimed that, since gymnastics merely followed the laws of the body, it could not make girls more like boys. Santesson’s vision of gymnastics also included disciplinary mechanisms, such as the partitioning of space, which were gender neutral. Apart from presenting insights into the ambiguous and contradictory notions of gender in Swedish girls’ gymnastics, this article thus also raises questions regarding whether other models of physical education were marked by similar discrepancies during the nineteenth century. 

Occupying the Land, Grabbing the Body

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
Nena Močnik
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Patriarchal System ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Voluntary Choice ◽  
The Military

This article traces trajectories of colonized bodies and (female) sexualities through the geopolitical and historical continuity in the territories of what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. Starting with the historiographic overview of women under Ottoman rule, the author addresses the “patriarchal bargain,” that is, women’s (in)voluntary choice to accommodate the frame of patriarchal norms and restrictions. The second section moves to the period of the Bosnian war in the 1990s and turns to the study of female bodies subjected to “double colonialism.” If women had been previously codified, categorized, and disciplined through the patriarchal system, during the war, the author claims, the military, political, and cultural occupation of their “land” doubles the “colonialization.” In the third part of this study, the author observes how the history of (semi)colonial practices in Bosnia-Herzegovina is reflected in present cultural patterns and physical manifestations through women’s bodies as the phenomenon that some authors with (justified) hesitation call “neo-ottomanism.”

Gruesome models: European displays of natural history and anatomy and nineteenth-century literature

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Anatomical Models ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

In ‘Gruesome models: European Displays of Natural History and Anatomy and Nineteenth-Century Literature’ Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores the process in which from the second half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, medical museums opened their doors throughout Europe and anatomical models circulated between Italy, Germany, France and England, serving to educate professional medical audiences and thrilling lay audiences keen on freaks and fairs. The chapter argues that the popularisation of anatomy and the circulation of anatomical models and modellers, exhibitions and anatomists throughout Europe was reflected in nineteenth-century literature, from Gothic novels to realistic narratives and even children’s fiction. Looking at the impact of the material culture of medicine upon the literary field, Talairach-Vielmas examines the relationship between literature and the European anatomical culture by exploring nineteenth-century narratives from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in the first decades of the nineteenth-century to Charles Dickens’s fiction in the 1860s, analysing novels alongside travel guides and journal articles which demonstrate how the specific example of anatomy influenced the literary culture.

Sustainable practice: The future mode of temporality in fashion

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harah Chon
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Sustainable Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Meaning Creation ◽  
Sociocultural Development ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
The Relationship

Fashion is indicative of time and, serving as the interpretive and representational forms of a society, is measured against the cyclical rhythms of trend diffusion and style adoption. This article examines the function of time within the framework of historical research, reviewing the construction and translation of contemporary fashion. The temporality of material objects is further probed by an analysis of the sociocultural development of current sustainable practices to grasp the affective nature of time and its relationship to the fashion system. With an overview of emerging sustainable design practices, the relationship between time and meaning creation is critically examined, analysed and discussed. The social production of design and its utilization of the body-as-space are presented in relation to the social construction of time, explicated as part of a subjective, embodied experience. This article presents a new modality of time in how it is articulated, imitated, reproduced and reinterpreted through material culture and future sustainable practices.

scholarly journals At Home in the World? The Ornamental Life of Sailors in Victorian Sailortown

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-485
Author(s):  
Emily Cuming
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Maritime Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
At Home

This article explores the representation of British sailortown and merchant sailors onshore in the context of their representation in Victorian writing and contemporary journalism. It proposes that sailortown functioned as an urban setting which offered the traveling or returning sailor an important sense of homeliness—a homeliness that was paradoxically based on the promotion of a collective and worldly belonging. This sense of “worldliness” was articulated through aspects of ornamental material culture ranging from sailortown's visual display of nautical and transnational symbols, to the interior arrangements of places of hospitality such as Sailors’ Homes, to sailors’ own forms of portable property. By thinking more closely about the relationship between the domestic and the global in the context of maritime culture, the article proposes that the ornamental features of the seafarer's life, in all its diverse manifestations, serves to reveal the paradoxes and rich ambivalences that underscore the situation of the nineteenth-century sailor onshore.

scholarly journals Le sommeil d’un mannequin: exploring material memory through film

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Del Giacco
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
The Body ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Human Essence ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
The Relationship

Le Sommeil d’un mannequin is a practice-based research project that examines the relationship between the female body and the body of the mannequin through creative methods of plaster body casting and experimental film. The film, Le Sommeil d’un mannequin, conveys the psychic experience of memory found in the unconsciousness state. Through the use of experimental filmmaking, this project speaks to the transformative power of memories and the interpretation of memory that is implied in the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud. Subsequently, this project bares importance to the study of material culture because it takes into account the human essence present in the fabrication and production of cultural objects. Applying Jules Prown’s method of object analysis uncovered the role of the mannequin to be more than just a cultural display of feminine identity.

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