FREN 017E. FYS: Fashioning the Self: The Shapeshifting of Identity in the French and Francophone World

From as early as the fifteenth century, fashion has been considered an important institution in France. King Charles VII was asked to establish a separate ministry of fashion, so much so that he codified this institution as an integral part of cultural life in Metropolitan France. When we think of the term “fashion” today, images of fluid skirts and dresses, tailored power suits, coats, shirts, trousers, shoes, and other luxe accessories come to mind. Susan Kaiser reminds us that fashion is not a “thing” or “essence”, but rather a social process of negotiation and involves “becoming” in the Deleuzian sense of the term.

The structure of fashion as a global system involves change, a break with the old in search of “the eternal occurrence of the new” (Benjamin). Most importantly, fashion is the stuff of identity, forever in motion, negotiating subject positions including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, and tribe . This ‘fashioning’ or navigation of power relations involves mixing, borrowing, and belonging gesturing toward change or creolization. In viewing fashion as philosophy, we will examine how fashion has been used and continues to be used as a vestimentary trope of subversion and transgression. The ultimate goal of this negotiation involves the ‘shapeshifting’ of troubled and vexed identities in the French and Francophone context expressed through literature, autobiography, historiography, film, cultural studies, and the ephemeral archive.

Seminar will be taught in English.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Fall 2024. Smith.
Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: French and Francophone Studies
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/french-francophone-studies

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