Dangerous Bodies

Royce Mahawatte is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and a member of the faculty at NYU London, UK. He is the author of George Eliot and the Gothic Novel (2013) and has published journal articles in Women’s Writing and Sexualities, and the chapters ‘Fashion and Adornment’ in A Cultural History of Hair (2018) and 'The Sad Fortunes of ‘Stylish Things’: George Eliot and the Languages of Fashion' in Communicating Transcultural Fashion Narratives (2018). He is also Director of Research at the think tank Fashion Roundtable, and during 2020-2021 was a Heinz Heinen Fellow at the Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. Jacki Willson is Associate Professor in Performance and Gender in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published two monographs – TheHappy Stripper: Pleasure and Politics of the New Burlesque (2008) and Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual (2015) – and one edited collection, Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking (2020).  She is Principal Investigator of a three-year AHRC-funded project, Fabulous Femininities: Extravagant Costume and Transformative Thresholds (2020-).

• 1. Introduction: Fashion, Bodies, Transgression, Royce Mahawatte and Jacki Willson.- Section 1, Dangerous Surfaces.- 2. Contagion and the Excess of Gender, Race, and Commodity, Nigel Lezama, Cardi B’s Nails.- 3. “Let me be your Stimmy Toy”: Fashioning Disability, Cripping Fashion, Jana Melkumova-Reynolds.- 4. “Under False Colors”: Nineteenth-Century Masquerading Laws and Black Disabled Transgender Embodiment in Post-Civil War Memphis, Ardel Haefele-Thomas.- 5. “One Club Fits All”: Male Embodiment in an Age of Homonormativity, Royce Mahawatte.- Section 2, Fashion and Spatial Transgression.-  6. The Politicisation of Palestinian Embroidery since 1948, Rachel Dedman.- 7. Polish ‘Black Protests’: political dress and the politics of fashion, Alicja Raciniewska.- 8. Performative Elegance: The Windrush Generation, Fashion and the Politics of Respectability, Telecia Kirkland.- Section 3 Embodiment and Abstract Boundaries.- 9. Non-Norm-(Hard)-Core: Hood by Air’s Porn Archive, Francis Summers.- 10. Consuming (beyond plain) Vanilla: ‘straight’ coupledom and illicit performativities on popular culture TV show Love Island, Jacki Willson.- 11. Terrifying Beauty – Theatrical Self-Performance in Leonor Fini’s Art and Life, Andrea Kollnitz.