Funambulist #15 Clothing politics #2 (jan/feb 2018)

The articles and projects presented in this issue feature instances of clothing that act as subversions of the gendered, colonial, racialized, and/or ableist normative contexts in which they are respectively worn. Ryme Seferdjeli (“The Veil in Colonial Algeria”), Wendy Matsumura (“A (Hi)story of Okinawan Clothes”), Alex Shams (“Afghan Miniskirts and the ‘War on Terror’”), and Venida Devenida (“Politics of the Bra”) link histories of settler colonialism, imperialism, and misogyny with their operative inertia in contemporary realities; Eric Darnell Pritchard (“Overalls”) and Mukhtara Yusuf (“Clothing as Healing”) engage with different aspects of clothing in relation to Blackness; Hoda Katebi discusses her work on the various imperialist and capitalist politics deployed against the hijab; and Lucia Cuba (“Articulo 6”) introduces the sartorial embodiment she created to address the memory of the Peruvian Government’s violent campaign of forced sterilization of indigenous women in the early 2000s. Finally, the three student projects created respectively by Joy Marie Douglas (“Rebranded”), Moira Schneider (“Worn”), Julia Lao, Claudia Poh, and Estee Bruno (“Unparalleled”) propose a more operative embodiment of the politics of social stigmatization, the norm, and ableism. As always, the issue also features guest columns addressing world political struggles against state violence and colonialism in Chiapas (Ruperta Bautista Vázquez), Tahiti-Nui (J. Vehia Wheeler), and West Africa (Bruno Boudiguet).