Sep 4, 2024 11:15 AM
To be confirmed
Cancelled

The presidential dress

The presidential dress

Panel:
[PA] Fashion, Semiotics and Reality: How Fashion Designs Gender Realities? (José María Paz Gago, Bianca Terracciano, Maya Marx Starque, Giulia Adriana Ceriani, Román Padín, Janiene Santos, Mirela Perez, Jacqueline Ausier, André Peruzzo, Andréia Meneguete)
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Speaker:
Margarida Amaro
ICNOVA - NOVA Institute of Communication, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
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This paper focuses on analyzing the process of neutralizing the binary category of gender (Greimas & Courtès, 1979) that traditional African dress undergoes when it enters the fashion system, with a focus on the Namibian context. The aim is to explore how clothing and fashion influence and transcend binary gender norms in Africa, considering various intersecting factors like ethnicity, age, rites, and class (Reilly & Barry, 2020).During the memorial of the late Namibian President Hage Geingob, his daughters made a unique fashion statement by wearing pinstripe Damara dresses, paying tribute to his distinctive style in a culturally significant way.With this gesture, they transformed the traditional Damara dress into a tuxedo-style dress through a process of transposition or transference (Lévi-Strauss, 2021) - translation, according to Fabbri (2017) - of elements from the male dress code universe into the female domain, giving it an air of ambiguity (Lotman,1998). It is not only a reinterpretation of the YSL smoking dress but also a recreation of the Zoot (suit) dress or an evocation of Papa Wemba’s way of dress. Not just a statement: wearing stripes is neither neutral nor natural (Pastoreau,1991), unlike the word dress, which is gender neutral.Therefore, the meaning of dress is fluid because the norm has no distinctive features (Lotman, 2009): sharing a blurred vision of masculine and feminine is now the new norm (Reilly & Barry, idem). “To be able to blend. That's what realness is”, explains Corey in “Paris is Burning” (cited by Hendrickson, 1996).

Location:
3.146 room, WLS (Dobra 55 street)

Explore Sessions

02
September
9:30
-
10:30
Location:
Mickiewicz Hall, Auditorium Maximum (Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28 str.)
Congress events
Opening Ceremony

September 2, 2024
Congress events
Mickiewicz Hall, Auditorium Maximum (Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28 str.)
02
September
10:30
-
11:30
Location:
Mickiewicz Hall, Auditorium Maximum (Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28 str.)
From Signs of Language to Semioses of Life: Paradigms and Turns in Global Semiotics

September 2, 2024
Mickiewicz Hall, Auditorium Maximum (Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28 str.)
02
September
11:30
-
12:15
Location:
Australia Hall, WLS (Dobra 55 street)
Catering
Coffee break [catering]

September 2, 2024
Catering
Australia Hall, WLS (Dobra 55 street)
Margarida Amaro