"Women Recovering Our Clothes" Iris Marion Young - 1990

Young is not quite as optimistic as Berry, but up there. Sharing of clothes and sharing of identity, clothes are often very personal sites of identity expression. She also examines Touch as an under-examined site of feminism. Psychoanalysis fetish with vision and ignores the tactile (and other senses).

Women’s experience of clothing is “saturated with the experience of images of women in clothing” and images have only recently become widely accessible through mass print to middle/lower class.

The dominant pictorial aesthetic is in part represented in film. Associating style and fashions with a cinematic narrative “fuses the unconscious effects of film experience with the very lines and colors of clothing designs.” (p.200)

Young cites Lacan and Mulvey saying “in film both voyeuristic and fetishistic looking deny the threatening difference of the female, either judging her lacking and guilty or turning her body or parts of her body into an icon in which the subject finds himself, his phallus.” (p.201) Yet she is concerned with how women, in the face of this objectification, can still find pleasure in films (and fashion). “When I leaf through magazines and catalogs I take my pleasure from imagining myself perfected and beautiful and sexual for the absent or mirrored male gaze.” (p.202)

“Patriarchal fashion folds create a meticulous paradigm of the woman well dressed for the male gaze, then endows with guilt the pleasure we might derive for ourselves in these clothes. Misogynist mythology gloats in its portrayal of women as frivolous body decorators.” (p.203) Her methodology is to talk from personal experience and hope it resonates with some women (most likely those most similar to her, white, middle class, heterosexual women in late capitalist society) about clothes in relation to Touch, Bonding and Fantasy.

Touch - If masculine desire expresses itself visually (and at a distance) then feminine desire moves more through the intimate medium of touch. Sensual, tactile imaginations and connection to clothes not just visually but through all sensations.

Bonding - Women develop a rapport and bonding over clothes. Exchanging clothes is like exchanging parts of our identities.

Fantasy - “Implicitly feminist critics of media images of women have tended to assimilate all images of women as the object of the male gaze. Clothing ads are split, however, between positioning women as object and women as subject. Clothing images are not always the authoritative mirror that tells who’s the fairest of them all, but the entrance to a wonderland of characters and situations.” (p.207) Women tend to create narratives out of what is implied in the ad and then derive pleasure “in the fantasy of clothes” by “partly imagining ourselves in those possible stories.” (p.208)