Fashion, Body and the Trauma of Modernity
Date Issued
2005-10-31
Date
2005-10-31
Author(s)
DOI
932411H002006
Abstract
As a mode of perception strongly related to modern urban experience and material culture,
“modernity” has successfully re-energized a new wave of scholarly analysis by breaking the
conceptual boundaries of “modernization” as the effect of an industrializing economy and
“modernism” as a study of high art and literature. Fashion as the central visual metaphor and
material practice of urban modernity, inevitably, becomes one of the major defining features of
this new wave.
This three-year research project aims at exploring the formation of Chinese urban modernity
from 1840 to 1949 in light of fashion as the traumatic surface. Judged from the turbulent history
of modern China, the changes of sartorial style stand as an over-determined sign of
nation-building and the constant inter-cultural and cross-gender dressing creates an atmosphere of
disorder and chaos. The forced incorporation of the Western style entails a radical body
(de)formation of Chinese modernity. No matter it is Western clothing dressed in the Chinese
way or vice versa, or clothing worn inside/out or outside/in, no matter it is cheongsam or Sun
Yet-sen suit, the uncanny and hybrid fashion of Chinese modernity presents not only the
fluctuating signifying system of nation-building, but also the phantasmagoric introjections and
projections, identification and desire of China’s mirrored relationship with the West.
This project thus traces and evaluates the ambivalent and complex role played by sartorial
fashion in the transformation of Chinese nation-state to foreground how the materiality of the sign
penetrates the materiality of the body and how the shame experience and inferiority/superiority
complex help to create the gendered subjectivity. It tries to map out in sartorial details the
traumatic surface of the modern Chinese subject created by the mechanism of displacement and
metonymy when the dualistic concepts of China/the West, tradition/modernity,
consciousness/unconsciousness, the literal/the figural, body/clothing are all collapsed together.
Subjects
modernity
trauma
fashion
shame
the uncanny
hybridity
Publisher
臺北市：國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所
Type
report
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