May 2007

Women and their clothes: A feminist approach to loving (RIP: Iris Marion Young - 1949-2006)

Some of our clothes we love for their own sake, because their fabric and cut and color charm us and relate to our bodies in specific ways - because, I almost want to say, they love us back (Iris Marion Young)

Clothes. Why do we love them? Feminism has rightly analysed our love of fashion as a desire to be seen as desirable. We know what that means: it means we dress to be either desired by men, or to be envied by other women. Well, this is true to a large extent. But the recently deceased feminist philosopher, Iris Marion Young, interrogated our love of fashion and found it to be more than just a desire for the male gaze and/or a desire to be envied by other women (a form of aggression), which she rightly insists that it is, with the latter simply being a logical extension of the former (when other women envy our appearance, they do so because they "know" it means competition for the male gaze). Iris Marion Young accepted this feminist position, but also wanted to posit something else, something that acknowledged and appreciated a certain shared love and conversation between women that involved clothes.

Iris Marion Young was an American philosopher. She died last year (1st August 2006) after a battle with cancer. She was a much loved colleague and teacher, with her brilliant mind engaging questions concerning feminism, social justice (especially women's and workers' rights), global responsibility, and democracy as a philosophical category. But it was her essay, 'Women Recovering Our Clothes' (in On Fashion, eds., S. Benstock and S. Ferris; New Brunswick: Rutgers; pp127-210) that made me really love and fully appreciate her work, for it opened my eyes concerning a feminist philosophical approach to women's lives and their intimate experiences with each other. Consider the following:

Girls often establish relations of intimacy by exchanging clothes; sisters and roommates raid each other's closets, sometimes unpermitted; daughters' feet clomp around in their mothers' shoes. I love my sweater, and in letting you wear it you wear an aspect of me, but I do not possess it, since you can wear it. Or I go into a fit of rage upon discovering that you have gone out in my favourite blouse, for in doing so you have presumed to take my place. As the clothes flow among us, so do our identities; we do not keep hold of ourselves, but share.

How many of us screamed at our sisters for stealing our clothes? How many of our mothers screamed at us for stealing their clothes? I personally "clomped around" in my mum's shoes, also destroying her make-up, as I pretended to be a teacher of, well, mainly teddy bears. My mum always smiled and laughed at the sight of me.

How many of our sisters screamed at us for stealing their clothes? And how many times have we willing said (or have our mothers or sisters willingly said) "O, wear this! It'll look great on you…O, yes that looks gorgeous! It looks better on you than on me!" And how many times has another woman, a friend, lent her clothes to us and said the same thing? In these intimate, beautiful moments, are we really thinking about men, or even thinking in envy of our beloved women friends or family? Absolutely not. As Marion Young points out, this is one of the ways we are truly caring and intimate with each other as women, as human beings who are women. We enjoy each other this way. And that is incredibly valuable to us.

I speak from experience. If you have never had the experience of a friend or family member lending you their clothes and saying "O, you look gorgeous," then you are missing out on one of the most lovely, female-female moments in life. 'Female-female,' as a gendered relationship is, of course, probably better known as a porn fantasy. But, as Iris Marion Young reminds us, this is not our everyday experience as women. Friendship, love between women is real. Personally speaking, my great and wonderful friend (and editor of this site) Kristin Devitt, was called upon to assist me with a job interview recently. I used to own suits, but with the last ten years spent studying, my suits had long gone to seed. I asked if Kris could help. She got on the phone to her sister, Marnie, who provided an appropriate little number. When I tried it on at the Devitt household, Kris said "That looks fabulous! Good legs on the pants. Yes!" I felt a million bucks, even though I didn't get the job. I felt loved by my friend and her sister, and that meant more to me than any job, let me tell you. These great women wanted me to look and feel great for my interview. Their support is priceless to me.

Now, we know that, as women, we do experience jealousy. How can we help it? Our culture tells us we are in competition with other women for the desirous gaze of men. This is something Marion Young is well aware of:

It's all true, I guess; at least I cannot deny it: in clothes I seek to find the approval of the transcending male gaze; in clothing I seek to transform myself into a bewitching object that will capture his desire and identity. When I leaf through magazines and catalogs I take my pleasure in these images of female bodies in their clothes because my own gaze occupies the position of the male gaze insofar as I am subject at all.

And yet ...

Women often bond with each other by shopping for clothes. Many a lunch hour is spent with women in twos and threes circulating through Filene's Basement, picking hangers off the racks and together entering the mirror-walled common dressing room…Women take care of one another in the dressing room, often knowing when to be critical and discouraging and when to encourage a risky choice or an added expense. Women buy often enough on these expeditions, but often they walk out of the store after an hour of dressing up with no parcels at all; the pleasure was in the choosing, trying, and talking, a mundane shared fantasy.

Marion Young reminds us of those intimate moments with our female friends and relatives, those moments where we take care of each other and sacrosanctly (as in the confession box) speak to each other with an honesty, confidence and true love of each other. This is often beyond the need to "shop" or purchase fashion. This is friendship, shared as women know how, given what our culture tells us women are. We move out of our private spheres and into the public, bringing our own specific forms of inter-personal relationships into that very much masculine-designed public space of commerce. Yes, we are expected to shop, but we do so with an unforeseen benefit: friendship and love between women.

Crucial also to Marion Young's understanding of our pleasure as women relating to fashion is touch. In other words, our love of fashion extends beyond the shared intimacy of vocalised friendship to a shared love of the textual. This is where Marion Young's argument really becomes original. I won't go in to the details of her argument, built on the great French Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray's attention to touch over and above sight, but I will say this: Marion Young reminds us of the importance of fabric, of the experience of running your fingers over a delicious garment made from a fabric that is not only gorgeous to look at, but also, more importantly, to touch. Marion Young suggests that, as women, our shared love of fashion has the potential to move beyond a patriarchal need to be seen, and a perverse need to outdo other women, because of our shared love of touching fabrics. Together, we touch and talk about clothes with an intimacy than makes our bonds stronger. Her final suggestion is that we come together to create clothes for each other, something almost lost given our magazines, our busy lives, and the ease of "off-the-rack" shopping. Something worth thinking about, nevertheless.

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Julie Kelso e julieanne.kelso@uq.edu.au