Foucault News

Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, 3rd Edition, Polity, 2023

The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. Where once fashion was seen as marginal, it has now entered into core economic discourse focused around ideas about ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ work as a major driver of developed economies.

This third edition of The Fashioned Body, the most comprehensive revision to date, revisits the classic works on fashion, dress and the body, and introduces contemporary issues and debates in the area. With new sections and revisions to all chapters, the major updates pick up on recent debates on fashion from the perspective of decolonising the curriculum, diversity, queer studies, sustainability, the environment, and digital fashion. A newly expanded bibliography of contemporary studies of fashion and dress is also included. The book continues to show how an understanding of fashion and dress requires analysing the meanings and practices of the dressed body in culture. Moreover, its central premise – that fashion is a ‘situated practice’ articulated through everyday dressed bodies – has become established orthodoxy within fashion studies since publication of the first edition in 2000.

Remaining a seminal text in the field, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social role of fashion and dress in modern culture.

From the 1st edition description
In examining fashion in relation to the body, the book offers amuch needed synthesis between the literature on fashion and dress, which has tended to ignore the body, and the sociology of the body, which has tended to marginalize fashion and dress. Entwistle shows how an understanding of fashion and dress requires an understanding of the meanings acquired by the body in culture – since it is the body that fashion speaks to and which is dressed in almost all social situations and encounters. She argues that while fashion refers to a specific system of dress originating in the west, all cultures ′dress′ the body in the same way, making it a crucial feature of social order. Drawing on the work of Douglas, Foucault, Merleau–Ponty, Goffman and Bourdieu, the book offers insights into the connections that need to be made between the body, fashion and dress, arguing for an account of fashion and dress as ′situated bodily practice′.

Yin-An Chen, Toward a Micro-Political Theology. A Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Liberation Theologies
Foreword by Jeremy Carrette, Pickwick Publications, 2022

Has liberation theology reached a dead end? Has the time come to propose another strategy of political resistance, one that considers and takes account of the complexity of power relationships in daily life? How can we explore the deeper meaning of freedom and liberation? This book begins with a reflection on the “failure” of social movements and revolutions and a review of the methodologies of liberation theologies. Offering a brand-new micro-political theology, it attempts to demonstrate how Michel Foucault can help us recognize the limitations of our standard definitions of liberation. Continuing Foucault’s critical engagement with desire, sexuality, and the body, this book opens a fresh dialogue between Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology, Latin American liberation theology, and radical orthodoxy, leading to an exploration of how that dialogue can remind us that spirituality and the transformative practice of the self can themselves be fully political. It also urges prayer as both the radical root of political resistance and its action.

Yin-An Chen is research associate at Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide and lecturer of theology and Anglicanism in Taiwan. He received his MPhil in theology from Kent, an MA in Christian theology from Durham, and an MA in anthropology from National Taiwan University. He is interested in queer theology, political theology, and critical theory.