Abstract |
Expanding critical scholarship on fashion, gender, and identity, this study aims to explore how dress and style can be used in a strategy of resistance through analyzing Chinese youths’ narratives about their appearance, personal style, gender, culture, and self. The study mainly draws on the philosophical ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to engage with a research agenda, which disrupts the transcendent logic and challenges binarism and essentialism as the guiding approach to fashion studies. Inspired by Deleuze and Guatarri’s concepts of rhizomatic thought and becoming, this exploration works within the realm of post-qualitative research. The study develops its argument through tracing two lines of creative “becoming” or lines of flight emerging from the “molecular mapping,” pointing to the moments of rupture and deterritorialization: gender and style; the ethics of consumption and style. The findings demonstrate the subversive potential in dress which challenges normalcy and regularity as well as consumerism, highlighting the complexity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of gender, fashion, and subjectivity. It advocates the creation of more inclusive spaces and potential socially just territories through fashion and clothing.
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