Das Margherita-von-Brentano-Zentrum präsentiert im Sommersemester 2022 erneut an drei Terminen Projekte und Neuerscheinungen aus dem Bereich der Geschlechterforschung der Freien Universität Berlin. Die Gender Lunch Talks sind in diesem Semester als Online- und Hybridveranstaltungen geplant.

Alle Interessierten sind herzlich dazu eingeladen, Lunch »mitzubringen« und mitzudiskutieren!

Input

Dr. Samira Spatzek, John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien

Fashion Literatures in Nineteenth-Century America: Kate Chopin’s “La Belle Zoraïde”

This Gender Lunch Talk zooms in on Kate Chopin’s short story “La Belle Zoraïde.” First published in the ladies’ fashion magazine Vogue in 1894, “La Belle Zoraïde,” in essence, is a tragic mulatta story woven around the wedding of a white lady’s house slave. In this talk, I am considering the cultural work (Tompkins) done by this short story in terms of the intricate connections between literature, fashion, gender, race, and violence. I do this as part of my current research project, which examines US fashion media such as literary fiction and mass-circulation magazines from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, also to be introduced in this talk. The project’s overarching goal is to examine how different communities of such “fashion literatures” negotiate diverging ideologies of fashion across genre while competing for what we might want to call their own “fashionability” in the literary market. Within this framework, the project examines how notions of literature and fashion have mutually constituted each other as well as how these notions relied on racialized gender norms. How do these fashion texts’ rhetorical and visual repertoires create and consolidate various versions of white femininity?

Die Zugangsdaten zur Veranstaltung finden Sie hier.