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Foucault Studies No. 36 Special Issue: Foucault's Legacy in Contemporary Thinking: Forty Years Later (1984-2024)
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Power + Fashion
Get PDF“Power dressing,” itself a women’s dress reform movement, as it came to be called in the 1970s, used to distinguish typical feminine dress styles and was seen as a necessary strategy for a more subdued image on par with the masculine, serious, and formal professional dress, namely the ubiquitous suit and tie. This new ‘career’ woman became visible by her appearance and choice of dress codes that reinforced her position as a businesswoman who was seriously committed to her work. But from the perspective of the first decades of the new millennium, power dressing and power and fashion have far wider meanings and ramifications. For Michel Foucault, power is a regulatory principle that is used to control social interactions and to impose structures that inform the ways in which we act and appear. In line with Foucault’s analysis, to dress is already to respond to tacit frameworks of power, and because it involves already accepted codes of visualisation and behaviour, to “power dress” is not simply to wield or enact power voluntarily but to succumb to it as well. Further, as this paper will reveal, power dressing can also be understood according to Foucault’s “technologies of self”, which sees the historical subject as both subject and object of a network of discursive forces that are considered normative as opposed to constructed. Power dressing still exists today but according to a more nuanced and multivalent configuration. It can also be thought of as a particular form of renunciation that facilitates an embodiment of power much as religious asceticism and privation is (purportedly) constitutive of a more authentic self.fals
Foucault's Legacy in Contemporary Thinking: Forty Years Later (1984-2024) - Foucault Studies Special Issue
No full textMichel Foucault was undoubtedly one of the most important and influential philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. It is not surprising that in 2024, on the fortieth anniversary of Foucault’s death, an abundance of tributes paid to the thought and work of this author has emerged (consider, for example, the “World Congress: Foucault 40 Years After”). Among these, the tribute of the journal Foucault Studies, one of the main international “places” for analysis and reflection on the French philosopher, could not be missing. We believe that this guest-edited special issue of Foucault Studies is capable not only of confirming the fundamental influence of Foucault’s thought on today’s intellectual debates but also of testifying to its unprecedented ability to offer fruitful, penetrating, and original conceptual tools which can help us decipher the physiognomy of our time in its diversity and complexity. Forty years after Foucault’s death, we can thus say: Michel Foucault is dead, long live Michel Foucault
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