PUBLICATION: The Woman in the Zoot Suit

La Bloga, a collective blog on Chicana/o and Latina/o arts and culture, has a fascinating interview with Catherine Ramirez, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (just out this year on Duke University Press).

I was especially gratified to find this interview as I was teaching one of Ramirez's earlier essays, "Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics," in my fashion course under the rubric of "subcultures and style police," alongside Kobena Mercer, Angela Davis (on her "afro image"), and a handful of news clippings and current editorials about the creeping spread of "baggy pants" ordinances -- that form of sartorial profiling that is also racial profiling, operationalizing (as Foucault put it in Abnormal) the categorization of individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it."

Writing for La Bloga, Olga Garcia Echeverria prefaces the must-read interview with this lovely series of ruminations :

When I wasn't highlighting passages in Catherine Ramirez' book, I found myself staring at the cover. The featured picture, printed in the Los Angeles Times in 1942, is both intriguing and haunting. It captures three young Chicana women being taken into police custody for allegedly being members of a pachuca gang, the Black Widows. One woman is gazing directly into the camera. I can't look at her without wondering who she is and what she's thinking. In fact, she inspires a litany of questions...

Who are these young women in baggy pants and huaraches entering a police car? What are their stories? Why have they and other women like them of the World War II era been so largely ignored by scholars and historians? And how is it that el pachuco (once demonized as a social menace, effeminate dresser and clueless pocho) got re-envisioned into history as an icon of masculinity, resistance, and cultural pride, whereas his female counterpart, la pachuca, dwindled into erasure?

Fall Fashion Forecast

An obvious F.Y.I., posting will continue to be wildly irregular from both of us until this fall, when I will be teaching my course, Gender and Women's Studies 490: The Politics of Fashion, again. I'll post at least once a week about this upper-division undergraduate seminar, to track the ups and downs of teaching that beauty and fashion are significant vectors of power. I'll be testing out new readings and assignments, including alternatives to the traditional seminar paper that might involve, say, a video ethnography of a mall (with references to Marianne Conroy's essay "Discount Dreams" on the outlet mall, Meaghan Morris' "Things to Do With Shopping Centers," or Elaine Abelson's When Ladies Go A-Thieving on middle-class women shoplifters in the Victorian era), or an art project along the lines of The Counterfeit Crochet or Emily Larned and Roxane Zargham's Lookbook 54, both fascinating commentaries on fashion's tensions between handmade luxury and homemade innovation in the first, and "traditional" standardization and temporary individualization in the second. Hell, I would also enjoy some sort of real-time performance piece, like The Grey Sweatsuit Revolution!

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying Tricia's thoughtfully composed query, "Would you wear garbage?", which is necessarily caught up in issues of "choice" and perceptions of value (including self-worth, whether one is invested in "I deserve only the best" or "I am a good person for being green and 'recycling'" or whatever), over at Bits and Bobbins.

And in the latest news about "racial-sartorial profiling," Florida's Palm Beach County Judge Laura Johnson ruled last week that the criminalization of "saggy pants," the result of a referendum targeting youth of color that had passed with the support of 72 percent of city voters the previous year, is unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Counterfeit Chic reports that Abercrombie & Fitch is back in the courtroom for racial discrimination, this time for designating certain hair hues as "appropriate" to black employees:

Former sales associate Dulazia Burchette claims that she was twice sent home to re-dye blonde highlights to a color she was "born with" before finally leaving A&F. According to the complaint, at least one other African American employee with nonconforming hair color was fired, another was allowed to work only in the stockroom until such time as she could dye her hair, and a third chose to wear a black wig. Caucasian employees' hair color and highlights were allegedly not subject to similar scrutiny.

Oh, Abercrombie, you never learn! I sure hope the New York Times is right -- that you're losing your "cool" at the mall, and taking a hit in the corporate pocketbook.

Lastly, I want to note that Minh-ha bought the Alexander McQueen tuxedo jumpsuit she fawned over here, and has successfully worn it to rave reviews!