Special Issue of Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion
Men’s Fashion in the Age of AIDS
Editors: Jonathan Kaplan and Peter McNeil
Abstracts due for review: 30 July 2022
Authors notified of decisions: 30 August 2022
Completed articles due: 30 September 2022
Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion under its incoming editors Dr Jonathan Kaplan (Sydney Jewish Museum and UTS) and Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil (UTS) place a call for papers for a Special Issue ‘Men’s Fashion in the Age of AIDS’.
As the world reels from the coronavirus, we remember AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), a virus first ‘identified’ in 1981 (but likely existing much longer) which has killed 36.3 million people worldwide and affects another 37 million Living With AIDS. AIDS has affected women, men, trans and non-binary populations but was particularly devastating for men who had sex with men as well as POC, sex workers, IV drug users and other vulnerable populations. AIDs continues to affect many parts of the world, has affected the consciousness of close to two generations, and galvanised a range of human rights movements including gay, queer, intersex and trans rights. Much of this has a fashion dimension.
Building upon much of the work of outgoing editor Andrew Reilly and their guest editors, this special issue of CSMF welcomes any interlinked historical and theoretical approaches to the study of men’s fashion in the age of AIDS. Global approaches to men’s fashion in the
age of AIDS are most welcome, keeping in mind much of Europe in the 1980s was behind the ‘iron curtain’, AIDS was a major cause of death in many African countries, and the AIDS pandemic is not yet ‘under control’. Case studies and micro-histories linking dress and identities are most welcome, as well as creative, reflective-practice and non-traditional research submissions.
We welcome all relevant papers that embrace any aspect of men’s fashion as dressed and bodily experience. For example, as Sarah Schulman argues in her Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (2021) the protest movement ACT UP’s membership included skilled figures from advertising and design who created unified and striking T shirts, posters and banners. The effect of their design was to create optimum impact for ACT UP’s protests in the news media but had the important secondary impact of creating ‘a new aesthetic as a mode of identification’ (Schulman).
Fashion is not just a material product. It also forms aesthetic knowledge and experience that is often transmitted by inter-generational practices. We therefore welcome relevant papers that fall outside the chronology of the 1980s–present day.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Fashion designers and fashion creators: a lost generation
• Questioning notions of fashion, gender and sexuality
• Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the AIDS crisis
• Reactive fashion: realignment of the fashion and luxury industries in the age of AIDS
• Fashion and intersectional homophobia, sexism, and racism
• Fashion and protest
• Fashion and activism
• Fashion and androgyny
• ACT UP: design strategies, protest and everyday dress
• Fashion and the ‘politics of respectability’ (David Halperin)
• Fashion and anxiety
• Transgender transformations or revisions in male fashion
• Fashion and camp
• Fashion and escapism in the age of AIDS
• The role of women in men’s fashion in the age of AIDS
• Femininity and male fashion
• Non-gay participants in gay-male fashion culture
• Fashion and obligatory heterosexuality
• Fashion and inter-generational practices
• Fashion and urban life
• Fashion and ‘masculinocentric’ culture
• The cult of the body in the age of AIDS
• Post-Stonewall fashion
• Fashion and sex work
• Fashion and postmodernism: eclecticism, pastiche and parody
• Fashion and new media – MTV, cable television news, and the invention of fashion
TV journalism
• Fashion decadence/innocence of the pre- and post- AIDSs era.
• Fashion and Andy Warhol in the 80s
• Fashion and clubland: New Romantic
Please e-mail a Word or PDF abstract of 150–200 words to the editors, Jonathan Kaplan (jkpalan@sjm.com.au) and Peter McNeil (peter.mcneil@uts.edu.au) by 30 July 2022.
Abstracts’ submissions should include a title, keywords, approximate word count including references, author’s full name, affiliation, contact details and a short biography of 3–5 sentences. The editor will aim to let prospective authors know their final decision as soon as possible.
Full manuscripts’ deadline is 30 September 2022.
All submissions must follow Intellect’s house style:
www.intellectbooks.com/asset/728/house- style-guide-4th-ed-2020.pdf
Manuscripts should be a maximum of 7000 words. It is the author’s responsibility to clear the usage rights for all images to be published.