The Masque of Femininity (review)

Book Reviews undertaken through analyses of Indians and mestizos in Ecuador, Turkish Cypriote in the UK, Bunu Yorubas in Nigeria, and Hmong Americans, amongst others, the once inevitable antonym to ethnic dress—western dress—gives way to the term "cosmopolitan dress," a term more appropriate to contemporary geopolitical realities. Analyzing the function of dress as a fluid, shifting styling of ethnicity, the authors explore its responses to contact with other cultures and to processes of intracultural differentiation, its modifications in the course of migrancy, and its adaptations to historical exigencies, as in the case of colonialism 's artificial administrative regrouping of peoples. Together with many recent critical interventions across the disciplines, which explore what Eric Hobsbawm calls modernity's "invention of tradition" (1983), the essays replace ahistorical notions of ethnic continuities on the temporal axis with a meticulous historicizing of inventions and discontinuities. Thus, the history of modern nationalisms becomes pivotal in accelerating the emergence of dress as a variable signifier of ethnicity. Masami Suga's essay, "Exotic West to Exotic Japan," demonstrates this expertly when she analyzes the contemporary Japanese return to traditional wedding dress as the new fabrication of a pre-Meiji "old Japan" (101). She attributes this development to present-day Japan's desire for an exotic, internal other at a moment when Japan's integration of Westernness has resulted in the loss of the West as its (exotic) other. Likewise, on the spatial axis, the essays quite compellingly stress the fashioning of ethnicity as a consequence of dynamic interactions across boundaries. Eicher and Erekosima's essay "Why Do They Call it Kalahari?" offers a brilliant analysis of the centrality of trade between the coastal Nigerian Kalahari people, India, England, and Italy in creating Kalahari dress. A process the authors analyze as cultural authentication, which selects, classifies, incorporates and transforms non-indigenous elements, produces clothing that is both specifically Kalahari, functioning inter- and /Virra-culturally, yet also the creative recombination of products of transnational trading. The Kalahari chief's costume, a light-colored ankle-length gown (doni, from imported silk or wool) together with a grey, formal English top hat and cane, is an example of such syncretic dress, used for the collection 's cover illustration. If one of the collection's strengths lies in emphasizing vestimentary authentication as process, it also deserves praise for its rigorous historicizing of appeals to traditional, authentic dress, analyzing these appeals as tactical responses to specific social, political and cultural configurations. Elizabeth L. Constable University of California, Davis Efrat Tseëlon. The Masque of Femininity. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Pp. 152. $19.95. "Cultural psychology" is what the author calls her field of study in The Masque of Femininity. By drawing on extremely diverse materials—ranging from Old Testament accounts of femininity to contemporary women's questionnaire responses and from psychoanalytic gender theories to impression management—Tseëlon is able to offer her reader a multifaceted understanding of how femininity in Western culture is projected, received, shaped, and experienced. While at times these disciplinary leaps can be too swift and even seem over generalized, this book is an impressive example of cross-disciplinary scholarship. Tseëlon arranges the first five chapters around what she terms core "paradoxes": "the modesty paradox"; "the duplicity paradox"; "the visibility paradox"; "the beauty paradox " and then goes on to illustrate how these centuries-old "paradoxes" continue to pulse through our daily experience of Western culture. VOL. XXXVII, NO. 1 113 L'Esprit Créateur These paradoxes are sharply framed and elaborated. The first four chapters illustrate in significant ways how the paradoxical representations of women throughout history continue to shape and trouble our experience of identity in relation to appearance. In contrast to the power of these chapters, Chapters 5 and 6 are less convincing. First, I was perplexed by Tseëlon's use of Lacanian registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic which seemed to obstruct rather than facilitate her argument, and often it was unclear whether her brand of psychoanalytic inquiry was Freudian or Lacanian; indeed, Tseëlon offers up a Freud that looks a good deal like Lacan and a Lacan that looks a bit like Sartre. The last chapter, which...