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WRITING ON THE SOCIAL BODY: DRESSES AND BODY 2 ORNAMENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY CHICANA ART Laura E. Pérez Through body decoration, concepts of social order and disorder are depicted and legitimized, or speci¤c power and class structures con-¤rmed or concealed. In all cultures body art also expresses the normal and the abnormal, stability and crisis, the sacred and the profane. —Elizabeth Reichel-Dolmatoff, “Foreword” to Body Decoration WHETHER THEY attempt to appear natural within a given culture or to create a spectacle of difference within it, as Dick Hebdige described the politics of subcultural styles (1987 [1979]: 102), clothing1 and body decoration signal the nature of membership within a given culture, whether it be normal, privileged, marginal, in opposition, or ambiguous. In themselves , dressing and other forms of decorating the body (e.g., cosmetics and other forms of body painting, tattooing, piercing, and scari¤cation) are cultural practices that produce, reproduce, interrupt, or hybridize (and thus produce new) cultural values. The use or representation of dress and body ornamentation in visual, installation, or performative art practices is, similarly, both symbolic and productive. In contemporary culture in the United States, dresses remain particularly charged symbols that mark, and produce, gender identities, whether these be normative or historically newer forms of constructing and representing femaleness, femininity, or the undecidability of gender, and whether these are worn by females or males. Dresses, like other forms of dress and body ornamentation, are props in racialized constructions of identities as well.2 Thus, in the United States, for example, where the majority of domestic workers are Latina or African American and racist assumptions about the inherent or cultural inequality of people of color continue to circulate, the uniform of the servant or nanny is likely to connote women of color in particular, while the power suit for women is more likely to call up images of Euro-American women of particular classes.3 Indeed, the body itself may be thought of as a social garment.4 From pigment to physical build to comportment, the presentation and reception of the body is, following Butler, part of the performance that reinscribes or interrupts social roles attributed as normal 30 to racialized and gendered bodies, whether these be “white” male bodies or those of women “of color.”5 Thus clothing and ornamentation in crossdressing , passing (e.g., for “white”), voguing, and subcultural styles transgress expectations according to gender, racial, and class roles.6 Within the metaphor of the social body as text, dress and body ornamentation are writings on and about the body. Body, dress, and body ornamentation speak, in this sense, both of how they are inscribed within the social body and how they, in turn, act upon it.7 Dress and body decoration in the Chicana art of the 1980s and 1990s examined in this chapter calls attention to both the body as social, and to the social body that constitutes it as such, speci¤cally through gendered and racialized histories of dress, labor (in domestic service and the garment industry), immigration, urban dwelling , academic discourse, art production, and religious belief. In so doing, the work of Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Diane Gamboa, and Yreina D. Cervántez ®esh out the numerous and con®icting ways in which socially and culturally invisible, or ghostly, bodies matter in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s—particularly those of women of color.8 H I S T O R I E S O F R A C I A L I Z AT I O N A N D T H E D O M E S T I C U N I F O R M : Y O L A N DA L Ó P E Z ’ S T H E N A N N Y 9 “The clothing of humanity is full of profound signi¤cance,” Carl Kohler wrote over one hundred years ago in A History of Costume, “for the human spirit not only builds its own body but also fashions its own dress, even though for the most part it leaves the actual construction to other hands. Men and women dress themselves in accordance with the dictates of that great unknown, the spirit of the time”10 (quoted in Parabola: 43). In Margaret S. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978), San Francisco– based artist Yolanda López focused precisely on the great unknown of women’s socially and economically invisible labor as seamstresses.11 In her 1994...

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