Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

In March 2018 the School of Architecture and Design at the Lebanese American University (LAU) hosted a one-day conference in Beirut titled “Modern Bodies: Dress, Nation, Empire, Sexuality, and Gender in the Modern Middle East.” The conference was jointly convened by Reina Lewis, professor of cultural studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and Yasmine Nachabe Taan, associate professor of art and design at LAU. Participants examined gender and colonial pasts through the lens of sartorial subjects using various methodological approaches, such as social, cultural, and economic histories, along with the history of fine art, photography, archives, and visual culture. The guiding term modern bodies served as the primary conceptual theme through which to evaluate changing gender identities at a significant time in the Middle East, the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. During this period new nations were forming, which led to the creation of hybrid national and gendered identities. Within this context, representing the body after surgery, nude, or adorned in various genres of fashion emphasizes the different stages of body formation on both small and grand scales. The conference highlighted this crucial historical and cross-cultural moment by addressing competing ideas about nationhood, personhood, gender, and cultural identity struggles that continue in the contemporary Middle East.

The conference began with a keynote presentation by Mary Roberts, professor of art history and nineteenth-century studies at the University of Sydney. A specialist in nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art and in the history of European and Ottoman exchanges, Roberts focused on the visual representations of dress in modern paintings. Her talk, “Sartorial Space: Metaphors of Modernity in Ottoman and Orientalist Visual Culture,” highlighted how analyses of paintings have often taken an Orientalist standpoint that renders the East as locked out of modernity or as atemporal. Rather than conceiving of Orientalism as a counterpoint to modern visual culture, her investigation postulated the presence of hybrid identities. For example, Roberts explained how wealthy Ottoman women commissioned portraits of themselves wearing the latest Western fashions, thus signifying a potent aesthetic of modernity. She showed paintings by the European-trained painter Osman Hamdi Bey depicting street scenes with Ottoman women dressed in modern attire. Such portrayals represent cross-cultural encounters that clearly illustrate changing conceptions of gender through style of dress. In the painting Women in Feraces (1887), Hamdi Bey also shows women clad in fashionable frocks underneath traditional overcoats, or feraces, combined with colorful parasols. Such an image demonstrates a cosmopolitan mix of Western and Eastern influences, thus evincing the modish attire displayed by women. This is a modern expression of cultural exchange between East and West rather than an Orientalist depiction of a timeless East.

Taan’s presentation, “The Arab Garçonne,” discussed the transformation of identity through photographs of women dressed in men’s attire in the 1920s and 1930s. In these photographs the women are wearing European suits and the tarboush, the red headdress usually worn by men during the Ottoman period to indicate a high social rank. Taan argues that these powerful images were attempts to dislocate cultural boundaries concerning gendered as well as national identities. Dandyism, as described by Taan, is thus about challenging social norms while making visible the female Arab body as a cosmopolitan figure. For Taan, moreover, this dandy-like demeanor complete with handkerchiefs in jacket pockets raised a number of questions that transcend the presentation. For instance: Why were women experimenting with their clothes in such a subversive manner? What cultural ideas were women exploring and challenging? Should scholars use contemporary language and theoretical ideas about gender and sexuality to analyze such images? The conference discussion highlighted how fashion and photography served as media of communication and as signifiers of modernity in the late Ottoman period. Such photographs suggested cross-cultural encounters that may have been overlooked in previous scholarship as well as in their original circulation. Taan’s paper opened the possibility of reimagining the dissemination of objects, ideas, and fashion in this period. Magazines and books of the time weighed in on the debate regarding women’s sartorial choices. Examples include...