But, even though we all know what’s going to happen to some extent in this movie, it looks beautiful, which makes me want to see it. Probably going to wait for the 5 buck club on this one.

Semiotics (to me) seems like the study of the meaning produced through the signs derived from discourses, both individually, and together. So there is meaning derived from being married, meaning from working, and meaning from being a person who is married to a co-worker. Someone who is married to a co-worker happens to be a part of all the discourses, while someone who is married but unemployed only fits into 1 discourse, and someone who is married and employed fits 2 but not 3, etc.

So moving to ubiquitous computing and group interaction (say CSCW) I have no idea… crap…

but does my first part make sense? Does it seem right to everyone else? Help a brotha out? (or a couple of us… – stay strong James, my brotha)

Just a small clarification in response to Amanda: Entwistle is not advocating power dressing or dressing for success or saying that she thinks women should dress like men. Rather, she is speaking as a scholarly observer, saying that these were concepts active in the 1980s in many different discourses (especially Molloy’s “engineering” guide for women’s dress). She is trying to analyze the concept as it was manifest in various cultural artifacts from the 1980s, not offer her own views on how women should dress (she never discloses her own position on that, in fact).

First, and most importantly, “fashion” is used in a very precise and technical sense in Davis, Entwistle, and so forth. It does not refer to “conventions of dress” (a very general definition). It refers, rather, to “mode,” that is, seasonal fashions that change from year to year in industrial societies. It does NOT include anti-fashion (conventions of clothing that never change; examples include the dress of the Queen of England, which is not supposed to look oh-so-2009 but rather timeless).

So he says that ancient Egypt or China had no fashion, he does NOT mean that they had no conventions about dress, but rather that they don’t have a fashion industry that is founded on fast-changing expressive styles, affordable by bourgeois middle class consumers.

So, to summarize, Paris Hilton and Project Runway are about fashion, but Queen Elizabeth and (arguably) Eddie Bauer and prison uniforms are not–in this technical definition of the word. What appears in Vogue is fashion. What appears in a Santa Claus catalog or records about medieval peasants wore is not “fashion.”

And the reason for the technical definition is not to be arbitrarily declarative about this-and-that, but because doing so makes it possible to speak with precision and make important distinctions. Today’s fashion researchers are interested in contemporary popular culture, and the ways that it propagates negative stereotypes, situates people in bad places, and perpetuates the power of people who are already in power. To critique that, we need to understand the fashion world that we are in, and it really is different than those of ancient Egypt and China, not just visually, but also economically, semantically, politically, and so on.

Speaking of, GISA event at the Funny Bone tomorrow!

Who: Robert Hawkins
What: $11 tickets
When: Friday, November 20th at 8PM
Where: The Funny Bone Comedy Club at 4th and Walnut

More info at iugisa.com, and free Ford Fusions to all who attend!*

* By “free” we of course mean $11, and by “Ford” we of course mean “stand up comedy”, and by “Fusions” we of course mean “at the Funny Bone in downtown Bloomington”.

@lynn At first I thought you were crazy. Super crazy. And then I saw the back of the ambulance. And then it went back to the gym doors. It’s a bistable illusion!

The stereotypical undergrad your friend dressed as would, I thin, fit what Entwistle described as the secretarial dress style. A style which presents the woman more as a sexual object. It harkens back to that old succes path for a woman of “getting and keeping the man” The girls in leggings and uggs and low cut shirts are pretty plainly saying, “hey look at my ass and legs and breasts!! look Look LOOK at me! Aren’t I hot?” They’re here for their MRS degrees (which means they’re here just to find a husband and become a Mrs. Something-or-other for our out of country fellows)

In conclusion, and go freaking figure, this helped me solidify how I felt about the reading, I think this must mean I come out agreeing with Entwistle. At first I was annoyed with this “dressing for success” meaning we had to dress like men, but I think that I have come to believe that was only for how it started. It’s more the intention. They were wanting to be taken seriously, seen as competent. That doesn’t have to mean dressing like a man anymore, but it does mean not dressing purely provocatively.