Masquerade, both literal and metaphorical, is now a central concept in many disciplines. This timely volume explores and revisits the role of disguise in constructing, expressing, or representing marginalised identities, and in undermining easy distinctions between 'true'identity and artifice.
The book is interdisciplinary in approach, spanning a diverse range of cultures and narrative voices. It provides provocative and nuanced ways of thinking about masquerade as a tool for construction, and a tool for critique. The essays interrogate such themes as:
* mask and carnival
* fetish fashion
* stigma of illegitimacy
* femininity as masquerade
* lesbian masks
* cross-dressing in Jewish folk theatre
* the mask in seventeenth and eighteenth century London and nineteenth century France
* the voice as mask.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203164822

"Fashion and Ethics "focuses on issues of power, social positioning, and practices among creators, producers, practitioners, wearers, and consumers of fashion. With a special emphasis on the moral fabric of clothing, contributors to the book offer a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of ethical fashion and expose how products are often framed as fair trade in order to relieve consumers' guilt.
With essays that problematize issues such as ethical fashion's self-appointed morality, the first-world notion that the environment should take priority over human development, the conflict between business profit and ethics, the unintended agendas involved in consuming green cosmetics or ethical culinary trends, and the discursive strategies of denial of the extreme cruelty in the procurement of animal skin and fur for use in fashion, "Fashion and Ethics "applies its uncompromising scrutiny to all areas of fashion. Throughout, the volume forces readers to confront the question: Does ethical fashion go deep enough into challenging unethical behavior or is it just a charade of good intentions?