1 However, a burgeoning field of work has emerged in the last thirty years addressing the interrelated fields of fashion, the body, gender, and visual culture. Stilman and Nancy Micklewright lamented that whilst study of fashion, clothing, and material culture was well advanced for European history, it was less so for the Islamic World. They also illustrate an interest in how gender and its embodiment function in relationships, encounters, and practices that traverse geographical, cultural, and corporeal borders in the course of these two works we move from the biopolitics of traversing the Israel/Palestine divide, to the role of intermarriage within Turkish Sudan, and from the complexity of defining indigenous, Arab, and Muslim identities in former European colonies to analyses of female masculinity, the self-fashioning of manumitted bodies, and practices of life drawing in Muslim-majority countries. Both books draw on post-colonial approaches and illuminate imperialist and Orientalist narratives at work in the visual and material culture of the MENA region post 1800, and both are interested in charting histories that are often maligned, forgotten, or elided.
Under the Skin and Fashioning the Modern Middle East reveal the important place of fashion and dress, photography, gender, and sexuality in charting how multiple modernities have been ‘embodied’ within the artistic practices and visual cultures of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
