Whose stitches? which threads?: how we (women) appear at the end of the millennium

Abstract

This project considers women's appearance from some different starting points or conceptualisations. The reason that the topic lends itself to a conceptual position is that women's appearance is so strongly interconnected with her status as a woman and as a human. Hence our appearance is an exercise in construction, representation and definition. It is far from a superficial or trivial aspect which is a matter of choice, indulgence or surface. I look at some ways of considering our existence both theoretically and definitionally before considering women's appearance as a form of work. I start off with a more traditional discussion of work relating this to the effort, time and space that goes into our appearance in a way that makes our appearance able to be described as work. I then consider women's status as mediated through a number of images and metaphors which have been used to define and decorate women, most of which reveal more about our culture rather than women. Finally there is some consideration of the impossible dilemma women face as they strive to fulfil some sort of acceptable appearance expectation which functions to predude them from some definitions of human which is premised an a disembodied modernist model. My discussions are illustrated with extracts from the questionnaires and interviews I conducted. It seems that no matter how different we are that appearance expectations remain as if we were one.