Anna HanchettGästforskare
Om mig
Currently, I am a guest researcher in Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, Gender Studies and the History of Religions. In 2024, I earned my PhD in Fashion Studies from the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. Prior to my doctoral work, I earned my MA in Fashion Studies from Stockholm and my BFA in Studio Art and BA in Art History from Calvin University. My research interests include fashion and gendered embodiment; women’s, gender and sexuality studies; feminist theories of difference; dressing practices and practices of making; and fashion and phenomenology.
I wrote my doctoral thesis on women’s experiences with the tailored suit. In the thesis, I engaged in ethnographic fieldwork at tailors' shops and interviewed women who have had a suit tailor-made. I analyzed the material through a feminist theoretical framework of sexual difference and phenomenology of embodiment, arguing, overall, that women, through their embodiment—and indeed, queering—of the tailored suit, actively rework a dominating masculine imaginary of the garment in ways that nurture women’s subjectivity as difference and, in turn, cultivate new modes of feminine embodiment.
Previously, I have written about the dressing practices of the Black Panther Party and their style politics. I have also written about the cultural history of the black turtleneck sweater, particularly its role in enacting embodied difference throughout the twentieth century.
My current project involves an examination of the embodiment of textiles in the work of several contemporary feminist artists.
Forskning
My doctoral research project is at the intersections of fashion studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Adopting the multiple methods of semi-structured interviews, auto-ethnography and ethnographic observations, I investigate lived woman-embodied experiences of the tailored suit. Previous research on women’s engagement with the suit has attributed the practice to masculinity, with the consequences of such association limiting our knowledge of suit-wearing practices to a masculine imaginary and, therefore, neglecting women’s own experiences and interests. The aim of my study, then, is to remove the suit from the hold of a masculine symbolic by exploring how women themselves experience the tailored suit, considering the cultural, social and personal aspects of their embodiment. To realize this aim, I assume a feminist framework of sexual difference theory and phenomenology of embodiment to think through women’s accounts of their acquisition and embodiment of tailored suits.
The research highlights the various structures which constitute women’s experiences, including how tailors approach the construction of the suit, how women respond to their social environments within tailoring as well as in their everyday lives, and how women relate to either masculinity or femininity through their adoption of the suit. By bringing these various dynamics to light, what is learnt from the study is how women, through their suit-wearing practices, actively rework the imaginary of the suit in ways that nurture female subjectivity and cultivate new modes of feminine embodiment.
To read the dissertation, please visit its DiVA Open Access page here: https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1891181&dswid=9481