A Taste for Excess: disdained and dissident forms of fashioning femininity
PhD Research, Univeristy of Stirling2004
My Doctoral research (completed in 2004) is entitled ‘A Taste for Excess: disdained and dissident forms of fashioning femininity’. The thesis examines the meanings of forms of fashioned femininity in Britain in the post war period. It draws on a range of popular, academic and media texts and the widespread social, political and cultural disdain for the feminised decorative is defined and discused. It includes empirical research detailing the experience of women users of hair salons in Glasgow and chapters on Dusty Springfield’s identifications with Black female music star’s fashioning of excess alongside the use of excessive jewellery (and appropriations) of ‘aristocratic taste’ by stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and by women (demonised by) racial, gendered and classed attitudes surrounding women’s pleasures and practice of excessive taste.
Read it here.
Selected Published disseminations:
Queening It: Women’s Taste for Jewelry excesses in Post War Britain.
Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Excess, Issue 30, 2005
A Taste for Femininity: Subordinated Pleasures in Fashioning ‘Feminine Excess’
Visual Culture in Britain, Vol 2, Number 2, 2001
Defiantly Dusty: A (Re)Figuring of ‘Feminine Excess’, 2010.
Feminist Media Studies, Vol 1, No 3, 2001
Read it here.
Selected Published disseminations:
Queening It: Women’s Taste for Jewelry excesses in Post War Britain.
Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Excess, Issue 30, 2005
A Taste for Femininity: Subordinated Pleasures in Fashioning ‘Feminine Excess’
Visual Culture in Britain, Vol 2, Number 2, 2001
Defiantly Dusty: A (Re)Figuring of ‘Feminine Excess’, 2010.
Feminist Media Studies, Vol 1, No 3, 2001
