Hahmann, Julia

The gendered body of women* is addressed with a variety of social norms, e.g., to be healthy, skinny, young, strong, attractive, or sexually desirable. Several if not most bodies deviate from these norms; may they be too long, too curvy, too old, or all these “too’s” combined. “Deviant” bodies have limited access to seasonal fashion trends, which also prevents subjects with deviant bodies from constructing their “fashionable personae”. Sewing their own clothes, the members of the so-called “Curvy Sewing Collective” have the possibility to dress their self-identified curvy or fat bodies in the ways they want to present themselves. Using a qualitative content analysis, the paper focuses on self-presentations of participants of the Curvy Sewing Collective and their material practices of sewing for and dressing their diverse bodies. Women develop technologies of the self in cooperation with the Curvy Sewing Collective that enable them to create socially acceptable clothing after having experienced the rigorous sizing regimes of fashion industries. Blog postings of sewing processes illustrate the dialectic relationship of included material entities – the body, sewing patterns and final garments – as well as ordering effects that are inscribed in these materials. In the result, these technologies support successful identity construction processes and produce images of attractive, fashionable subjects. The collective therefore fosters individual empowerment, though under the conditions of normative femininity.

Dr.’in Julia Hahmann works as an assistant professor (“Vertretungsprofessur”) for transculturality and gender at the University of Vechta, Germany. She is a trained sociologist from RWTH Aachen University and finished her PhD thesis on friendship patterns of older adults in 2013. Since 2013 Julia worked as a postdoc in gerontology and social work. Her current research focuses on different topics within a materialist framework, for example on clothes and clothing strategies and deviant bodies or on habitual practices of community building and belonging. She has a strong interest in feminist sociology, epistemology and activism, and is a seamstress herself.

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