In the Folds:
Notes on Clothing and Abjection in the Work of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane
by Franziska Blume
As artistic explorations of abjection frequently breach and turn bodily boundaries inside out, we are used to seeing garments cut up, stripped or left without wearers. Take Robert Gober’s Untitled (1991), which appeared on the cover of the Whitney Museum’s catalogue for its 1993 exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. The hyperrealist wax cast of a severed leg usually placed against a wall gains much of its uncanniness by being dressed in a leather shoe, a beige sock and khaki pants. The survival of these markers of social identity heightens the jarring effect of their wearer’s dismemberment. Much of Cindy Sherman’s work, like her series of Untitleds made in 1993, hijacks the codes of fashion, thus conjuring up a threat (or promise?) of a breakdown in meaning.1 The sculptural work of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane can also be read through the lens of abjection, yet it departs from the use of clothing as an illustrative device. Surveying a selection of recent sculptures and objects, I trace out the artist’s sensibility for the many ways clothing can participate in abjection as an active force. In adopting this focus, I try to move beyond an established analysis of Sánchez-Kane’s work through the lens of gender and to think about how these works can offer new perspectives on the relation between materiality and abjection.
The Bounded Body and its Enemies
In the fall of 2023, I walked into kurimanzutto’s crowded New York gallery space, not knowing which show had opened that night, but hoping for a complimentary drink. To my surprise, beers were being handed out by an attendant in a trench coat with built-in construction that held dozens of Corona six-packs—a garment made by Mexican artist and designer Bárbara Sánchez-Kane (*1987), emblematic of her2 witty and surreal approach across wearable art, performance, painting and sculpture. Founding her eponymous fashion label in 2016, Sánchez-Kane quickly became known for clothing that both feeds off and intervenes in the performance of gender and Mexican identity, coining a self-described “macho sentimental” aesthetic. Often, these creations infuse immaculate tailoring with a recurring vocabulary of everyday objects: corona bottles, boxing gloves, sombreros, plastic chairs, calla lilies… In recent years, the artist has increasingly pushed into the art world, expanding on the performative presentation of collections with the display of stand-alone sculptures and installations.
Sánchez-Kane’s work gained large recognition at the 2024 Biennale di Venezia, where her installation Prêt-à-Patria (2021) was exhibited as part of the Nucleo Contemporaneo section in the Arsenale.3 A sort of human centipede, the work consists of three uniform-clad golden mannequins impaled by a long pole (fig. 1). With their identical appearances, one can imagine an endless chain of such mannequin-soldiers marching up into the sky. In the front, their attire of an olive green fitted suit worn over a dress shirt and tie is a familiar sight: Soldiers customarily wear such ceremonial dress uniforms in military parades, of governments both authoritarian and democratic (and everything in between). There are, however, more than a few tweaks to the uniform that are distinctly Sánchez-Kane. Most dramatically, the artist stripped away the uniforms’ back sides to reveal lace-trimmed red stockings and lingerie. In a 2022 interview, the artist described Prêt-à-Patria as a deconstructive attempt to “neutralise markers of hypermasculinity through introducing feminine elements.”4 In the context of the Mexican army’s history, this approach is not merely imaginative but redemptive: Reformers of the postrevolutionary period laboured hard to expulse feminine influences from the military, banishing female “soldaderas” and sanctioning “effeminate” bodily practices such as removing body hair, wearing jewellery, etc.5
Fig. 1: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Prêt-à-Patria, 2021. Installation view, kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2021.
Gender is a central lens through which to approach the artist’s work, even if at the cost of other dimensions.6 Sánchez-Kane’s deep insights into the workings of clothing also allow an interpretation of Prêt-à-Patria as a complex investigation of clothing’s capacity to provide and refuse form to their wearers. With the artwork’s title, a combination of Prêt-à-Porter; French for “ready-to-wear,” and Patria; the homeland, Sánchez-Kane highlights the importance of dress in nationalist frameworks. While the combat suit is obviously instrumental for the military enforcement of the nation, aiding in defending or forcefully expanding its borders, the ceremonial dress uniform appropriated by the artist works differently. Rooted in 19th-century tailoring, it shapes the soldier’s body and renders it into a singular, cohesive form. (Etymologically, “uniform” derives from the words una (one) and forma (form)). Streamlined and contained, the body of the soldier becomes a model of the impermeable patria, a mechanism which Sánchez-Kane nods to by occasionally including a vacuum-sealed uniform jacket in the work’s display.
The uniform as an impermeable boundary has its obvious appeal not just for the nation-state, but for a subject constantly tasked with fortifying itself against the threat of non-differentiation, as theorised by Julia Kristeva. In her psychoanalytically informed model, the subject constitutes itself through boundary-establishing actions but also by striving to “take on the signs of language.”7 This effort is aimed at entering the symbolic realm of clear meaning and logic. With its nuanced semantics of rank ascribing a stable and highly differentiated identity to its wearer, the uniform seems like a reliable ally in this constant process, that is, before it was energetically deconstructed by Sánchez-Kane. Not satisfied with rupturing the uniform’s surface, the artist also replaced all military insignia with her own logo. Against the backdrop of the uniform’s promise of providing form and meaning to their wearers, Prêt-à-Patria becomes legible as a crisis of subjectivity, connecting it strongly to Kristeva’s conception of abjection. Laid out in her 1980 publication Powers of Horror, abjection refers both to a disruption of the subject as well as its constitutive process of casting out (“abjecting”) those elements which threaten and remind of its unstable boundaries. As “something rejected from which one does not part,” the abject remains a constant threat hovering at the subject’s periphery.8
What could have caused Sánchez-Kane’s uniforms to fail their wearers? Commenting on a declassified US archive of military styles from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, fashion critic Angelo Flaccavento credits outerwear with “shielding emotion from the intruding gaze.” This idea is compelling for the camo-suit and can also be turned on its head to make sense of the dress uniform appropriated by Sánchez-Kane. Rather than camouflaging their wearers, these uniforms worn by soldiers at official parades and ceremonies demand to be looked at, inviting the gaze of spectators with their gleaming buttons, insignia and form-fitting silhouettes. In Sánchez-Kane’s twist on the garment, such eye-catching features pale in comparison to the red lingerie revealed underneath. Offering up such garments unambiguously tied to eroticism and visual seduction, the artist seems to invite in and cater to a desiring gaze.
At the same time, the golden mannequins employed by Sánchez-Kane disappoint not only the hopes for a body below the uniform but also that of an unambiguous reading of the work. Confronted with the mannequins’ reflective surface, we might consider the work not catering to but making visible the effects of a desiring gaze.9 This hypothesis would link Prêt-à-Patria to Robert Gober’s initially mentioned wax leg. Commenting on his own work, the artist recalls the image which triggered it: “I was in this tiny little plane sitting next to this handsome businessman, and his trousers were pulled above his socks, and I was transfixed in this moment by his leg.”10 In Gober’s work, desire acts as a force cutting through the protective layers of clothing to then dismember the body, destroying its very object of desire. Arguing that “sight opens all spaces to desire, but desire is not satisfied with seeing,” literary critic Jean Starobinski poignantly expresses this idea of desire as an insatiable and destructive force.11 While this line of interpretation seems compelling, it leaves open the question of where the object of desire in Prêt-à-Patria is ultimately located. Is it the (absent) body below the garments (as in Gober’s account) or the uniform itself? Considering the soldier’s intense fetishisation, the question is an impossible one: Desire for the soldier can hardly survive without the sexual allure of the uniform.12 The attraction of erotic drives, which form part of Kristeva’s realm of the semiotic, certainly troubles the uniform’s orderly signification and risks transforming its wearer from self-contained subject to desired object. However, would this be enough to cause abjection?
Sánchez-Kane’s sensibility as both an artist and a fashion designer necessitates a reading that considers clothing not “just” as a surface trigger for affects but as an active agent itself. For this purpose, I will turn to a so-far overlooked element of the work: Through comically elongated hats and inflated combat boots, the artist seems to poke fun at a subordination to increasingly outsize expressions of nationalism.13 One could, however, also regard these inflated garments as indicators of processes spurred by the uniform, as suggested by another detail: Suspended on erect ribbons in Mexican national colours, make-up compacts modelled after military medals jut out from each of the mannequins’ crotches. Overly dependent on the uniform’s validation, its wearers have apparently become corrupted, their erotic desires reshaped into a need for empty decorations.
In this regard, I am reminded of the notion that clothing can be “deeply put on” proposed by historians Peter Stallybrass and Ann Jones as part of their thinking around investiture. In their work on Renaissance dress practices, the authors describe investiture as “the means by which a person was given a form, a shape, a social function” through the putting on of clothes.14 Rather than rooting this idea in dress as a simple signifier of social identity, the authors highlight clothing’s capacity to act as a material memory and to “permeate the wearer, fashioning him or her within.”15 Through this lens of investiture, Sánchez-Kane’s mannequin-soldiers appear deeply refashioned by memories of subordination contained within the uniform and their desire for ever-more decoration. Stallybrass’ and Jones’ writing is additionally helpful as the authors historicise the strict separation between clothing and its wearer as a product of the early modern period, characterising it as an expression of an “increasing uneasiness [...] toward materiality.”16 At the same time, the authors variously hint at clothing’s constitutive powers surviving this conceptual separation. Reinserted into Kristeva’s theory of abjection, this historical lens might explain a modern subject’s anxieties around its lasting, but culturally unrecognised intertwinement with clothing. This idea is echoed by Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro in their book Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body. Dress, they argue, “precludes any final and irrevocable integration into the symbolic, by constantly reintroducing into the latter’s prescribed modalities reminders of an archaic and intractable entanglement with materiality.”17 Exposing the uniform as the ultimate enemy from within, Sánchez-Kane demonstrates that clothing can itself become an active agent in abjection when a defenceless subject overly dependent on its form-giving properties is unable to re-establish its boundaries.
Bodies in the Folds
An important moment in Sánchez Kane’s reflection on clothing’s capacity to provide and withhold form was marked by her 2023 solo exhibition New Lexicons for Embodiment. The show at kurimanzutto’s New York gallery space included recent sculptures, some of them wearable, as well as a Sánchez-Kane store with items for purchase (more on that later). As a prime inspiration, the artist drew on The Koester School Book of Drapes, a 1913 practical manual for draping textiles in department stores. This inspiration is most overt in the monumental 2023 installation Lessons in Draping, a cascade of draped rawhide weightlessly fused with a school chair (fig. 2). Sánchez-Kane’s inspiration for the work is easily identifiable in the manual under a section detailing the use of furniture as draping fixtures (fig. 3). When comparing the two, one gets the distinct impression that the artist infused the illustrated model with a liveliness or embodied spirit: Rather than limpidly hanging down, Sánchez-Kane’s folds swell and curve to form the anthropomorphic suggestion of a torso. In contrast to the rigid uniform, the floating drapery seems to extend a promise of lifting the body from the material constraints of corporeality. Weightlessness carries an enormous suggestive potential in fashion, as elegantly argued by Roland Barthes: “The garment, by virtue of its weight, participates in man’s fundamental dreams, of the sky and the cave, of life’s sublimity and its entombment, of flight and sleep: it is a garment’s weight which makes it a wing or a shroud, seduction or authority.”18 An instance of drapery’s promise of physical transcendence being harnessed is dance wear, like the billowing garments worn by modern dance pioneers Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan at the turn of the 20th century.19 Nonetheless, Sánchez-Kane crucially takes inspiration from commercial advertising, reminding us that a desire for transcendence is easily capitalised on. In the consumer sphere, anthropomorphic folds can act as an effective medium for creating desire, by promising a body which can freely move between different material expressions.
Fig. 2: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Lessons in draping, 2023. Rawhide, metal, wood. 325.12 x 91.5 x 84 cm. Installation view, kurimanzutto, New York, 2023.
By teasing the emergence of a body within the folds but halting this very process, Lessons in Draping evokes also the opposite of transcendence. The body suggested by Sánchez-Kane does not or cannot separate itself from the drapery. As we have seen, in Kristeva’s conception a subject’s inability to separate itself from materiality equals a failure to enter the symbolic realm and thus represents a deep crisis. Interestingly, the artist’s inspiration already has this threat written all over it. Even as The Koester School Book of Drapes repeatedly states that drapes need not emulate actual garments, many designs rival Sánchez-Kane’s sculpture in suggesting bodies forming but not emerging from the folds. Textile bodies balance precariously on pedestals, are left suspended mid-air or are inescapably bound to chairs (fig. 3). Paradoxically, it seems that the manual acknowledges the presence of these bodies by respecting their taboos: Urging drapers to avoid showing raw edges and openings at all costs, the manual contains various solutions for this purpose. Some of these designs rival the suggestiveness of surrealist masterpieces, such as when a plush fur shawl is draped over a gaping slit. Thereby reaffirming the ideal of the bounded body, these efforts might be aimed at countering the unsettling ambiguity produced by suspending bodies in the folds.
Fig. 3: Furniture as Draping Fixtures, from The Koester School Book of Drapes: A Complete Text Book and Course of Instruction in Merchandise Draping, Chicago: 1913, 123.
In Lessons in Draping, it is not only formal ambiguity evoking the threat of abjection but also the choice of material. Rawhide is made from dried animal skin that has not been exposed to tanning, its organically marbled surface betraying this origin even in the bleached variant employed by Sánchez-Kane. In her recurring use of the material, the artist frequently draws on its association with carnality, taking it the furthest in her 2022 installation Versos Rancios, in which a rawhide shirt was pierced through by a suspended bronze ribcage. Fittingly, Kristeva relies on the image of transparent skin to evoke a collapse between inside and outside: “It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents.”20 Viewed in this light, Sánchez-Kane’s sculpture contains a palpable threat: Disavowed by the subject, corporeality may return to a more carnal and more precarious state.
So far, I have considered two possible lines of understanding Lessons in Draping, one departing from the promise of transcending materiality, the other from the threat of being stuck within it. In the following, I want to briefly sketch out a reading that temporarily moves away from abjection, instead turning to the question of embodiment. As the Koester School Book of Drapes illustrates, it takes a skilled draper performing a chain of precise movements to turn bolts of fabric into appealing folds. Often, these actions involve the whole body, as when fabric needs to be arranged over the knee to be handled simultaneously by both hands. Drapers need to be intimately attuned to the textile’s materiality, registering its weight, structure and texture at their fingertips. For the making of Sánchez-Kane’s installation, registering temperature needs to be added, as rawhide can only be draped when wet (neurologically, wetness is registered via a combination of sense data, including temperature and texture).21 With this knowledge, drapery, as described in the manual and utilised by Sánchez-Kane, becomes legible as the result of a collaboration between textile, embodied action and knowledge. Considering these insights, Sánchez-Kane’s work reminds us that the body’s intertwinement with clothing is not only the stuff of grand promises or anxieties but is continuously enacted at the level of everyday reality.
Naturally, embodied experience structures also the wearing of garments, which brings me to a series of wearable sculptures that were exhibited in the show alongside Lessons in Draping. Presented hanging on the gallery’s walls, the works are constructed from leather belts in black, white and red, which are interwoven to form latticed surfaces (fig. 4). At the show’s opening, a person wearing one of these sculptures suddenly appeared and slowly made their way into a corner of the room, where they remained for a while under the curious gaze of attendants. It is challenging to describe the effect of these works when worn: Neither affirming nor negating their wearers, I think of independent organisms which take on new shapes each time they collide against a body. Sánchez-Kane’s choice of the leather belt is significant, being a symbol connected to discipline, and, at times, corporeal punishment. The belt is however also a visual and experienced marker of bodily boundaries. Tightening or loosening one’s belt is among the most direct and commonplace engagements with the physical contours of the body. In Sánchez-Kane’s sculptures, pulling on any of the belt straps alters the overall shape and whether the latticed surface appears open or closed. Thus, expanding and contracting the boundaries of the sculptures is in constant negotiation with the wearers’ ability to see and be seen. Acting as interfaces, the sculptures mediate between the perception of onlookers and the embodied experience of their wearers. Hence, they remind us that clothing’s representational and experiential dimensions work back and forth on each other. Staging a criss-cross situation of embodied gazes and embodied wearing of clothing, Sánchez-Kane illustrates yet another situation in which dress and body are inextricably intertwined.
Fig. 4: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Look 4, 2023. Belts, rivets, polyester and metal. 300 x 160 x 60 cm.
Protect Me From What I Want
In the New York exhibition I visited, Sánchez-Kane’s Monedero Loafers (2022) stood out in my eyes as simple, yet incredibly desirable (fig. 5). The shoes were included among a group of items which could be purchased in the front of the gallery but also did double duty as artworks placed throughout the exhibition. Consisting of a classic pair of loafers in black or burgundy with a coin purse integrated into their tongues, the work stands in a long tradition of surrealist shoe assemblages. While Salvador Dali’s Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically (1931/73) unimaginatively uses a high heel as a generalised stand-in for the fetish, works by Meret Oppenheim and Birgit Jürgenssen harness the composite form of the assemblage to evoke an unstable separation between shoes and body.22 In Oppenheim’s 1936 drawing for an unrealised Project for Sandals, porcelain toes summon a horror described by Kristeva as “an Other who precedes and possesses me,” while Jürgenssen’s Zungenleckschuhe (1974) are occupied by a real (and very swollen) cow’s tongue.23 This evoked threat of being overtaken or consumed by one’s clothes is at this point well familiar to us from Prêt-à-Patria and Lessons in Draping, but is abstracted in Sánchez-Kane’s Monedero Loafers: When opened, the integrated coin purses reveal their crimson lining and come to resemble little mouths demanding to be fed. Playfully evoking the threat of being consumed by a desire to consume, the shoes recall Dorothea Tanning’s surrealist painting Rêve de Luxe (1944). Here, similar coin purses line the inside of a large shell, one of them having caught on fire. Sporting a clever pun on the penny loafer, the wearer of the Monedero Loafers can express their desires and anxieties around consumption, while distancing themself with self-reflexive humour. Given that buying art is already a tried-and-tested strategy for demonstrating one’s removal from “base” material desires, Sánchez-Kane’s loafers are highly effective.
Fig. 5: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Monedero Loafers, 2022. Calf leather, metal.
Ultimately, the work’s true efficacy lies in the hidden ambiguity the shoes allow when worn: Even as the desire for consumption is externalised, it is kept close to the body. This aspect links the Monedero Loafers to apotropaic garments and pouches containing protective substances, objects (including coins!) or writing. Often visually concealed, these protective contents release their powers through close physical contact with their wearers. While remarkably transcultural and transhistorical, such practices largely fell victim to the same “uneasiness [...] toward materiality” which defined garments and their wearers as categorically separate.24 Evidently, Sánchez-Kane’s loafers do not mark a simple return to premodern attitudes to dress. Rather, I see them as perfect footwear for a modern subject torn between welcoming and abhorring their intertwinement with materiality.
Final Thoughts
Considering more artworks by Bárbara Sánchez-Kane would likely add to the long list of how clothing can assume various, often contradictory roles within abjection. For the time being, let’s take stock. The uniform proved to be a garment exceptionally fraught with contradiction: Enticed by a promise of physical and social containment, its wearers are faced with high costs, being exposed to desiring gazes but above all being remade and contaminated by patriotism. In contrast to the military, the consumer sphere promises a transcendence of the bound body yet is also informed by the threat of abjection. Sánchez-Kane partially appeased these anxieties by reminding us that the body’s inseparability from materiality is already given at the level of embodied interaction with clothing. Pragmatically, the artist also offers footwear for a subject torn between despising and welcoming its inescapable intertwinement with materiality.
I went into writing this essay having noticed a conceptual gap: While artists like Robert Gober and Cindy Sherman frequently draw on clothing in their works, art theoretical writings around abjection rarely mention clothing at all, except for occasionally connecting it to the fetish. What I previously considered an oversight, however, seems more reasonable after engaging with Sánchez-Kane’s work. After all, Gober’s severed legs and Sherman’s “fashion” photography focus largely on clothing’s representational qualities, rather than affording it an active role within abjection. Clothing is used to embed their subjects in social frameworks, and then routinely cut open or put in disarray to illustrate social, semantic, symbolic or bodily breakdown. Such a focus on the representational qualities of clothing adheres to the lasting idea of clothing as sign, as language, even as the breakdown of its communicative function is staged.25 This strikes me, given that artists of the 1990s moved away from representational approaches to the body towards a preoccupation with embodiment. Perhaps, artists first needed to work through the layers of the body to recognise its inseparability from clothing. In their defence, fashion theory was equally slow to come to this recognition and is still in the process of moving toward the embodied and affective qualities of clothing.26 Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s practice, highlighting the manifold and active inner workings of clothing, partially echoes this shift. By asking us to pay attention to both representational and experiential dimensions, the artist models how such an approach benefits our understanding of materiality’s part within abjection.
Franziska Blume is a graduate student of Art and Visual History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has studied in Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York, directed a curatorial collective and is currently completing her thesis on Ibrahim Mahama’s textile interventions.
1 See Rosalind Krauss, “The Destiny of The Informe” in Formless: A User’s Guide, ed. Yve Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (Zone Books, 1997), 240.
2 The artist uses both she and he pronouns. The pronoun ‘she’ is used throughout this text for readability.
3 The accompanying video of Mexican soldiers in Sánchez-Kane’s uniforms performing a ritual of honouring the national flag was not shown in Venice.
4 “Bárbara Sánchez-Kane En Siembra,” video, posted May 3, 2021, by kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York, YouTube, 3 min., 18 sec.,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lksj4wcDunk&ab_channel=kurimanzutto.
5 Thomas Rath, “Modernizing Military Patriarchy: Gender and State-Building In Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 808, 817-818.
6 This impression is echoed by the artist in a 2023 portrait: “A lot of times my work is reduced to queer or gender issues, but there is more to it than that.” Cit. after Stephanie Sporn, “This Fashion Wunderkind Wants You To Question Your Relationship To Clothing,” Art Basel Website, September 11, 2023, https://www.artbasel.com/news/barbara-sanchez-kane-question-relationship-clothing?lang=de.
7 Julia Kristeva, Interview by Susan Sellers, Women’s Review, no. 12 (1989): 19.
8 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
9 Angelo Flaccavento, “Function Is Form,” in Fashion Army, ed. Matthieu Nicol (Mack, 2024), n.p.
10 “Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991,” Whitney Museum, accessed December 19, 2024, https://whitney.org/collection/works/7987.
11 Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye (Harvard University Press, 1989), 4.
12 Jennifer Craik, “The Cultural Politics of The Uniform,” Fashion Theory 7, no. 2 (2003): 135-136. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270403778052140.
13 A fitting example for the Mexican context is a program for monumental flags (“Banderas Monumentales”) started in 1999 by then-president Ernesto Zedillo. Flags measuring hundreds of metres were placed across the country in locations significant to Mexican history, for a time holding records for the world’s largest flag and the world’s tallest flagpole.
14 Examples provided by the authors are the coronation ceremony and the early modern practice of livery, the payment of servants in goods, mostly clothing. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and The Materials of Memory (Cambridge University Press: 2000), 2.
15 Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 2.
16 Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 7.
17 Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and The Body (Berg, 1998), 37.
18 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (University of California Press, 1990), 126.
19 These dancers inspired fashion, film, art and design, and were also swiftly capitalised on, a famous example being the Art Nouveau lamps and vases made after Fuller's figure.
20 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.
21 Davide Filingeri, Damien Fournet, Simon Hodder and George Havenith, “Why Wet Feels Wet? A Neurophysiological Model of Human Cutaneous Wetness Sensitivity,” Journal of Neurophysiology 112, no. 6 (September 2014): 1457-1469. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00120.2014.
22 In Kristeva’s writing, the composite appears as one possible source of abjection: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. [...] The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. For Jürgenssen, see also Patricia Allmer’s chapter “Birgit Jürgenssen’s Abjections” in her book The Traumatic Surreal: Germanophone Women Artists and Surrealism After The Second World War (Manchester UP, 2022), 109–162.
23 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 10.
24 Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing and The Materials of Memory, 7.
25 Examples of this approach include Alison Lurie’s The Language of Clothes (1981) and Malcolm Barnard’s Fashion As Communication (1996).
26 Lucia Ruggerone, “Fashion Studies At A Turning Point,” in Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress, ed. Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins (Palgrave Macmillan [online], 2023), 238. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19100-8_13.
Image Credits:
Image 1: © Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York. Photo: Gerardo Landa and Eduardo Lopez (GLR Estudio))
Image 2: © Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York. Photo: Dan Bradica.
Image 3: Image in the Public Domain, Photo: University of California Libraries, via the Internet Archive.
Image 4: © Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York. Photo: Dan Bradica.
Image 5: © Bárbara Sánchez-Kane. Photo by the author.