Sexuality Expressed in the 19C Fashion in Foucauldian Post-Structural Perspective- Focusing on femininity and masculinity represented in the mainstream &anti-fashion in the middle&latter of the 19C-

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to understand sexuality expressed in fashion in a discursive view and reinterpret sexuality represented in fashion in the 19th century in Foucauldian post-structural perspective. As for methodology, at first the conception of sexuality was examined from structural feminism to post-structural pluralism by a literature review and discussed in relation with the matters of body and fashion on the basis of Foucault's discourse. Then, sexuality represented in the 19C fashion as a case study was re-estimated in terms of power relationship between dominant and oppositional discourses and mainstream fashion and anti-fashion as well. The conception of sexuality in Foucauldian post-structuralism maintains the view of plural sexuality, which floats by discourse and power produced in a specific historical context. In the Foucauldian perspective sexuality expressed in the mainstream fashion and anti-fashion in the nineteenth century shows the following aspects. The mainstream fashion in the middle and latter of the 19C made the clear sexual difference in dress of plain and functional male suit and extravagant and decorative female dress on the center of bourgeois masculinity in the context of modernity and capitalism. Although anti-fashion was also co-existed with the mainstream fashion, it was criticized by the Victorian people. It codifies sexual ideology of the binary opposition of male domination and female subordination. Therefore, the traditional sexual ideology in the 19C is a capitalist value, which gives a priority to bourgeois man's profits, and the Victorian discourses of sexuality constructs the clear sexual difference in dress in the period.