In March 2018 the School of Architecture and Design at the Lebanese American University (LAU) hosted a one-day conference in Beirut titled “Modern Bodies: Dress, Nation, Empire, Sexuality, and Gender in the Modern Middle East.” The conference was jointly convened by Reina Lewis, professor of cultural studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and Yasmine Nachabe Taan, associate professor of art and design at LAU. Participants examined gender and colonial pasts through the lens of sartorial subjects using various methodological approaches, such as social, cultural, and economic histories, along with the history of fine art, photography, archives, and visual culture. The guiding term modern bodies served as the primary conceptual theme through which to evaluate changing gender identities at a significant time in the Middle East, the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. During this period new nations were forming, which led to the creation of hybrid national and gendered identities. Within this context, representing the body after surgery, nude, or adorned in various genres of fashion emphasizes the different stages of body formation on both small and grand scales. The conference highlighted this crucial historical and cross-cultural moment by addressing competing ideas about nationhood, personhood, gender, and cultural identity struggles that continue in the contemporary Middle East.The conference began with a keynote presentation by Mary Roberts, professor of art history and nineteenth-century studies at the University of Sydney. A specialist in nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art and in the history of European and Ottoman exchanges, Roberts focused on the visual representations of dress in modern paintings. Her talk, “Sartorial Space: Metaphors of Modernity in Ottoman and Orientalist Visual Culture,” highlighted how analyses of paintings have often taken an Orientalist standpoint that renders the East as locked out of modernity or as atemporal. Rather than conceiving of Orientalism as a counterpoint to modern visual culture, her investigation postulated the presence of hybrid identities. For example, Roberts explained how wealthy Ottoman women commissioned portraits of themselves wearing the latest Western fashions, thus signifying a potent aesthetic of modernity. She showed paintings by the European-trained painter Osman Hamdi Bey depicting street scenes with Ottoman women dressed in modern attire. Such portrayals represent cross-cultural encounters that clearly illustrate changing conceptions of gender through style of dress. In the painting Women in Feraces (1887), Hamdi Bey also shows women clad in fashionable frocks underneath traditional overcoats, or feraces, combined with colorful parasols. Such an image demonstrates a cosmopolitan mix of Western and Eastern influences, thus evincing the modish attire displayed by women. This is a modern expression of cultural exchange between East and West rather than an Orientalist depiction of a timeless East.Taan’s presentation, “The Arab Garçonne,” discussed the transformation of identity through photographs of women dressed in men’s attire in the 1920s and 1930s. In these photographs the women are wearing European suits and the tarboush, the red headdress usually worn by men during the Ottoman period to indicate a high social rank. Taan argues that these powerful images were attempts to dislocate cultural boundaries concerning gendered as well as national identities. Dandyism, as described by Taan, is thus about challenging social norms while making visible the female Arab body as a cosmopolitan figure. For Taan, moreover, this dandy-like demeanor complete with handkerchiefs in jacket pockets raised a number of questions that transcend the presentation. For instance: Why were women experimenting with their clothes in such a subversive manner? What cultural ideas were women exploring and challenging? Should scholars use contemporary language and theoretical ideas about gender and sexuality to analyze such images? The conference discussion highlighted how fashion and photography served as media of communication and as signifiers of modernity in the late Ottoman period. Such photographs suggested cross-cultural encounters that may have been overlooked in previous scholarship as well as in their original circulation. Taan’s paper opened the possibility of reimagining the dissemination of objects, ideas, and fashion in this period. Magazines and books of the time weighed in on the debate regarding women’s sartorial choices. Examples include the 1923 publication of Huda Shaarawi’s photograph staging a public removal of the veil as well as Nazira Zeineddine’s 1928 book Al-Sufūr wal Hijab (Unveiling and Veiling) calling for the removal of the veil. Taan concluded that these photographs transcend social binaries and challenge rigid assumptions about femininity.In her talk, “Fashion and the Camera: Istanbul in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Nancy Micklewright, head of scholarly programs and publications at the Freer-Sackler Gallery, discussed the ephemerality of photographs. She noted that photographs could be discarded as easily as clothing, thus revealing the power of archival evidence, understood as lived moments in the past interpreted in the present to show change and the historical significance of cultural identities. Micklewright conceived of fashion and photography as both economies and bastions of modernity that work together to communicate identity and construct meaning. In her presentation, she speculated about changes in Ottoman society through the changing character of dress. She argued that the images of clothing worn by royal women revealed certain patterns of attire that, in turn, provided information about the fashion economy of the late Ottoman period. She concluded by explaining how her future research would investigate royal women’s interactions with photographers and the circulation of these photographs. Such direction will provide a rich contextualization of lived experiences and additional meanings concerning the subjects of these photographs and the social life of images.In her paper, “Tracing Threads: The Stitched and Painted Thob,” Tina Sherwell, assistant professor of art and music at Birzeit University, explored how the Palestinian thob (dress) and its embroidery came to signify national identity in Palestine.1 She described how this sartorial item, initially a local village symbol, became prominent in the national imagination through a contentious political history in which identity was articulated through traditional clothing. With the loss of land, women’s costumes became a way of mapping heritage, as each dress held a specific relationship to a different location. In this regard, Sherwell argued, this style of clothing represented an imagined homeland.Lewis’s paper, “Visibilizing the Modern Body in Harem Literature,” marked her return to historical research after years of working on contemporary modest fashion. Lewis used contemporary models to examine “harem literature” written in English during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Feminist scholars have analyzed this genre to determine whether it offers a perspective that challenges Orientalist perceptions of the exoticness of this space. Lewis spoke about the circulation of fashion items and the various actors (of different status, power, class) involved in the distribution of commodities. She described this process as central to understanding the intersections of fashion, modernity, and changing social structures. Moreover, she argued, different conceptions of gendered relationships came into play through the circulation of fashion—for example, relationships between women of different social classes as well as between women and eunuchs, who were often the mediators between distributors and consumers of fashion.Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, media anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of International Studies at Macalester College, centered her presentation, “Undressing Patients, Redressing Photographs,” on images and texts of surgery patients. While most of the preceding talks concerned elite women, Gürsel’s focused on a different constituency. She analyzed the portraits she came across in 2009 of seven women from the Haseki Hospital in Istanbul. The Haseki Hospital, which became a women’s hospital in 1868, was the only institution of its kind in the Ottoman Empire and the only one performing surgery before the invention of the X-ray, in 1895. The hospital served mainly homeless and indigent women, caring for—and controlling—these patients by keeping them away from public spaces. The images date from the early 1890s and belong to the Haseki photographic album, found in the archive of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit’s palace. Unique in their portrayal of medical care, they show female surgery patients standing next to jars containing tumors that had been removed from their bodies. The photos resemble classic nineteenth-century studio portraits but differ from those in that they expose the women’s postsurgical abdominal scars. In contrast to studio portraits, these display what was internal rather than external to the female body to be viewed by the women themselves, the surgeon, and the sultan. Such archival images of medical photography did not exist elsewhere and thus were not “imported” as a Western genre, such as easel painting.Kirsten Scheid, associate professor of anthropology at the American University of Beirut, also addressed the materiality of the body with a presentation about the history of nude paintings as a modernizing force in Lebanon in the 1920s. In her paper, “The Nudism Movement: Learning to Look at/as Nudes,” Scheid explored how painting and practicing nudes formed part of the renewal projects that emerged in art practice and social movements during the French mandate in Lebanon among former Ottoman and colonized subjects. Drawing on the work of Monique Scheer (2012), she considered “looking at nudes” and “looking as nudes” to be emotional practices during this historical period. She described how paintings of nude female figures by the Lebanese artist Moustapha Farroukh, as part of a modernist art-historical tradition, built on notions of self-discipline and accomplishment.The final, keynote presentation, “‘What’s a Body to Do?’: (Un)dress, Masculinity, and Power in Post-Ottoman Egypt,” by Wilson Chacko Jacob, associate professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal, investigated the “body that is” in post-Ottoman Egypt through the narrative of the country’s semi-independence from the British in 1922. Questioning the social ruptures and continuities of this political and historical moment, Jacob looked at how the national subject embodied masculinity or femininity through sports and other physical activities. The male subject of Egyptian modernity served as the focus of Physical Culture, the magazine Jacob used to illustrate the making of modern gendered bodies. He argued that the corporeal “body that is” (or the material existence of the body) ultimately receded from the horizon, leaving the focus on how the body was mediated by social, political, and cultural forms.Throughout the conference, participants’ engagement with the guiding concept “modern bodies” brought to light critical transformations that took place at various historical junctures, such as changing attitudes about gendered bodies, conflicting ideas about women’s liberation and nationhood, and the history of the women’s movement, which would have deserved further examination. Forms of dress (or undress) provided a compelling vantage point from which each speaker could articulate his or her own set of ideas and concerns. The different ways in which clothes or the (un)clothed body were depicted in photographs and paintings opened up a discussion about the circulation of commodities, cross-cultural encounters, changing identities, and medical practices. The conference proposed a new way of thinking about modernity in the Middle East by looking at various representations of the body. Though the crossroads of dress and modernity clearly demonstrate changing expressions of gender, especially for upper-class women, there was a lack of discussion about how “modern bodies” were sexualized. Nevertheless, the ideas presented and the questions posed by the speakers and audience members highlight broader issues about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Future scholarship could pose additional questions, such as: Why is archival evidence important for understanding changing scholarly perspectives about art history genres, representations of nude bodies, or cross-dressers? How did changes in sartorial practices affect women’s expressions of sexual identity, their subjectivity, and their understanding of the self? The conference offered a launchpad for further investigation of sexuality and embodiment in the history of modern and contemporary identities in the Middle East.