La disciplina dell'abito. Momenti di contestazione femminista dalla Dress Reform al Freedom Trash Can

Through a materialist feminist perspective, this essay offers a critical analysis of women’s dress and self-presentation as both the expression and the impression of the “mark of gender”. It examines several instances of feminist criticism and militant protest against the corporeal discipline imposed on women through dress, their sexualization and objectification: a line is traced in feminist history starting from the mid-19th-century Dress Reform movement, to the 20th-century writings by Perkins Gilman, Woolf and De Beauvoir, culminating with the 1968 Freedom Trash Can action organized by the women’s liberation movement at the Miss America protest, which originated the media image of feminists as “bra-burners”.