Dress, Labor, and Choice: An Intersectional Analysis of Clothing and Adornment Artifacts

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the midst of racialized servitude, sexual exploitation, and economic disenfranchisement, that marked the post-emancipation era in the United States, African American women were styling their hair with combs, lacing glass beads around their necks, dyeing coarse-cotton fabric with indigo-berry and sweetgum bark, and fastening buttons to adorn their bodies and dress their social lives. Through an examination of clothing and adornment artifacts recovered from the Quarters at the Levi Jordan Plantation, this paper explores quotidian dress practices. I posit that how people dressed their bodies in their everyday lives, are practices of self-making,  that through their repetitive daily nature, constitute the body and form identities. Through a Black feminist framework, this presentation focuses on the ways African American women dressed their bodies for the types of labor they performed to garner a discussion around how they negotiated ideologies of race, gender, and class, that shaped hegemonic notions of femininity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 551