Abstract
This paper provides analysis from a participatory design project wherein an intersectional group of women co-designed clothing intended to meet the aesthetic, functional, emotional, and symbolic needs of plus-size bodies (20+). The work of the collective is as much an exercise in fashion co-design as it is a defiant act of activism intended to dissolve, displace, and contest normative categories used to articulate some bodies as beautiful, desirable, and accepted, and others as failed, ugly, and/or sick. We build upon the concept of articu-lation to consider how co-design, in the spirit of activism, might be taken up as a counter-hegemonic practice used to disarticulate the boundaries that demarcate categories of Other-ness, giving way to space(s) where individuals can try on alternative subjectivities.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2017.008
Citation
Story, C., Barry, B., Tullio-pow, S., Abel, S.,and Schaefer, K.(2017) Disarticulating ‘fatness’: Design Activism and the Counter-hegemonic Practices of Co-designing Clothing with Plus-size Women, in Stuedahl, D., Morrison, A. (eds.), Nordes 2017: Design + Power, 15 - 17 June, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2017.008
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Papers
Disarticulating ‘fatness’: Design Activism and the Counter-hegemonic Practices of Co-designing Clothing with Plus-size Women
This paper provides analysis from a participatory design project wherein an intersectional group of women co-designed clothing intended to meet the aesthetic, functional, emotional, and symbolic needs of plus-size bodies (20+). The work of the collective is as much an exercise in fashion co-design as it is a defiant act of activism intended to dissolve, displace, and contest normative categories used to articulate some bodies as beautiful, desirable, and accepted, and others as failed, ugly, and/or sick. We build upon the concept of articu-lation to consider how co-design, in the spirit of activism, might be taken up as a counter-hegemonic practice used to disarticulate the boundaries that demarcate categories of Other-ness, giving way to space(s) where individuals can try on alternative subjectivities.