Dominant Discourse On Gender And Its Impacts On Costumes And The Presentations Of Body

The main object of the paper is to explore the impacts of the dominant gender discourse on individuals'costumes and presentations of body in people's everyday life. Basing on a careful and meticulous literature review, in chapter 1, i.e., the Introduction, the author points out the fact that conventional sociological research has for a long time neglected to study costumes, and at the same time, researches on body and presentations of body have not paid enough attention to costumes, either. Following the literature review, a conceptual framework, mainly influenced by Foucault's theory of knowledge/power, is set up and taken as the key approach to analyse the impacts dominant discourse of gender has on costumes and presentations body and its resistance by people in their everyday life. Chapter 2 points out the mechanism of how gender discourse dominates costumes and presentations of body. The paper stresses that after people submit themselves to the discourse, they identify with certain style of dressing and particular presentations of body. Chapter 3 discusses how expectations and norms, which embody the dominant discourse, guide or normalize the daily dressing practice, and thus the universality of the gender discourse is proved. And in this section, it is stressed that the female is proved to have been more influenced by the discourse. Chapter 4 reveals the fact that the seemingly personal psychological peacockery is actually a social result, refletcting that women and their practices of dressing and the presentations of body are indeed controlled by the gender discourse. Chapter 5 discusses the resistance to power, which is presented in the a tendency of the so-called convergence of dressing and cross-dressing. Chapter 6 is a reflection of the thesis, trying to draw a conlusion that people's self identification of gender is actually a result of the cross-cutting operation of discourse and power. That is to say, gender as a social fact accepted with taken-for-grantedness is actually the result of the disciplining of body by power, but at the same time, the very power is at anywhere and anytime confronting the resistance in peoples'everyday practice. The paper also points out that the disciplining of body by power is to differentiate gender and thus functions in a sense as a mechanism of social control. Finally the paper discusses how feminism looks into costumes and presentations of body, and their relations to discourse/power. As readers will find that Foucault's theory of power is the only basis of the conceptual framework in this paper, and this makes the explanation of the paper divergent from any psychological or aesthetic analyses on dressing, and lets us have a better chance to understand the dynamic mutual constructive relations and processes between costumes and the presentations of body from a real constructionist sociological angle.