Contributing to Oppresion

Edwin

In the reading for this week Enstad puts forth an interesting argument concerning the radicalization of popular culture. Her focus on fashion in the beginning of the book was for me the more interesting part of the argument. Eliciting a movement of increasing egalitarianism and democratization and a moment of identity formation from fashion is a difficult argument to organize but Enstad puts forth her case well. However, there were a few issues I had with the fashion argument. Enstad argues that these women were working in factories, slaving over the very goods that at the same time were empowering them. They were working for companies that saw them as dispensable and at the end of the day, were returning their wages to them. This idea seems fairly counter-intuitive to me. Inside the factory, women worked under horrible conditions and were treated as insignificant, yet when they left the factory and bought the goods they were producing the become empowered? Whatever empowerment they felt from wearing clothes which helped establish their “ladyness,” pales when presented with the fact that they were contributing to a system which was oppressing them.

At the same time Enstad’s examples of cheap clothing as a crack in class walls seems feasible. One look at the business world and it is easy to observe how clothing can bring forth favorable judgment, no matter who is the wearer. On pages 26-29 Enstad gives examples of individuals who could no longer tell ones class by examining clothing. What I find difficult in this section of the argument, is that even through wearing middle class cloth one is still acknowledging that these distinctions matter. For me, this fact puts the rising democratization that Enstad was arguing in question. After all there was likely a large amount of women who could not afford to buy even these cheaper imitations of high class clothing. Those who could and did buy these imitations were contributing to these class distinctions which were still enforced on the fashionably less fortunate.