Clothing Inventions as Acts of Citizenship? The Politics of Material Participation, Wearable Technologies, and Women Patentees in Late Victorian Britain
Open Access
- 14 September 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Science, Technology, & Human Values
- Vol. 48 (1), 9-33
- https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211044210
Abstract
This article is about clothing inventions, material participation, and acts of citizenship. I explore how pioneering Victorian women at the turn of the last century inventively responded via clothing to restrictions to their (physical and ideological) freedom of movement. While the bicycle is typically celebrated as a primary vehicle of women’s emancipation at that time, I argue that inventive forms of clothing, such as convertible cycling skirts, also helped women make claims to rights and privileges otherwise legally denied to their sex. I ask: Do clothing inventions create possibilities to act differently? Can they be thought of as wearable technology, and in what ways do they (and their invention) enact political concerns? Might convertible cycling skirts be considered “acts of citizenship?” Throughout, I mobilize concepts of multiplicity, in-betweenness, and ambiguity to make a case for the relevance of clothing research for science and technology studies.Keywords
Funding Information
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/K008048/1)
This publication has 23 references indexed in Scilit:
- Citizen sensing, air pollution and fracking: From ‘caring about your air’ to speculative practices of evidencing harmSociological Review, 2017
- Medical aid as protest: acts of citizenship for unauthorized im/migrants and refugeesCitizenship Studies, 2013
- Enacting European CitizenshipPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2013
- Claiming European citizenshipPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2013
- Packaging water: plastic bottles as market and public devicesEconomy and Society, 2011
- Materials and devices of the public: an introductionEconomy and Society, 2011
- Citizenship: Feminist PerspectivesPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,2003
- ‘The Epidemic of Purple, White and Green’: Fashion and the Suffragette Movement in Britain 1908–14Published by Bloomsbury Academic ,2002
- Respectable Identities: New Zealand Nineteenth-Century 'New Women' - on Bicycles!The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2001
- “Not for Ornament”: Patenting Activity by Nineteenth-Century Women InventorsJournal of Interdisciplinary History, 2000