ABSTRACT
Recent legislation criminalizing the outward appearance of Muslim women living in some European Union (EU) Member States has implications for critical theory and research into the micro-macro analytical nexus of world politics and popular culture, and the gender geopolitics of fashion in particular. Veil dressing construed by its most vocal critics as a provocatively religious act of defiance, rather than an expression of culturally multiplex dress practices is a controversial issue. This chapter shows how conceptualizing the body as and in world politics from a gendered perspective can offer avenues for further research into the geopolitics of fashion. Acts of undressing in ways that evoke, indeed provoke, strong responses from the guardians of virtue, political mobilization or public order, link the politics of veil-dressing practices, artistic interventions and naked protests. Gendered, racialized and style-conscious narratives in the public media and halls of political power have coded the act of getting dressed as an everyday corporeal practice.
