Introduction

This chapter recognizes that fashion plays a seminal role in the creation of political identities, from the crafting of national identity to various iterations of individual forms of subjectivity. It pushes this line of analysis one step further in order to examine what types of practices contribute to enfashioning bodies of resistance in international politics. The chapter highlights the body's location between the ideational and the material in order to play within and against the tensions of a body enmeshed in linguistic structures of meaning that performativity evades, contests and shatters. The crucial determination here turns on reading the moments of subversion immanent in the process of enfashioning bodies of resistance. The chapter provides a rationale for deploying the mannequin as a contrapuntal figure, enabling an exploration of how dressing the body functions to capture it as an absorptive, reflective surface of power tangled in a web of representation.