The Corset and the Hijab: the Discursivisation of Identity Between the West and the Orient

The present thesis contains the commentary reviewing nine publications produced and submitted between 2016 and 2020. The portfolio debates the intersection of Communication and Semiotics theories, utilised in the study of Fashion and the Body as media displaying multifarious relations of communication which, through their iterations in culture, generate the interactions between human subjects, which are the foundation of the social milieu. Throughout the sections, the matter is explored in the proposition of a method to the study of rhythmic changes and their alternation, which is employed in a series of analyses addressing Western dress and the hijab, to then unfold into the works’ core contribution: the postulation of the West and the Orient in parallel, rather than viewed as opposed cultural practices. Utilising mainly the Semiotic and Socio-semiotic Theories developed by Greimas (1970, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 2000; Greimas & Courtés, 1993) and Landowski (1992, 1997, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010,2014, 2017) as a foundation to the construction of our methodology (Jardim, 2021c), the work merges Post-colonial Theory (Ahmed, 2006; Bhabha, 1994; Buruma & Margalit, 2004; Lévi-Strauss, 1952; Said, 2003; Spivak, 1999), and works about the corset (Jardim, 2014; Kunzle, 2004; Steele, 1997, 2001) and the hijab (Ahmed, 2011; El Guindi, 1999; Shirazi, 2003) to promote an examination of the objects as communication praxes constructing and disseminating ideas linked to the role of women, as well as discourses about Culture, Identity, and Religion. The investigation results in questioning multiple relations of power articulated through various media of communication—the verbal use of language and the discourses it creates but, equally, the visual dimension of the body, dress, and the imagery constructed around them— rejecting the dogmatic binaries which form our current worldview to, instead, observe the semio-narrative structures of discourses and practises which reveal the entanglement of Western and Oriental dress practices.