Articles by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Choreographic Practices, 2024
This is an autoethnographic article that unpicks the author's experiences of navigating the form ... more This is an autoethnographic article that unpicks the author's experiences of navigating the form and the social world of contact improvisation (CI) as a crip bodymind that routinely passes as normative and (very) 'able'. Drawing on fieldnotes made across a year of practising and studying CI in London, it considers what kind of subjectivities and social relations this dance form summons, encourages and constitutes. This article proposes that the ideal subject of CI is characterized by vitality, agility, intense desire, openness to risk, an ability to attune to oneself and to others and a combination of self-reliance and willingness (and capacity) to cooperate. The article draws parallels and (dis)continuities between these features and the aspects of subjecthood fostered by late capitalist 'risk society' and the risk subjects it conjures. It then enquires whether this ideal subject is compatible with certain neurodivergent and other crip ways of being-in-the-world. The article proceeds to consider how, and if, space can be made in CI for what is ironically defined here as the 'wimp' subject: less disposed to embrace risk; not adept at quick decision-making; not thrill-seeking, and easily overwhelmed by sensory and nervous stimulation.
Time & Society, 2024
This article draws on an (auto)ethnographic study of a group of freelance fashion professionals, ... more This article draws on an (auto)ethnographic study of a group of freelance fashion professionals, known as 'fashion agents', with a particular focus on their relationship to time. It aims to elucidate the temporalities that permeate their work lives and shape their subjectivities, which I coin as anticipatory subjectivities. Such subjectivities, I posit, are emblematic of the conditions of flexibilisation, precarity and hopeful investment in the future characteristic of contemporary cultural industries and, more broadly, late capitalist knowledge economies. I propose that agents' life-worlds are permeated by a promissory regimei.e., living in anticipation of constantly deferred, adjourned and unsecured rewards. Such a regime produces subjectivities that are premised on a hopeful emotional investment in the future, coupled with a preparedness for, and a capacity to navigate, incalculable risks. Another feature of the 'timescapes' that agents have to negotiate is the simultaneity of multiple fluid, unstructured and often conflicting temporalities and tempos, which requires a particular kind of time-competence. Finally, the article also foregrounds the importance, in agents' temporal orientations, of kairos: the right, opportune moment. Such a moment is normally perceived as being just about to happen; yet, it cannot be orchestrated or precipitated. As a result, one of agents' key temporal experiences is that of waiting, which de-subjectivises them and inhibits their capacity to act.
Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 2019
Fashion and prosthetics may appear at first glance to be unlikely bedfellows. Yet a tiny number o... more Fashion and prosthetics may appear at first glance to be unlikely bedfellows. Yet a tiny number of pioneering fashion scholars (Vainshtein 2012, Hall and Orzada 2013) have begun to extend the concept of adornment beyond recognized forms of dress and examine items that were hitherto perceived as belonging to the medical domain. This paper embraces a similar outlook and expands upon the currently available research. It considers how the amputee body is incorporated into the visual mainstream through the use of new generation “fashionable” prostheses, and how – and if – such prostheses can help to disrupt dominant discourses of normalcy. To do this, we study visual representations of three amputee artists and public figures: British performer Viktoria Modesta, American athlete, model and speaker Aimee Mullins and Japanese artist Mari Katayama. We argue that the use of aesthetic prostheses de-medicalizes disabled bodies and instead constructs them as consumer bodies, granting them what disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “the freedom to be appropriated by consumer culture” and “integrating a previously excluded group into the dominant order” (2004, 96). We then turn to the few images of disability that subvert such order, by engaging with prostheses creatively or by rejecting them altogether and celebrating unadorned stumps.
KEYWORDS: fashion, disability, prosthetics, amputees, non-normative bodies
Papers by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
How The East Was Worn
Routledge eBooks, May 27, 2022
“Let Me Be Your Stimy Toy”: Fashioning Disability, Cripping Fashion
Springer eBooks, 2023
This chapter considers how previously marginalised corporealities get incorporated into the visua... more This chapter considers how previously marginalised corporealities get incorporated into the visual mainstream and asks how—and if—fashion can help to disrupt the canons of bodily normalcy. It sets out a theoretical framework for analysing images of disability by outlining the four dominant strategies for representing disabled and other non-normative bodies in visual culture: “enfreakment” (Garland-Thomson, Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity. In R. Garland-Thomson (Ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. University Press, 1996); “mainstreaming”, a strategy that invites the viewer to negate and disregard the bodily difference (Smith, The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney. In J. Morra & M. Smith (Eds.), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. The MIT Press, 2006); “disability aesthetics” (Siebers, Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, 2010); and “crip aesthetics”. It then discusses recent representations of disabled bodies in fashion and lifestyle media that perform or challenge these strategies, focusing on images of amputee performer and model Viktoria Modesta, amputee war veteran and model Noah Galloway, model Melanie Gaydos as shot by photographer Tim Walker and the fashion performances organised by non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx artist and designer Sky Cubacub. I argue that the latter projects offer alternative and radical ways of representing disability within a fashion context and celebrate visible difference as a source of creative potential, rather than attempting to normalise or fetishise it, thus “cripping” fashion.
Dangerous Bodies: New Global Perspectives on Fashion and Transgression, 2023
This chapter considers how previously marginalised corporealities get incorporated into the visua... more This chapter considers how previously marginalised corporealities get incorporated into the visual mainstream and asks how—and if—fashion can help to disrupt the canons of bodily normalcy. It sets out a theoretical framework for analysing images of disability by outlining the four dominant strategies for representing disabled and other non-normative bodies in visual culture: “enfreakment” (Garland-Thomson, Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity. In R. Garland-Thomson (Ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. University Press, 1996); “mainstreaming”, a strategy that invites the viewer to negate and disregard the bodily difference (Smith, The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney. In J. Morra & M. Smith (Eds.), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. The MIT Press, 2006); “disability aesthetics” (Siebers, Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, 2010); and “crip aesthetics”. It then discusses recent representations of disabled bodies in fashion and lifestyle media that perform or challenge these strategies, focusing on images of amputee performer and model Viktoria Modesta, amputee war veteran and model Noah Galloway, model Melanie Gaydos as shot by photographer Tim Walker and the fashion performances organised by non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx artist and designer Sky Cubacub. I argue that the latter projects offer alternative and radical ways of representing disability within a fashion context and celebrate visible difference as a source of creative potential, rather than attempting to normalise or fetishise it, thus “cripping” fashion.
The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies, 2021
This chapter considers the mediations that have contributed to the commercial success of British ... more This chapter considers the mediations that have contributed to the commercial success of British accessories brand Sophie Hulme through the prism of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984, 1993) and Bruno Latour’s (2005) frameworks. It examines both human and non-human intermediaries that enabled the “consecration” of the brand, as per Bourdieu’s definition: the agent (or sales rep), the buyer, the fashionable consumer and the spaces of fashion cities and retail stores. It suggests that the roles of fashion intermediaries are shifting from participants of “vertical traded relationships” to facilitators of “horizontal traded interactions” and resulting “knowledge spillovers” (Bathelt et al 2014).
Bodies in Flux (Embodiments at the End of Anthropocentrism) ||
Brill 2019, ISBN: 978-90-04-40876-0 This volume offers an insight into a selection of current iss... more Brill 2019, ISBN: 978-90-04-40876-0 This volume offers an insight into a selection of current issues of embodiment and other related aspects, such as identity, gender, disability, or sexuality, discussed on the basis of examples from contemporary culture and social life. Inspired by Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg as a transgressor of boundaries, the book examines fluidity of post-human bodies-from cyber relations to others and to self, enabled by the latest technologies, through fragmented, prostheticised, monstrous or augmented body of popular culture and lifestyles, to the dis/utopian fantasies offered by literary texts-showing how diffcult it still is in current culture to let go of the stable boundaries towards the post-gender world Haraway imagines.
“This guy is such a machine!”: Gendering the Amputee Body in Fashion and Lifestyle Media
Bodies in Flux: Embodiments at the end of Anthropocentrism, 2019
This chapter is one of the outcomes of a larger study investigating the portrayals of amputee bod... more This chapter is one of the outcomes of a larger study investigating the portrayals of amputee bodies in recent fashion media. My interest in this topic was prompted by the sudden proliferation, over the last decade, of projects that married the two seemingly incompatible worlds, those of glamorous consumption and prosthesis design, that suggested a new way of looking at the disabled body was possible. Such ventures include catwalk shows and ads that employ amputee models, apparel and lifestyle brands, such as Nike and Adidas, branching out into prosthesis design, and emerging manufacturers of assistive technology and accessories, such as The Alternative Limb Project and Alleles, that use the logic and language of fashion, adornment and pleasure – rather than necessity and utility – in their work.
Naturally, the study underwent a number of permutations over the course
of its development. In one of the earliest drafts, its provisional title included
the terms “posthumanism” and “postgenderism” because, at the preliminary research stage, I had assumed that ground- breaking contemporary prostheses, magazine shoots featuring amputee models and emerging discourses around disability as super- ability would attempt to constitute a new type of body. I had expected to find, in recent media portrayals of disability, a body that transcended the gender binary and extended beyond its own “(hetero)normative, (re)productive function” (Seely 22); a body that would challenge the dominant concepts of normalcy; a body that would need to be conceptualised through Donna Haraway’s (1991) and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) cyborg and posthuman theories, rather than classic texts on gender and embodiment.
However, what I found instead was the opposite: recent representations of
amputees in fashion and lifestyle media adhere to the gender binary – and the neoliberal concepts of normalcy – much more than the images of able- bodied individuals. A close reading of such representations revealed that, within contemporary visual culture, the male disabled body is conceived of as being functional, productive and, in some instances, patriotic; conversely, the female disabled body is a body of pleasure and consumption. This vision reiterates the traditional ideas of masculinity as “hardness and power” (Bordo 1999), and femininity as leisure and display. The following chapter discusses the construction of gender in such media portrayals, focusing on how they channel what Raewyn Connell (77) coined as contemporary Western “hegemonic masculinity”, a culture- specific model of masculinity that ensures, legitimates and reproduces
male dominance in the sex/ gender system.
Journalism and Commentary by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Schrödinger's Jeans
Vestoj, 2019
"Cambridge Analytica’s model is based on the premise that fashion has solid, unequivocal meanings... more "Cambridge Analytica’s model is based on the premise that fashion has solid, unequivocal meanings that can be used to profile and target you with political messaging according to your clothing choices; that it is a rational universe where ‘Wrangler ergo Trump’ correlations can be drawn. But can it really hold ground today?"
A short opinion piece for Vestoj
Exhibition Reviews by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Mannequin: Le Corps de la Mode, in Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
Exhibition review
Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Russian edition), No. 28
Alaia, in Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
Exhibition review
Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Russian edition), No. 30
Book reviews by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Experimental Fashion: Performance art, carnival and the grotesque body (book review)
International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2019
‘Lumps’ and ‘bumps’, created through elaborate padding, in the collections of Japanese label Comm... more ‘Lumps’ and ‘bumps’, created through elaborate padding, in the collections of Japanese label Comme des Garçons; Leigh Bowery’s birth performance at Wigstock drag festival in 1993; Martin Margiela’s experiments with scale in his XXXXL-sized garments; and Lady Gaga’s ‘fat’ costume: all these cultural arte- facts, according to Francesca Granata’s book, reflect the same cultural para- digm, coined by Russian philologist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) as ‘carnivalesque’. Bakhtin studied medieval carnival culture through the works of French writer François Rabelais, unveiling a world predicated on the inversion of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, on satire, transgressing boundaries and shape-shifting. Granata’s interest, however, lies in one particular aspect of Bakhtin’s frame- work – the grotesque body.
Fashioning Models: Image, Text and Industry, in Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
Book review
Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Russian edition), No. 29
Catalogue and artist book essays by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
The Forgotten Book, 2018
Catalogue essay for Deathliness x The Forgotten Book exploring 'deathliness' (Evans 2003) in cont... more Catalogue essay for Deathliness x The Forgotten Book exploring 'deathliness' (Evans 2003) in contemporary fashion photography
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Articles by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
KEYWORDS: fashion, disability, prosthetics, amputees, non-normative bodies
Papers by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Naturally, the study underwent a number of permutations over the course
of its development. In one of the earliest drafts, its provisional title included
the terms “posthumanism” and “postgenderism” because, at the preliminary research stage, I had assumed that ground- breaking contemporary prostheses, magazine shoots featuring amputee models and emerging discourses around disability as super- ability would attempt to constitute a new type of body. I had expected to find, in recent media portrayals of disability, a body that transcended the gender binary and extended beyond its own “(hetero)normative, (re)productive function” (Seely 22); a body that would challenge the dominant concepts of normalcy; a body that would need to be conceptualised through Donna Haraway’s (1991) and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) cyborg and posthuman theories, rather than classic texts on gender and embodiment.
However, what I found instead was the opposite: recent representations of
amputees in fashion and lifestyle media adhere to the gender binary – and the neoliberal concepts of normalcy – much more than the images of able- bodied individuals. A close reading of such representations revealed that, within contemporary visual culture, the male disabled body is conceived of as being functional, productive and, in some instances, patriotic; conversely, the female disabled body is a body of pleasure and consumption. This vision reiterates the traditional ideas of masculinity as “hardness and power” (Bordo 1999), and femininity as leisure and display. The following chapter discusses the construction of gender in such media portrayals, focusing on how they channel what Raewyn Connell (77) coined as contemporary Western “hegemonic masculinity”, a culture- specific model of masculinity that ensures, legitimates and reproduces
male dominance in the sex/ gender system.
Journalism and Commentary by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
A short opinion piece for Vestoj
Exhibition Reviews by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Book reviews by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds
Catalogue and artist book essays by Jana Melkumova-Reynolds