Michelle Liu Carriger, chair of the UCLA Department of Theater and an associate professor, has been named the recipient of the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre for her book “Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity Between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan.” The award, presented by the American Society for Theatre Research, recognizes the best book in theater history or related disciplines published during the previous calendar year.
By using key historical moments, Carriger explores the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed, and examines fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities.
In the book, Carriger examines a number of case studies, including an essay called “The Girl of the Period,” the story of middle- and upper-middle-class girls dressing too sexy, too loud and too unladylike, sparking a media frenzy; a report from 1870 Victorian England about the arrest of two “flashy” girls engaged in horseplay in the theater, for being men in women’s dress; the history of the 1870s Japanese emperor who was made over with Western fashion after traditional Japanese fashion was deemed too effeminate; and the story of a 21st-century student using Victorian aesthetics to pursue a gothic, Lolita-inspired street look.
Carriger draws from a range of media, including conservative newspapers, tabloids, ukiyo-e — a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries — and early photography to position dress as a site where the individual and the societal are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the 21st century.
Carriger specializes in the historiography of theater, performance and everyday life, with special focus on gender, race and sexuality, as well as how clothing and fashion can serve as historiographical methods for maintaining bodily links to the past.
Read more about Carriger’s award at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television website.
