The Shoplifter’s Clothes: Technologies for a Feminist Practice at the turn of the 20th Century
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Bombardini, Silvia. 2024. The Shoplifter’s Clothes: Technologies for a Feminist Practice at the turn of the 20th Century. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Abstract or Description
This thesis considers whether women’s shoplifting from department stores, at the turn of the 20th century, may be understood as a feminist act of citizenship – and examines the role that the clothes that shoplifters wore or might have worn, played or might have played in their thefts. Throughout, I engage with three sets of literatures. The first is Shoplifting Literature, which includes different interpretations, at the time and since, of the phenomenon which came to be known as a ‘kleptomania epidemic’. The second is Feminist Citizenship Studies, and the third is what I refer to as the interdisciplinary object turn, which comprises of texts influenced mostly by STS, but published across different academic fields. The methods I use are archival research, and the making and wearing of selected sartorial technologies. First, in anglophone newspaper archives, I collect reports from the turn of the 20th century, that describe in detail the sartorial technologies that the shoplifters who got caught had been wearing to steal. Next, in patent archives, specifically the Politics of Patents (POP) dataset of clothing inventions, I collect patents from the turn of the 20th century, that bear remarkable similarities with the shoplifters’ clothes described in newspaper reports. For example, a patented petticoat in which the wearer’s skirt can be inserted when it rains, recalls in its description that of a shoplifter’s skirt that is double lined to become a pocket. These patents allow me to speculate about the sartorial technologies that successful shoplifters might have worn, which are missing from newspaper reports. It is in this respect that, finally, the making and wearing of selected inventions provides a more comprehensive understanding of what these or similar technologies could do, beyond what their patents prescribe that they are for. Certainly, partiality is inevitable in making and wearing. But rather than producing objective knowledge, with this thesis I hope to open up the history that archives tell, to the unseen and untold stories, the feminist acts of citizenship that may undermine it.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
shoplifting, feminism, citizenship, clothing, fashion, technology, object turn, material networks, department stores, patents, archival research, speculation, reconstruction, misuse, inventive methods |
| Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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| Date: |
30 September 2024 |
| Item ID: |
37739 |
| Date Deposited: |
17 Oct 2024 13:32 |
| Last Modified: |
17 Oct 2024 13:37 |
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URI: |
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