The politics of clothing in the work of Shirin Aliabadi

In the broad overlapping areas of recent scholarship deriving from, first, the field of fashion studies, and second, focusing on the politics of attire in relations between the West and the Muslim world, Shirin Aliabadi is an artist whose work has the potential to provide illuminating insights. This paper provides a general overview of her oeuvre with a focus on the way she uses fashion, clothing and associated concerns to explore the socio-political context confronting female Muslim MENA-based artists seeking to reach an international audience. The paper characterizes this context as one constituted by intersecting patriarchies: a local one that constrains artists’ activity through censorship and associated laws and norms; and that of the globalist West that imposes a discursive framework via which female Muslim MENA-based artists’ works are stereotyped to fit certain orientalist assumptions. Like a few prominent female Muslim MENA-based artists, Aliabadi’s work is characterized by a sophisticated deconstructive approach that can be seen to contest both of these constraining frameworks in the effort to clear a discursive space. Adorno’s and Rancière’s ideas regarding the relation of the aesthetic to the political are drawn on to account for the forms this contestation takes.