Fashioning Cultural Identity: Body and Dress

Goldstein-Gidoni explores the centrality of distinctions in dress in the construction of Japanese cultural identity. Modern Japanese wear both Western-style clothing (yofuku) and Japanese-style attire (wafuku), although the latter is worn mainly on ceremonial occasions. She considers the dynamic process of the construction of gendered cultural identities in modern Japan through both a historic perspective and present-day ethnography, looking closely at the gendered effects created through clothing in the coming-of-age ceremony (seijin shiki). The sartorial politics of cultural identity in modern Japan consists of two separate but related aspects: the cultural construction of what is Japanese and what is Western, and the construction of ''the traditional'' and ''the modern.''