Fashion and Material Culture, Midwest Popular Culture Association. Proposal deadline is April 30, 2020

The Fashion and Material Culture area of The Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association is now welcoming abstracts, papers, and panel proposals for its 2020 meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 2-4, 2020. 

In Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander writes that “the primary function of …a garment itself …, in the main tradition of Western dress, is to contribute to the making of a self-conscious individual image, an image linked to all other imaginative and idealized visualizations of the human body” (xiv). As such, fashion and the material goods function as the material barrier between the body and the word, broadcasting identities while simultaneously serving material functions and situating a subject in a particular cultural context. Fashion is idealization and function, individual and cultural, product and production. 

In the breadth of the subject is a world of possibilities, and the MPCA area seeks work that represents the breadth and depth of academic work. All work on Fashion and Material Culture is welcome, from historical treatments to industry examinations to ecocriticism, fan studies to theoretical approaches to queer readings. 

Interested scholars should submit their abstracts here: <http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/>

Proposal deadline is April 30, 2020.

All papers and proposals must be submitted through the MPCA website; no emailed submissions will be considered. 

Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association Annual Conference

Friday-Sunday, 2-4 October 2020

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Westin Minneapolis