Abstract

This study explores how late colonial Virginians used clothing to control, enforce, and negotiate gender. Gender, both as a system of power and as a category of social identity, became linked with the material forms of clothing that Virginians wore in their everyday lives. The identification of clothing with the body enabled Virginians to actively make choices about how to perform themselves to the wider culture of observation and perception present in the colony. Dress was ubiquitous, but its meanings were variable, changing, and unstable. In eighteenth-century Virginia, Anglo-descended colonists imported ideals from Britain, which then produced Chesapeake-specific gender relationships, facilitated by slavery and networks of perception. These relations became entangled in the sartorial embodiment of gender, as Anglo-Virginian women and men dictated acceptable forms of femininity and masculinity. Yet enslaved Afro-Virginians could and did negotiate gender on their own terms by fashioning new meanings about their clothing when they ran away. Bringing together documentary, visual, and material sources enables a material perspective on the importance of colonial appearances and the centrality of gender to colonial life. Embodiment theory, the method of reading "along the bias grain," and discussions of agency further augment histories that deal primarily with embodied social status or race and refine gender scholarship concerned with colonies besides Virginia.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2021

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Beiler, Rosalind

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

History

Degree Program

History; Public History

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0008880; DP0026159

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0026159

Language

English

Release Date

December 2021

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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