Geek Feminism: On feminism and clothes

[terriko]

I'd been trying very hard to avoid answering any of the feminism and clothing questions because they didn't really interest me, but I was personally disappointed with the first post about them, and then got inspired by one of the HL Project books, so I wound up writing two essays about women's clothing, business, and geekery:

Who are you dressing for? re-evaluates a reader question, keeping in mind this quote I got from a 70's feminist business guide:

In business you are not dressing to express personal taste; you are dressing in a costume which should be designed to have an impact on your bosses and teammates

And this spawned another post regarding the question Can you dress well and be taken seriously as a woman in technology? (Which was actually part of the first post originally, but it was too long so I chopped it in half.)

Clothes are a common hot-button topic on another mailing list I frequent, and it's clear that womens' experience in this area varies wildly (which is why I was trying to avoid these questions myself). So unsurprisingly, my answer wasn't satisfying to at least one person (although I don't seem to have the stream of disgust evident on the earlier post that I didn't write, so I feel pretty decent about the whole thing).

Anyhow, what I'm getting at is that Mary sensibly put up a call for guest posts on the subject of appearance and presentation issues, because as she says, we don't really have anyone who's willing or able to write some of the posts that people seem to want. If you can help, we'd love to hear from you!

Comments

[kittenthebad.wordpress.com]

I've been thinking about clothes in the workplace a lot lately - it's tricky to dress well as a female intern in the tech sector, and we have client meetings which further complicates things... this has inspired me to write something for my blog, but I'm totally open to guest posting instead/too :-)

[terriko]

Crossposting a guest post from your own blog is fine, too, if you want to do that! You might want to look at Mary's post for some of the angles that might be worth examining: http://geekfeminism.org/2010/06/20/clothes-and-geek-feminism/

Basically, though, we're looking for stuff vastly different from the stuff we discussed in the first few posts. If you think you want to do that, let me know when the post is ready and/or up on your blog.