Essay Contest Winners 2008

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Undergraduate Essay Contest Winner
Ryan L. McElveen
Graduated in May 2008 with a bachelor's degree in Anthropology

In “Challenging Yellow: Decoding Skin Color in Urban China and the Convergence of Tradition and Globalization” I explore the changing consumption of skin color in urban China that has resulted from both globalizing and traditional influences. Cosmological and nationalist discourses have for centuries bounded the Chinese people under the banner of yellowness, but as skin whitening and tanning products have entered the market Chinese men and women have begun to draw on both the traditional want of white skin and global consumption hierarchies that promote tanning. After conducting fieldwork in Shanghai, China, I discovered the main impetus for tanning or whitening, particularly for women, lies in the want of a healthy, comfortable beauty that balances inner and outer energies. Consumption patterns are integral to the ways in which skin color is displayed and understood, and new Chinese skin color-based hierarchies continue to emerge. As China continues down the road of marketization, these hierarchies will become increasingly more pronounced.

Zora Neale Hurston Graduate Essay Contest Winner
Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Doctoral candidate in English

The essay “Virginia Woolf’s ‘frock consciousness’: The Gender and Politics of Fashion” examines the gendered politics and aesthetics of fashion in the work of Virginia Woolf and in early 20th century popular, sociological, and psychoanalytic discussion of dress. In Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction, fashion illuminates how everyday experiences and activities underpin larger social systems and values, while her accounts of fashion interrogate prevalent associations amongst fashion, femininity, and apoliticism. In particular, Woolf’s treatment of fashion counters rhetoric about the gender and politics of fashion that emerged in debates about women’s suffrage and the “flapper vote” in Britain as well as the work of influential sociologists Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel and the psychoanalyst J.C. Flugel, among others. Reading Woolf’s treatments of fashion in light of such diverse and often conflicting discussions of fashion, this essay shows how and why fashion was a site in which questions of style and aesthetics took on political force and meaning during the period.