Dressed for Dissent : Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the wake of the second intifada and energized by the Arab Spring, young Palestinian designers have used fashion to voice their political consciousness and forge affective communities in the face of Israeli occupation. This book proposes to understand their practices as “queer decolonial fashion,” a collaborative aesthetic ethos attuned to gender, sexuality, race, and the environment that transcends nationalist framings of the Palestinian struggle. Making the case for queer decolonial fashion as a model of creative activism, Dressed for Dissent shows how these designers’ work—imbricated with body, identity, and land—ultimately emerges as a site where a viable future for a free Palestine can be envisioned, while also offering insights relevant to other settler-colonial contexts.