Fashionable Gender Trouble in Politics

The paper is placing an exemplary focus on fashion and the body and examines the visible part of gendered relations within the contested field of politics. What is new about the perspective here is that it starts from a common, historically established piece of clothing − the dark suit − in order to relate to macro-structural principles of the gender order and the repetitive practice of exclusion in politics. On the basis of a visual discourse analysis − a vis-course analysis, so to say − of group photos taken at political events like summits, the text traces fashion practices marking the field of masculinity and power. The global visual political communication sends clear signals: nothing changes. Women are (still) the exception, the other. No matter how women devise their roles, they remain imprisoned in a Double bind. And this fact of a lose-lose situation is conceived as symbolical violence here.