Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

In March 2018 the School of Architecture and Design at the Lebanese American University (LAU) hosted a one-day conference in Beirut titled “Modern Bodies: Dress, Nation, Empire, Sexuality, and Gender in the Modern Middle East.” The conference was jointly convened by Reina Lewis, professor of cultural studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and Yasmine Nachabe Taan, associate professor of art and design at LAU. Participants examined gender and colonial pasts through the lens of sartorial subjects using various methodological approaches, such as social, cultural, and economic histories, along with the history of fine art, photography, archives, and visual culture. The guiding term modern bodies served as the primary conceptual theme through which to evaluate changing gender identities at a significant time in the Middle East, the late nineteenth to the...