Reading Feminism, New Materialism and Post-colonial thought through Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture and the Body

This PhD by Publication enables the advancement of the research methodologies and theoretical positions that underpin the development of Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture and the Body, a book that critically explores potentialities of agency through the ways in which costume, itself, performs. Drawn from selected and interconnected past and contemporary costume-led performances, this thesis addresses how these may account for the capacity to both empower and oppress, focusing on contexts of colonialism and neocolonialism. Engaging in a wider and ongoing process of decolonising of the subject, it brings to bear key transdisciplinary theoretical advances that enable expanding beyond the ideas set out in the book to articulate intersecting ethical entanglements, while building on the implicit feminist, post-colonial position taken by it. In this process it considers costuming as a phenomenon that is critical, active, situated, material, temporal, spatial, in motion and embodied. Placing costume within post-humanist ontologies, I intend to make it an object of feminist, new materialist knowledge, that furthers thinking around performance as much as addresses social and environmental concerns, while offering a myriad of creative possibilities for future ethical interdisciplinary research, practice and pedagogy.