Your Pain, Fashion's Gain

by A.D. Amorosi

Haute couture

Author and theorist Branka Arsic has made a career of studying how the body's surface acts as a playground for pleasure, pain, hedonism or consumerism. She appears this week with Syracuse University English professor Gregg Lambert (The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture) as part of a symposium on fashion and pain — two ideas that have gone together since super-tight corsets were invented. Like Orlan (pictured), the carnal performance artist whose career consisted of permanent body and face modification and "aesthetic surgical" manipulation, Arsic also seeks to question beauty's empirical nature; she argues that personal choices and preferences govern fashion. The SUNY Albany professor, a big name in gender studies, 19th-century American literature and 16th- to 18th-century European philosophy, penned The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (via Beckett) before working on a new book on the politics of pain and the rhetoric of masochism. In her view, S&M is the chance for a body to adjust itself to accommodate more than just pain. She sees clothing, like corsets and neck braces, as experimental totems. And she can tie both to larger societal themes, like drug addiction and anorexia, which indicate a method of whole-body refashioning — you may not look healthy, but you do look the way you wish. Fashion choices, therefore, are not about style but rather a body that "emits its own signs," states Arsic in her program's notes. "Fashion is about turning the body into a surface that is capable of bearing its own inscriptions." Sometimes a pant leg isn't just a pant leg.

"Pain-Fashion," featuring Branka Arsic, Gregg Lambert and Jean-Michel Rabaté, Thu., March 17, 6:30-8 p.m., free, Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., 215-222-9050, www.slought.net.