Participants: Prof Dr Karen Ellwanger, Prof Dr Silke Wenk, Lüder Tietz (coordination)

Period: May 2009

Funding: Gerda Henkel Foundation, UGO

Structure: New teaching format with symposium for young academics (May 2009), publication of an anthology (in preparation)

Cultural studies, art studies, sociology of the body, political, ethnological and representation-critical research from a gender and queer studies-informed perspective on the ambivalent production of the men's suit. In men's studies and gender studies in general, the significance of the men's suit for the naturalisation of heterosexual bourgeois masculinity has hardly been taken into account. Clothing research, which has so far mainly examined the men's suit in terms of costume history, has only begun to work out that and how power, modernity and masculinity are linked in the men's suit. For several decades, the men's suit has been subject to ambivalences and hybridisation. Appropriations by dandies and as artists' uniforms, by women, lesbians, drag kings and trans men, in youth cultures and in post-colonial contexts have been of interest.