Anna Hanchett

Anna Hanchett joined the Department of Media Studies in 2019. Before her arrival at the Section for Fashion Studies, Anna received her BFA in studio art and her BA in art history from Calvin College (USA), and her MA in fashion studies from Stockholm University. Anna wrote her final MA thesis on the turtleneck and nomadic subjectivity, and she advanced to the PhD program shortly thereafter.

Anna's most pressing intellectual interests include fashion history and theory; feminist, gender and sexuality studies; fashion materiality; studies of corporeality and the body; fashion studies methodology; avant-garde and experimental aesthetics; and film and visual culture.

Anna's doctoral research is at the intersections of fashion, art and feminist studies. Departing from a nomadic feminist perspective, the project explores fashion's (re)articulation of subjectivity through representations of garment basics within feminist fashion cultures. 'Garment basics' in this case is broadly defined. Yet, the sociosymbolic versatility provided by these articles of clothing serves as a fruitful point of entry for examining fashion's cultural interweaving of body, garment, and identity. Informed by feminist theories on embodiment and sexual difference, the project engages with clothes as discursive tools. In doing so, the research aims to develop new understandings of fashion and contemporary subjectivity. Moreover, the project recognizes fashion as a cultural phenomenon, calling into question issues revolving around representation, corporeality and interiority; sameness and difference; the (male, primitive) gaze and (female, ethnic) visibility; and subject-object relations.