Uniforms Exposed

Uniforms are perhaps the most widely worn garments in the world. Craik looks at the meaning of uniforms as well as how they have influenced fashion, and shows the centrality of uniforms to cultural politics. She draws on historical and contemporary examples of uniforms across different cultures.

This edited volume brings together a new materialist approach to understanding the various legacies and controls being exercised through school uniforms. Through examining school uniform policies, the editors and their authors highlight the embodied choices that contribute to a socio-materialist understanding of democracy and social justice. Uniform policy plays a distinct role in setting the culture of compulsory school education and as such it constitutes a set of under-theorised school practices. This work thus brings together critical perspectives from education, sociology, cultural and postcolonial studies within an overarching analysis of how uniform imposes performances that have a formative effect on young people’s identities and economic positionality.

Through a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job explores the changing styles, business practices, and lived experiences of the people who make, sell, and wear service-industry uniforms in the United States. It highlights how the uniform business is distinct from the fashion business, including how manufacturing developed outside of the typical fashion hubs such as New York City; and gives attention to the ways that various types of employers (small business, corporate, government and others) differ in their ambitions and regulations surrounding uniforms. On the Job sheds new light on an understudied yet important field of dress and clothing within everyday life, and is an essential addition to any fashion historian's library, appealing to all those interested in material culture, the service industry, heritage and history.

Starting in the nineteenth century in Germany, colourful military uniforms became a locus for various queer male fantasies, fostering an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a series of scandals derailed this emancipatory project. Simultaneously, public debates began to invoke homosexuality, sadism, transvestism, and other sexological concepts to criticize military policies and practices. In pursuing the threads with which queer authors and activists stitched their fantasies about uniforms, Jeffrey Schneider offers fresh perspectives on key debates over military secrecy, disciplinary abuses in the army, and German militarism. Drawing on a vast trove of materials ranging from sexological case studies, trial transcripts, and parliamentary debates to queer activist tracts, autobiographies, and literary texts, Uniform Fantasies uncovers a particularly modern set of concerns about such topics as outing closeted homosexuals, the presence of gay men in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity.

army branches - infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers - as well as the service and support branches comprising doctors and nurses, chaplains, musicians, quartermasters, military police, and the many others who have made up the U.S. Army. Insignia worn by all soldiers, such as eagles, devices with the letters US, and other letters and numbers, are also described and illustrated. Historians, military collectors, military reenactors, antique dealers and collectors,

This collection brings together cutting-edge research on the history of embodiment, health and schooling in an international context. The book distinguishes a set of educational technologies, schooling practices and school-based public health programmes that organise and influence the bodies of children and young people, defining the curriculum of the body. Taking a historical approach, with a focus on the period in which mass schooling became an international phenomenon, the book is organised according to four major themes. The first positions the school as a modern clinical space, followed by the second that explores programmes and curricula which influence the discipline of and care for the body. The third section examines the role of the built environment on the organisation and experience of children’s bodies, and the final section outlines the pedagogies, rules and routines that determine how the body is treated and experienced in school. International and multidisciplinary in scope, this unique collection is of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in education and public health, as well as history, policy studies and sociology.