Faculty Introduction for “The Little Black Dress: An Embodiment of Femininity”

The third unit in my Writing as Inquiry class, titled “Object Lesson,” asked students to examine the history of an everyday physical object in order to develop a broader argument about the object’s cultural, social, and political significance; in the terms of a TED video series that was one of our models for this kind of work, students were asked to find a “big idea” within a “small thing.” Ishita’s “The Little Black Dress: An Embodiment of Femininity” is an exemplary fulfillment of the expectations of this assignment. The first thing that stands out is her vivid and elegant scene-setting in the opening paragraphs, where she locates her chosen object – the little black dress or LBD – within an iconic cultural image, and reveals its crucial but potentially overlooked presence there. What follows is a deft interweaving of cultural history and sophisticated engagement with complex arguments. Ishita manages to situate the story of the LBD within a broader social history of gender, while grounding a foundational modern intra-feminist debate about femininity in this concrete narrative. She manages to engage thoughtfully with opposing positions while advancing a subtle but cogent case of her own. This is an impressively multifaceted contribution to our understanding of the object as well as the larger questions Ishita brings to bear on it.

Read “The Little Black Dress: An Embodiment of Femininity”.

Geoff Shullenberger, Lecturer in the Writing Program