Women's History Commons^™

Wear & Tear, Wymberley Davis

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Wear & Tear is a documentary poetics project acknowledging and addressing the systematic policing, silencing, violence, and stripping of self-expression that women have suffered at the hands of cultural, societal, religious, and sexist norms. Wear & Tear is a hybrid research project which draws together mass culture archives and uses heterogenous sources like advertisements and juxtapose these with excerpts from sacred texts which seek to proscribe and circumscribe women’s clothing choices. It models itself on archival works such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee which works with image, language, and voice. My project presents a distinctly material cultural history …