ABSTRACT Young people in contemporary South Africa inhabit a multiplicity of diverse, often contradictory, economic and socio-cultural contexts. These contexts offer a range of possibilities and opportunities for the affirmation of certain identities and positionalities alongside the disavowal of others. Dress – clothes, accessories and body styling – is one of the key components through which, within specific social conditions, people perform these identities. In making statements about themselves in terms of these multiple and intersecting group (or social) historical identities, the meanings soaked into people’s dress simultaneously speak to the present and their aspirations for the future. This article reports on a study that explored how a group of third year students at a South African university use dress to negotiate the multiple and intersecting identities available to them in a context characterised by neoliberal democracy and market ideologies that continue to be mediated by the racialised legacies of apartheid. The study employed a qualitative feminist discourse analysis to consider 53 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted by third year students with other students on campus as part of an ongoing project exploring gender productions and performance. The discussion focuses on student understandings of ways in which contemporary clothes and dress signal gender. The research suggests that while there are moments in which clothes are acknowledged as expressions that can reinforce or challenge inequalities structured around gender, participants are also strongly invested in neoliberal consumerist understandings of clothes as accessories to an individualised self in ways that reinforce neoliberal market ideologies and reinstate hegemonic performances of gender.

中文翻译：

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“因为他们是我”：着装和性别的形成

摘要当代南非的年轻人生活在多种多样、往往相互矛盾的经济和社会文化环境中。这些背景为肯定某些身份和地位以及否认其他人提供了一系列的可能性和机会。着装——衣服、配饰和身体造型——是人们在特定社会条件下表现这些身份的关键组成部分之一。在根据这些多重和交叉的群体（或社会）历史身份对自己进行陈述时，渗透到人们服装中的意义同时讲述了现在和他们对未来的渴望。本文报告了一项研究，该研究探讨了南非大学的一群三年级学生如何在以新自由民主和市场意识形态为特征的背景下，通过着装来协商他们可以获得的多重和交叉身份种族隔离的遗产。该研究采用定性女权主义话语分析来考虑由三年级学生与校园其他学生进行的 53 次半结构化深度访谈，作为探索性别产生和表现的正在进行的项目的一部分。讨论的重点是学生对当代服装和服饰表明性别的方式的理解。