Power in the Folds of Clothes: Costume Symbols and Female Micropolitics in The Song of Eternal Sorrow

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_96How to use a DOI?

Keywords

The Song of Eternal Sorrow; clothes; code; women

Abstract

In the traditional field of literary criticism, dress writing focuses on the symbolic function of the mirror image of the times and the social class. With the in-depth excavation of the semiotic theory on the meaning practice of the object system and the revelation of Foucault’s micro power theory on the penetration of disciplinary technology into daily life, the complex connotation of dress as a micro-political field and medium of bodily practice carrying multiple symbols has become the focus of research more and more. Wang Anyi’s The Song of Eternal Sorrow is an exemplary text under this research path, in which the writing of costumes transcends the traditional symbolic function of the era and reveals the power game lying dormant between the folds of the clothes. This paper starts from the triple symbols of politics, gender, and era, analyzes how the dress becomes a symbolic weapon for women to fight for the subjectivity in the gap of the era’s discipline, and takes Wang Qiyao’s interpretation of the dress as a typical example to show the predicament of women’s survival in the era that is reflected by her tragic destiny, which provides a new textual analytical path for the interpretation of women’s mobility and the construction of subjectivity in the macro-history, and it has significant significance for the study of literary criticism and socio-cultural research. It is of great significance for literary criticism and socio-cultural research.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ruoxuan Shi
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/26
TI  - Power in the Folds of Clothes: Costume Symbols and Female Micropolitics in The Song of Eternal Sorrow
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Culture, Design and Social Development (CDSD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 869
EP  - 878
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_96
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-541-6_96
ID  - Shi2026
ER  -