Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study explores alternative views on the Western miniskirt and isigcebhezana (miniskirt) in the patriarchal Zulu culture of South Africa. In recent times, the shift in meanings and perceptions on women wearing miniskirts has prompted the researchers to embark on this study. The aim was to find out why women wearing a traditional miniskirt (isigcebhezana), are more respected and appreciated among the patriarchal Zulu nation in South Africa than women wearing a Western miniskirt. However, in contemporary times it is often associated with sexuality. In the patriarchal Zulu culture, the Western miniskirt is often perceived differently from the traditional miniskirt – even though they look similar. The sexualisation of the Western miniskirt leads to situations where African women who wear miniskirts are harassed by cultural men in public spaces. Clothing, such as miniskirts, evokes intense emotional responses in Africa; and objections to this type of clothing are articulated through a discourse of foreign appearance (Hansen, 2004:167). Vincent (2009: 11) suggests that women wearing miniskirts are perceived as slaves of Western cultural imperialism. Like, Hansen (2004: 166) we ask: What is it about the miniskirt that continues to provoke public interest on questions concerning culture, gender, and sexuality?

A short story is presented.

This article reconstructs the life story of a commodity, the blue jean, in 1960s and 1970s Buenos Aires. It analyzes how the blue jean was commercialized, who wore it, and the meanings they attributed to the jeans. In addition, it explores the cultural representations of the blue jean and analyzes the debates it sparked in the public arena, which revolved around the \"Americanization\" of Argentina's culture; the shifting understandings of gender and sexuality; and the changing youth identities the blue jean allegedly embodied. In 1960s and 1970s Argentina, the blue jean acted as a prime marker of a youth identity as separate and eventually opposed to an \"adult\" identity and fashion. Jeans were the first dress item to be worn exclusively by young men and women, who increasingly dressed—and thought, and behaved—differently from the older generation. Yet the blue jean also served to signal and reinforce class distinctions and gender differences among young people. Jean styles, brands, and \"nationalities\"—whether imports or locally produced—became ways of elaborating intra-generational differences. By the mid 1970s, there was a \"blue-jean generation,\" although young people neither wore the same jeans nor endowed them with the same meanings.

Burgess discusses how nation building as an ideology lost meaning in Zanzibar, where young people lacked productive work, and how Western cinema emerged as a primary escape and inspiration for clothing styles. The ruling party mobilized against unsanctioned styles in order to defend revolutionary concepts of visual order, discipline, and citizenship.

This article examines another European iteration of the headscarf debate, this time in postcommunist Bulgaria, the European Union member with the largest Muslim minority. Bulgaria is a country that has always been at a crossroads between East and West, and women's bodies and their fashion choices have increasingly become the symbols of the \"backward Orient\" or the \"corrupt and decadent West\" for those on either side of an ongoing national identity crisis. For the Orthodox Christian/Secular majority, the headscarf represents all that is troubling about the country's Ottoman past and Islam's presumed oppression of women. For a growing number of Bulgarian Muslims, the miniskirt has come to represent the shameless commodification of women's bodies and the moral bankruptcy of global capitalism.