Fantasising gender with the J. Peterman Owner's Manual

Abstract

This article offers an exposition of the J. Peterman Company's Owner's Manual, a mock-vintage clothing catalogue that promises customers ‘things that make their lives the way they wish they were’. Written in dramatic, long-form prose and illustrated in watercolour – both uncommon in today's mail-order fashion industry – the Owner's Manual is at once appalling for its misogyny and enticing for its nostalgia. This article argues that the Owner's Manual and its enduring success confound existing paradigms for interpreting both fashion media and the body's gendered relationship to attire. Are the Manual's millions of subscribers beset by false consciousness, imagining themselves into an oppressive sex/gender field and endorsing the catalogue's misogyny with their desire? The Manual is not fully intelligible within either structuralist or phenomenological interpretive modes – fashion theory's two most prevalent schools of thought – but, rather, begets an interpretive paradigm that forces us to reconcile individuals’ desires for, and identification into, historically mediated gender performance with the fact of individuals’ dignity, agency and autonomy. I argue that the Owner's Manual achieves this reconciliation by foregrounding sartorial objects, rather than individuals, as the bearers of gender fantasy and by demonstrating how these objects, laden with historical associations, have detached from the highly gendered contexts of their origins while nevertheless retaining aspects of their original semiotic potencies.