The Bad Corset

A fascinating and brilliantly executed re-examination of long-held assumptions about a notorious episode in fashion. Gibson takes an elegant pair of shears to a tightly bound arrangement of misconceptions. The history of women, of their bodies, and of their health is all the better for it. * Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times Bestselling author of The Facemaker *A must read for any corset scholar or enthusiast. Skilfully combining biological anthropology, feminist theory and fashion history, Rebecca Gibson shows how deliberately biased medical discourses of the past still influence discussions about corsetry, women’s bodies and health today. * Sarah Bendall, Australian Catholic University, Australia *Breaking down the wall between science and social science, Professor Gibson’s translation and dissection of Ludovic O’Followell’s treatise on Le Corset shines an expert light on the ignorance and contempt embedded in medial ‘knowledge’ about women at the dawn of the twentieth century. * Steven Zdatny, University of Vermont, USA *Innovative, engaging, and incisive, The Bad Corset is a necessary anthropological, feminist, reframing/reimagining annotation of a very particular book, Le Corset … Using translated text, original imagery, and a thorough, and at times gratifyingly sardonic, scholarly lens, Gibson pushes against patriarchal framings and errors regarding corsets, corseting, women, and human biology … [and] invites readers to reflect with the past and to think anew about bodies, biases, and possibilities. * Agustín Fuentes, Princeton University, USA *

Rebecca Gibson is Assistant Professor in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. Her published works include Desire in the Age of Robots and AI (2019), The Corseted Skeleton (2020), and Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death (2021). She holds a PhD in Anthropology from American University, USA.