The essays collected in this book provide profound insights into the wide-ranging topic of the fashionable queen: the manifold implications and effects that the combination of body, power and gender can have are examined by using different approaches and a variety of theoretical frameworks. By addressing queenly appearances in the past and the present, in politics and the media, in royalty and the middle-classes, in the arts and in popular culture, this book offers a new way of thinking of publically significant women, who exert, and at the same time subvert, their power through their attires and thereby negotiate notions of gender, class, power and media representation.

Monika Seidl is Professor of Cultural Studies at the English Department of Vienna University. Her research interests are wide-ranging with a focus on visual texts, literary classics and popular culture. Eva Flicker is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. Her fields of research are visual sociology, gender studies as well as organizational communication and group dynamics.