Sartorial borders and border crossing in contemporary multi-ethnic short stories

Abstract

Departing from recent theorisations on liminality in the short story genre and drawing on diaspora theory as well as socio-cultural approaches to dress, this chapter provides a sartorial reading of Qaisra Shahraz’s twenty-first-century version of her story “A Pair of Jeans” (2017). As the chapter contends, Shahraz’s story signals a point of inception in contemporary debates on the dressed body of ethnic minorities in Britain, fuelling insightful reflections on the intersections of gender and ethnicity in the diaspora space and revealing the existence of invisible borders that code dressing seeks to preserve or trespass.