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In the wake of the Second Intifada and energized by the Arab Spring, young Palestinian designers have used fashion to voice their political consciousness and forge affective communities in the face of Israeli occupation. This book proposes to understand their practices as “queer decolonial fashion,” a collaborative aesthetic ethos attuned to gender, sexuality, race, and the environment that transcends nationalist framings of the Palestinian struggle. Making the case for queer decolonial fashion as a model of creative activism, Dressed for Dissent shows how these designers’ work—imbricated with body, identity, and land—ultimately emerges as a site where a viable future for a free Palestine can be envisioned, while also offering insights relevant to other settler-colonial contexts.
Roberto Filippello is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and coeditor of Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress.
“In a time of endless devastation and despair, these Palestinian fashion rebels are balm for the soul. Narrated with care and precision, Dressed for Dissent chronicles the rise of sartorial endeavors that cannot but comment on the conditions of occupation, settler rule, and genocide. Roberto Filippello convincingly argues for a radical decolonial queer Palestine that is cohered not under the rubric of identity but rather through the aesthetics of confrontation, refusal, and redirection.”—Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
“Dressed for Dissent moves like a signal through the noise—a luminous act of witnessing. Filippello listens for how Palestinian fashion speaks in fabric, gesture, slowness, and style, turning dress into an embodied refusal of erasure. Clothes emerge here as living archives and speculative devices, carrying queer, Indigenous, and collective futures across checkpoints, ruins, and screens. Grounded in Palestinian life and propelled by collective struggle for liberation, this book does not ask fashion to stand in for resistance; it reveals making and wearing as insurgent practices of care, defiance, and world-building. A vital testament to beauty under siege, and to the futures stitched into the present.”—Laila Shereen Sakr, author of Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives
"With deeply collaborative research and confident and appealing writing, Filippello shows that fashion contributes profoundly to Palestinian resistance. The collectives profiled in Dressed for Dissent give Palestinians inventive ways to embody the grounded perseverance of sumud in the things they wear close to their skin."—Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos
“Dressed for Dissent redefines fashion as decolonial resistance. Whether in speaking of queer stealth as evasion of Zionist state violence, queer slow fashion as contending settler time, or the practices of queer Indigeneity as a means to confront the sexual regimes of Israeli colonial control, Filippello elegantly shines light on Palestinian designers who transform clothing into a materialist language of defiance, pleasure, and futurity contra Zionist apartheid and settler colonialism.”—Stephen Sheehi, coauthor of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine
“Finally, a book that moves beyond tatreez (embroidery) as the totality of Palestinian fashion and takes seriously the visual, material, and political significance of contemporary creations and trends. Dressed for Dissent weaves together stimulating stories of designers, imagemakers, and craftspeople from the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the '48 territories to map the affective landscape of Palestinian fashion. Through a simultaneously empathetic and theoretically grounded voice, Filippello demonstrates how these fashion collectives center and themselves enact anti-individualist, anticapitalist, and decolonial cultural aesthetic-political praxis. Considering practices and issues such as design, craft, fabrics, images, film, bodies, space, ecology, and sexuality, Filippello affirms that fashion, and especially what he theorizes as queer anti-apartheid fashion, is a medium through which new, exciting, and alternative Palestinian lifeworlds are and can be created.”—Helga Tawil-Souri, coeditor of Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media
244 pp.6 x 9Illus: 33 color figures
9780520424906$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Oct 2026