performing_patents_otherwise/web/content/hidden/expanding.md

## EXPANDING Citizens

Who gets to take up public space (and who doesn’t)? Who is made smaller, concealed and compressed? Who isn’t given capacity and possibility to expand? What forms of exclusion are revealed and resisted in clothing inventions? Claiming space and ideas of having ‘rights to the city’ are central to citizenship and enshrined in law (Lefebvre 1996). It speaks to physical and political freedoms, belonging, safety, access to resources, open social relations, and the ability shape and construct identities as well as the fabric of the city itself. A central aim of many clothing patents is to enable freedom of movement –though the nature of this is socially, politically and culturally shaped and reflects wide held beliefs and norms. While purporting to this noble aim, women are more often reduced, minimised, hidden, internalised, inside and contained –while cis able white men are expressed as open, outside and externalised.

This chapter highlights how inventors have resisted these hegemonic norms. They refuse to be reduced, compressed, made smaller or diminished by society by seeking new ways to make, take and claim space via unusual and inventive forms of clothing. The archive reveals other ways to claim space in public beyond more visible and conventional forms. There are also smaller, more modest, informal and less visible acts of citizenship found in the ways individuals have creatively and unexpectedly responded to restrictions to their participation in public life.

Examples of patents to be explored in this theme:Skirts (air filled tube hoop, inflatable bustles, divided skirts, convertible skirts), Gussets (bloomers, overalls)and self defendinginventions(electric, stabby, recording devices).