Angela Carter and the “Sociology of clothes” in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

The richly allusive tapestry of Carter’s fictional costumes – comprising varying fabrics, face-paint, tattoos, and other forms of bodily modifications – invites closer examination of the complex politics that undergird them. This paper examines Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to understand how the novel uses dress not only to foreground gender-coded sartorial practices but also to draw attention to the ways in which it indexes colonial, cultural, and moral politics. The proposed paper thus, aims to analyze how Carter employs dress as a recurrent motif in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to examine its role in signaling and shaping socio-cultural identities.