Overdressed and underexposed or underdressed and overexposed?

Judges and public policy makers have transmitted conflicting messages in relation to women's bodies and have made normative judgements about how women are to appear in public. Women who have been judged to be wearing too much are called to undress as they are seen as interfering with the rights of others or being oppressed. Women judged to be wearing too little are urged to clothe themselves to avoid being seen as inviting sexual assault or dressing like always sexually available prostitutes. Juxtaposing these two situations, the oddness of judicial and public regulation of women's clothing becomes more starkly exposed. This paper examines the shifting nature of equality discourse and the naming of women's oppression; the near-disappearance of patriarchy as an explanatory framework; and the quagmire of women's agency. The concluding section proposes shifting the focus from differences between women's experiences to similarity in order to facilitate critical inquiry, dialogue and strategic action that might reconstitute women's equality in new ways.