DRAFT PAPER – NOT FOR QUOTATION – COMMENTS VERY WELCOME
‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU WEAR’
YOUNG GIRLS’ USE OF CLOTHING AND THEIR EMBODIED IDENTITY CONSTRUCTIONS
ALEXANDRA ALLAN
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
WALES, UK
Alexandra Allan, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT. Email:
Foreword: This paper is given as a basic outline for the presentation that I will be making in Lancaster. As it was written over a year ago I feel that my theorising and thinking has substantially moved on since it was developed. It is hoped that the presentation for the Girls in Education seminar will connect with the basic argument of the paper but will move onto reflect my current thinking and theorising; to discuss some of the ideas that I am developing for a new chapter in my thesis on the embodiment of girlhood.
The clothed body: some introductions
It has often been suggested that we live in an era characterised by visual images; a society that places premium on the way things look, especially in how we present ourselves to others. Lasch (1979), in particular, has argued that we live in a ‘narcissistic age’ where the presentation of self is important and the body becomes a ‘fetishised commodity’ that can be attractively packaged and sold. Given this emphasis on self presentation and appearance as central to modern society and to the way in which identities are constituted, it is surprising that relatively little has been written about dress and adornment within sociology. As Edwards (1997) suggests, sociology has generally tended to neglect fashion; viewing it as outside of the social sciences and more in line with the arts. Similarly, Polhemus (1988) suggests that dress has traditionally been viewed as a typically feminine pursuit that is irrational, trivial and unworthy of serious sociological analysis. Entwhistle (2000) explains that, even when fashion has been considered by sociologists it has tended to be reduced to simplistic overarching theories that rely on grand notions of emulation (Simmel 1971, Veblen 1953) or of communication/symbolism (Barthes 1985) that do not account for the complexity and contradictions of everyday dress. Gender, race and class all appear to have been oversimplified in these theories. Childhood in particular is a social category that has received very little attention in this literature. Although a small body of literature does now address this issue (Swain 2002, Bodine 2003, Pole 2004), traditionally children have been regarded as inactive social agents and passive consumers of clothing.
Perhaps the largest criticism that sociological fashion theory has had to endure is of its use and portrayal of the human body. Many writers have argued that despite its obvious relevance to dress, the body has largely been ignored in studies of clothing. Quoting Turner, Entwhistle (2000) argues that ‘there is an obvious and prominent fact about human beings…they have bodies and they are bodies’ (Turner 1985:1). Furthermore, human bodies are essentially dressed bodies; dress is a basic fact of social life, an individual act that prepares the body for the social world. The neglect of bodies in the study of dress, Entwhistle (2000) believes, is what has hindered our understanding of clothing and the importance that it plays in our everyday lives: ‘without a body dress lacks fullness and movement and is incomplete’ (p10). Wilson (1985:1) also makes a similar point when she comments on the ‘strangeness’ of dress without the human body:
For clothes are so much a part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the evanescence of life.
Entwhistle (2000) proposes a move away from seeing dress as an object to seeing it as an ‘embodied activity embedded in social relations’. She understands dress as a ‘situated bodily practice’ and her own work provides a theoretical and methodological framework to understand dress as a social activity.
The aims of this paper – an embodied theoretical approach to dress
My own work begins from this understanding of dress as a ‘situated bodily practice’. This paper will seek to explore the relatively under researched topic of children’s clothing use; it will concentrate on children’s use of clothing to construct their various ‘childhood’, ‘gendered’, ‘sexualised’ and ‘classed’ identities. The paper will suggest that although ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘age’ are useful lenses that we can view children’s clothing practices through, in reality the process is much more complex. Indeed, the paper will demonstrate that children can use clothing to transgress trouble and complicate identity boundaries; identities are ‘fixed’ through clothing and they are ‘transformed’ and made fluid. Importantly, the paper also seeks to explore clothing as an embodied identity practice. It aims to understand how children ‘live’ their clothing on a daily basis and how they embody these identities through their clothing. A central concern of the paper will also be to explore the ‘body work’ children participate in on a daily basis in order to negotiate the meanings of their clothing and bodily appearance/identity. Dress, therefore, will be used in this paper as an analytic tool; it is not clothing per se that this paper focuses on, but rather, dress as a visible marker/way of presenting the human body to others.
This paper’s theoretical framework is influenced by Foucault’s work concerning the ‘discursive’ and ‘docile’ body. Foucault (1977) argues that through surveillance our bodies are made docile by institutions and become subject to mass standards of behaviour, these standards of behaviour (or ‘discourses’) are then internalised by individuals and govern the ways in which we use and understand our bodies. Foucault (1980) also suggests, however, that people can act on their bodies in different ways and resist these normalising discourses. He does not, therefore, see the body as an entirely natural entity, instead he sees it as discursively produced and his work has been extremely important to an understanding of the socially constructed body. Although, as Entwhistle (2000) suggests, Foucault has very little to say about fashion, his work can be utilised to think about how discourses on dress discipline and instil meaning on the body. We can use his theories to understand how and why people may dress differently and resist being seen as ‘normal’ in their appearance. His theory is also important in understanding the ways in which dress can reproduce gendered discourses on the body, for as Butler (1990) also suggests, gender is not an essential characteristic of the body but a product of styles and techniques.
Two further caveats need to be discussed before moving on to detail the research this paper is based upon. Firstly, it is necessary to note that this research is based upon a study of ‘female bodies’. Very little has been written in mainstream sociology about women’s bodies and indeed Foucault has also been criticised for failing to account for gendered bodies in his analyses (McNay 1992). It has been left to feminists to account for the very different ways in which women experience their bodies (and indeed their clothes) in comparison to men; they have made the personal body political (Bordo 1995). As Frost (2001) suggests, in a study of girls it is necessary to account for the different experiences girls have of their bodies and to remain aware of the fact that they live in specific bodies with very real, material constraints. Therefore, it is not just any ‘dressed bodies’ that this paper seeks to explore but the gendered, feminine bodies of young girls. Secondly, these girls are also children and this has consequences for the ways in which their bodies will be perceived in society. As James (2000) argues, children’s bodies are subjected to discourses of normality, growth and change and any account of their bodies must appreciate the ways these temporal discourses are inscribed on the body and the ways in which children learn to negotiate these meanings in their everyday lives.
My own research – an ‘embodied’ ethnography
This paper draws on research carried out with one class of twenty five girls (aged ten and eleven) in a single sex, private girls’ school in the South West of Britain. The main emphasis for this research was to explore the ways in which girls manage and negotiate their gender identities as ‘girls’ with their academic identities as ‘pupils’. However, it was recognised that a major part of this project would be concerned with the visual re/presentation of identity through the body and clothing, this paper is concerned with that data.
My research was an ethnographic project that utilised a number of different methods. Some of these methods were specifically chosen to access the topic of embodiment and clothing. In particular, photographs were used to encourage the girls to re/present themselves visually and to talk about their clothing and appearance. Some of the girls joined a lunchtime photography club that I ran in the school to get the girls to look at photographs critically and to see how other people were visually represented. This involved looking at photographs by various professional photographers and writing monologues and stories about the girls they saw in these pictures. The girls were encouraged to create their own photographic diaries to portray things of importance to them and they were also invited to take part in a one day photography workshop where they worked alongside a professional photographer to produce a range of portrait prints that visually expressed their various identities. But as Emmison and Smith (2000) remind us, photographs are not the only method capable of capturing visual aspects of society. Through observation I was also able to make notes of the girls clothing and its usage in everyday situations as I spent time with them in the classroom and on school trips. The girls were also interviewed in their friendship groups and were asked specific questions about their bodies, appearance and their clothing. My role as an embodied researcher was central to all of these practices (Coffey 1999). As a researcher it was important to be aware of the impact my body and clothes had on the children in my research. The clothes that I wore imbued my body with specific meanings, the way I wore my clothes had particular significance and the children drew on my own dressing habits as a way of expressing their own ideas about dress.
Fashioning femininity: using clothes to construct a feminine identity
Entwhistle (2000) remarks that ‘fashion is obsessed with gender’. It could also be argued that the girls in my own study were relatively obsessed with the ways in which clothing could demonstrate gender. Their primary concern was not, however, the demarcation between male and female clothing but the much subtler differences clothing could illustrate between different femininities. The girls talked to me in interviews about the various identities they felt were available to them as girls and when explaining these identities to me they could rarely distinguish between them without resorting to talk of clothing:
G: I am not a tomboy I am a girly girl. I hate wearing t-shirts and trousers.
L: Tomboys wear trousers and baggy Mosher clothes. Girly girls wear dresses and look all lovely.
G: But tomboys are not moshers.
AA: What are moshers then?
L: Moshers wear baggy and all black and they are disgusting and they mope around and smoke.
A: Tomboys wear plain jeans and blue tops and things.
But it was not just the types of clothing that were important to the girls; colours were considered equally or even more important. ‘Girly girls’ were linked with pink items of clothing where as tomboys told me that they preferred to wear blue. This was clearly illustrated in one of the photographs the girls constructed as part of the photographic workshop. In the photograph two members of the group (who described themselves as tomboys) dressed themselves in neutral colours and sat against a stark, black backdrop. They asked one of the other girls to kneel before them in a pink dress and blow a kiss to the camera. At the front of the scene the girls also arranged an array of pink and blue products. The idea behind the photograph was to show the stark differences between tomboys and girly girls in the way that they dressed and the colours they wore. The girls summarised these feelings in a caption they wrote to accompany the photograph:
Not all girls have to wear pink lipstick and skirts. Some do and some don’t and there is nothing you can do about it. Why make us all stereotypes when we can be unique individuals.
Experimenting with clothing – changing meanings and changing fashions
Although most of the girls recited these clothing ‘rules’ to me in interviews, in reality the meanings of clothes or colours were not quite so fixed. There was often confusion over clothes in colours like green, yellow and purple. These colours were seen to be fairly neutral and so could be adopted to compliment a range of identities. Often the meaning of clothes and their colours were negotiated locally and depended on the context in which they were worn. When I questioned a girl who saw herself as a tomboy about wearing a pink fleece she told me it was okay for her to wear it as it was an ironic statement. This clearly fits with Finkelstein’s (1991) idea that clothes can be misappropriated to fracture, parody and satirise conventions. The colour black could also be ambiguous and worn by a number of different girls. In interviews the girls told me that it was mainly worn by Goths, tomboys and moshers and generally signalled some sort of resistance to a ‘girly girl’ identity. Holland (2004) also suggests that black clothing is associated with resistance (especially to traditional feminine dress). However, she also believes that over time black clothing has changed in meaning (from mourning to Chanel’s little black dress) and it now has many other uses. This was certainly the case in my own study where some of the girls simply wore black clothing for practical reasons. Gabriella reached this conclusion in the course of one of the interviews where she reasoned with the other girls:
Okay black is worn by Goths but what about if I wore a black dress I wouldn’t be a Goth then would I? Oh and remember that black suit Elsie wore to Katrina’s party with a turquoise top she looked really nice…she was really pleased with her self because she said it went with everything and she felt really smart.
Often the girls relished the fact that clothes were ambiguous and could shift in their meanings (Gleeson and Frith 2004). The girls felt that this gave them a chance to experiment with their clothing and also in their identities. Laurel, for example, insisted she could ‘play’ with her identity and that it could not be pinned down; she could be a Goth, a girly girl or a tomboy depending on her mood. She told me that she used her clothes to reflect her change in identity so sometimes she wore pink dresses and other times she would wear black trousers. Other girls could recall times when they had adopted different styles of dress due to changing friendship patterns, as Gabriella told me:
Well like this one time in year five I sat next to Gale and I got talking to her and I actually got quite friendly with her but it just goes to show all of a sudden I got more boyey…like I didn’t act like that but I did start wearing baggy trousers…it is part of growing up and experimenting to see who you want to be.
Some of the girls were avid watchers of the television clothes makeover series ‘What not to wear’ and so they too would experiment with their clothes, makeover their image and come to school with a radically new style. As Guy and Banim (2000) suggest, clothes contain a fantasy element; people can use them to describe and imagine the person they would like to be. Clothes were an important way for the girls to re/present their identities visually and to fix themselves into certain ‘feminine categories’ but they could also be used to transform identities and suggest multiple re/presentations. Clothes were used as a powerful and enjoyable way of remaking the self through the body.
Clothing restrictions – gender and bodily limitations
Despite this playful use of clothing, it was not simply the case that the girls could try on any clothes (or indeed any feminine identity) that they fancied (Butler 1993). In their everyday use of clothing the girls were subject to some very real, material restraints generally imposed on them by their bodily shape. Laurel, for example, despite referring to herself as a ‘dib dab’ (someone who was able to change their clothes and identity frequently) would often be positioned by others as a tomboy because of her larger bodily frame. Many of the girls told me that she was ‘too big’ or ‘too fat’ to be a girly girl: ‘can you imagine those legs in a skirt! No way, she is not girly!’ Laurel’s larger build appeared to limit her in her presentation as an ‘authentic’ girly girl. This was not the case for all girls as some were able to ‘work’ with their bodies to imbue it with different meanings or to change the ways in which they were seen by others, as James (2000) suggests their bodies could be used as agents of ‘self help’. Vanessa, for example, was a larger girl than Laurel but her keen interest in sport stopped her from being seen as big or fat. Vanessa also came from an extremely wealthy family and she was able to use her economic capital to buy the current fashions which helped her gain cultural capital and retain her popularity in the ‘girly girl’ group at school.