Conclusion
Even when unstable or ambivalent, meanings about the self are conveyed in everyday dress (Entwistle, 2000, p. 338). Bodies are processual, multiple, and always in flux, and this should translate into sartorial indeterminacy and hybridity, but academic dress codes embrace Cartesian dualism, deem masculinity and bourgeois ideology as neutral, and reject traces of the body and bodily sensations such as pain, which I can’t deny. Concealing stigmatized identities and performing professional ones—and thereby internalizing mainstream norms—is exhausting unpaid labor and carries grave consequences for the fibromyalgic academic, given that women’s professional attire is usually restrictive, form-fitting, and woven from fabrics that don’t breathe, stretch, or slide easily on the skin. Fabrics that do—like leather, silk, lace, cutouts with cutouts—are simply textiles that the mind is housed in a body, whether or not the body is neutrally dressed. These gestalts grant me agency over my body’s edges and non-visual sensory interfacing, and help me modulate my felt body as well, letting me control for variable somatic sensations and vocally express pain within the bounds of academic propriety.
Dress is a situated bodily practice (Entwistle, 2000), and working with/in/through chronic pain is a situated bodily practice as well. By dressing in ways that embody sporting and alt femininities instead of academic ones, connotes fleshier forms of endurance replete with sweat, blood, plasma, ink, tears and renders the fibromyalgic academic legible while simultaneously reducing her pain. This mode of dress doubles as a challenge to the ideologies underlying academic dress codes, the linkage between feminine styles and seriousness as a scholar, and the legibility of the fibromyalgic subject in the moral enterprise of academic culture. In a sense, dress practices aid the fibromyalgic academic in reconstructing herself as an entity who isn’t defined by or erased due to an allegedly moral failing.
