Being the academic "bad girl"
“Invoking the power of clothes to enhance confidence thus pre-emptively defends an interest in personal aesthetics against potential critique” (Donaghue, 2017, p. 236), but confidence is an indecorous bottom line argument with fetish- or anti-establishment inspired garments. Leather, vinyl, and hardware accents are popularly constructed as subcultural or deviant, connotations that are reflected in dystopian and cyberpunk film and pornography as well as in fetish club performances, and punk subcultures are associated with the underclass (Commane, 2009). Contradictorily, textiles like silk and leather connote luxury, as these fabrics are typically expensive. On an adjunct’s salary I hardly made enough to shop for such clothes anywhere but thrift stores, where the markdown could be as steep as 70%. This is not evident in the quality of the clothes, however, which still communicate the bourgeois class sensibility institutionalized in academic departments (Archer, 2008).
Practices like piercing, tattooing, scarring, and branding negotiate cultural, gender, and sexual identities (Pitts, 2003). Even though piercings and tattoos have become more mainstream, tattoos considered tastefully feminine tend to be delicate, small, easily concealed, and themed around art that is itself gender-marked, such as hearts or butterflies. By contrast, nonmainstream or heavy body modifications reject normative femininities and gender and sexual binaries, carry working-class connotations, and/or are associated with stigmatized groups like bikers, gangs, or prison inmates. Thus, body modifications exposed on the dressed body lend themselves to alternative femininities comprising lower socioeconomic status, criminality, sexual deviance, or gender fluidity. These subcultures and groups are also associated with aggression, toughness, bravado, and DIY resourcefulness, all qualities I sought out for myself as I revised my habits and narrative of self after my diagnosis. In rejecting vulnerability and passivity, reminders of the daily violence done to me by chronic pain, I also abandoned traditional feminine markers. I have a gold nose ring but no other culturally-marked modifications, like peacock feather or mandala tattoos. Including a magnetic implant and large scarifications on both thighs, I have fourteen body modifications, eight of which are difficult to hide. Most are coded masculine, black-and-white designs including circuitry, serpents, and a medical diagram of the female body.
I got my first tattoo the year I was diagnosed. After that, body modifications became an essential part of my post-illness reconstruction of self that literalized that refashioning through bodily inscription (Charmaz, 2002), not just as an aesthetics of self but as an aesthetics of existence. Expressions of pain simultaneously repel and encourage spectatorial sympathy for the sufferer (Scarry, 1985; Halttunen, 1995), but body modifications—conveying past pain that was undergone by choice—indicate the ability to endure and emerge anew, qualities that fibromyalgia had wrested from my post-illness self-concept. By visually signaling that I’ve voluntarily endured the acute pains of body modification, I might leave myself open to skepticism about the authenticity of my fibromyalgia. However, these modifications bolstered my self-confidence and contribute significantly towards the post-illness body image I needed to cope with chronic pain. Intervening into my skin and flesh rearranged my body schema, changing my experience of my body’s edges through raised scars, or the number and weight of multiple earrings which also change the shape of the ear and thus how the brain grasps sound.
Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) posits the body as a being interfacing with the world through embodiment, arguing that our perception of sensation is determined by how we understand external stimuli, which itself derives from how we organize experience, and not from the stimuli themselves. The body is the envelope through which we sense the world, but clothes impinge on this experience. Dress makes us aware of the body’s edges by covering the body with haptic sensations, such as pressure, texture, temperature, and weight. Body modifications similarly alter the body’s contours, rearranging my body schema when it was permanently disrupted by fibromyalgia, permitting me agency over it once more. Body modifications exposed through dress create a prurient gestalt, arousing visual-tactile response in the viewer in addition to awe (“How did you endure it?”), disgust (“Why would you endure it?”), or concern (“You know that’s permanent, right?”). Moreover, some of my heavier, more subcultural modifications are located in intimate places, such as my thigh scarifications or my rib tattoo, bringing alternative sensuality, sexuality, and femininity into academic life, where embodiment isn’t welcome.
In academic culture, those obsessed with body projects signal that they undervalue the life of the mind. Endurance is an embodied phenomenon; in academic culture, it must be the consequence of nurturing the life of the mind: for example, pulling an all-nighter to grade or write, or skipping breakfast and lunch to teach back-to-back. By contrast, with roots in fetish and youth rebellion subcultures, fashion and body art nurture “irrational” carnality.
Chronic pain “is not a sensation but a perception dependent upon the mind’s active ongoing power to make sense of experience” (Morris, 1998, p. 118). I expose my skin not to reveal my tattoos but to relieve my body’s edges of the haptic sensations created by clothes and exert control over my sensory experience of the world. Entwistle (2000) describes dress as a second skin or shield that impacts how we perceive the world through non-visual senses, but for me, clothing, professional attire especially, asks me to willingly shut myself in an iron maiden. Projecting my desired body image, one that reflects my self-concept and buoys my self-confidence, eases the distress that accompanies this daily decision. Through fetishistic textiles and body modifications that are unfeminine and untrendy, my affective presence, my felt body, projects the self-concept that buoys me enough to competently enact and survive my academic duties. Additionally, the fabrics associated with these so-called “lowbrow” subcultures best accommodate my fibromyalgic intensities. Non-utilitarian elements of dress like cutouts or metal or leather accents have use-value for fibromyalgic bodies and also open extra-linguistic spaces for more productive intersubjective constructions and understandings of pain in the workplace.
Academic dress practices seem intended to discipline women’s femininity, sexuality, and affective body where it threatens the identificatory narrative of the professoriate. According to Carter (2012), “Human dress, because of its physical independence from the body of its wearer, can play a surrogacy role as a field across which the ripples and convulsions of the non-utilitarian are able to play” (p. 351). Tailoring my dress practices to include non-utilitarian accents and signs accommodate my body schema and body image upsets this narrative with alternative femininities, which can’t be explained through mainstream fashion trends, which are highly corporeal, and thus anathema to the life of the mind.
