"Looking well."
I describe intolerable pain to my primary care physician and am referred to a psychiatrist, an older white woman whose boho maxi skirt, loose white blouse, and navy blazer convey a vaguely hippie aesthetic. I go to the appointment directly after a seminar I taught in a suit and tie, and she gives me a once-over and says, with a conspiratorial laugh, “But you look so well, there can’t be anything wrong with you!”
2007.
After six specialists and innumerable tests, I am diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a rheumatologist who tells me, “You’re a bright young woman with ambition and creativity and a conventionally desirable body. I’m sorry. No one is going to believe you.” If I want to be believed, I must exaggerate signifiers of pain, and inscribe myself with disability through dress (Siebers, 2004).
2014.
I pass my oral defense of my qualifying exams in my go-to black J Brand skinny pants with ankle zippers and a green silk-blend shirt with leather trim, a relatively painless ensemble that buoys me with confidence. This body image sustains me through the flare-up of my pain and brain fog. I don’t know it yet but my appendix has been perforating for months. As it slowly ruptures, I go on a campus visit for a tenure-track job, wearing black Corso Como pumps I could barely afford, gray cigarette pants, a short-sleeved white button-down with a silver zipper accent, and a black blazer to hide my tattoos despite it being a 75-degree day. Formal interview outfits are generally uncomfortable (Entwistle, 2000), and the pain makes me stumble through my teaching demo. I realize afterwards that my wrist and foot tattoos show. At lunch an interviewer whispers that I can talk to her about the experience of being queer on campus. I hadn’t disclosed; my body image and associated affective presence must have signaled this identity. Later, back in the hospital in similar workplace attire, I’m told I “look too good” to have a ruptured appendix when I inquire about the possibility. Desperate to maintain the quality of my academic work, I start teaching in athleisure and feel my carefully constructed body image—queer punk resourcefulness meant to mitigate the realities of constant pain—deteriorate. I go to the ER in Uniqlo sweatpants and a thin holey shirt from Target and am given the emergency appendectomy I ask for, which saves my life. I don’t get the job. I feel I am here because of athleisure apparel.
2016.
While teaching in the black leather and snakeskin-print shirt I wore when defending my dissertation proposal, an older male professor interrupts my class to ask me what I’m doing at the front of the room, and where the professor is. In my chosen attire, I look too young and unauthoritative to be one.
2018.
I overhear a departmental conversation about whether there’s a dress code policy (there isn’t), and a colleague later tells me I have a great sense of style. I wear all black, bold geometrics, leather and lace, boyfriend shirts, sweatshirts, runner tops, backless blouses, pigmented matte lipstick, statement jewelry. I can better hush the pain when my body image emulates my self-concept, but I remain acutely aware of other women professors who dress conservatively, in pantsuits, large floral prints, sensible heels, pearls, nude lipsticks. What imparts confidence to me is not professional to them (Brown, 2017).
Always.
The through-line is that my wardrobe choices are dire, encoding narratives of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability, all of which must be socially, morally, and professionally regulated (Eicher & Roach-Higgins, 1992). As a fibromyalgic subject, academic dress practices are often injurious. Its smart casual neutral style, allegedly effortless, mature, approachable, and elevated (Nixon, 2017; Brown, 2017) wreaks havoc on my body but trumps outfits highlighting immoral, undisciplined corporeality. Either I exist in an industry that will always insist I hurt myself to be taken seriously, or there’s something to be learned from negotiating expectations around academic dress as a scholar and professor perpetually hurt by clothes.
