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“But you look so well!”: (Un)professionalizing chronic pain through academic dress

Black Short-Sleeve Button-Down Shirt

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Neoliberal governance and academic dress codes Clothing is a visual communicative artifact, a fundamental aspect of social order that inscribes discursive and phenomenological meanings on the body (Entwistle, 2000, p. 326). Barthes (1967) famously describes fashion as a language with its own grammar and communicative and utilitarian purposes that establish the dressed body in a given social collective, but this favors a structuralist account of fashion, overlooking individual, non-utilitarian motives behind outfit selections. As Carter (2012) puts it, “the object always exceeds its instrumentality” (p. 348); the grammar of clothing is not one of strictly use-value but also of uselessness, an intensification or reduction of affective expression that contributes to felt bodily presence (Featherstone, 2010).

Entwistle (2000) defines dress as an embodied practice, “a situated bodily practice that is embedded within the social world and fundamental to microsocial order” (p. 325) with which individuals routinely, actively engage, (re)producing social structures and hierarchies of power in doing so. “Styles of dress are regularly employed in the workplace as part of institutional and corporate strategies of management” (p. 329). Formal occupations are more likely to have more conservative dress codes, while creative occupations are less likely to restrict what you wear (p. 328); thus, academic dress codes exist on a spectrum from the social science professor in my doctoral program who tended towards black slacks, ruffled or floral tops, blazers, and minimal makeup, to the creative writing professor in my master’s program who wore heavy makeup, black miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and four-inch stiletto heels as a rule.

If management is the aim, “what does one wear to work in the life of the mind?” (Donaghue, 2017, p. 231). Devereaux and O’Driscoll (2009) observe that the academy operates under a semiotics of performance, representation, and identity that is more diverse now than it has been traditionally. However, according to Zwicker (2009), academics are “positioned in a way that works against stylishness” (p. 6): socially constructed as too serious for vanity or frivolities like shopping; paid too little to indulge in even fantasies about expensive couture; too busy for anything but research. Nixon (2009) reminds us that neutrality and modesty characterize the fashion of serious thinkers, not garments that call attention to fleshly needs, which “authentic” academics aren’t bound by. In other words, “what many members of the professoriate seem to assume [is] that sartorial resplendence is suspect, mere superficial fluff distracting attention from the meaty intellect it shrouds, or that fashionable dress is a sellout” (p. 24). For these reasons, perhaps, academic fashion blogs tend to warn against “good fashion,” garments that are too youthful, formalwear that’s too corporate, colors and prints that are showier than neutral tones like black, blue, or brown, and outfits incorporating too much black, often perceived as “edgy” (Zwicker, 2009, p. 8).

Although aesthetic labor isn’t typically emphasized in academia given its privileging of mind over body, neoliberal responsibilization, or the process through which subjects of neoliberal governance internalize personal responsibility, places the onus of “appropriate” self-representation on academics (Donaghue, 2017; Pyysiäinen et al, 2017). Neoliberal responsibilization refers to a praxis of governance that endows subjects with autonomy to transform them into self-driven, personally accountable citizens (Pyysiäinen et al, 2017). Individuals assume control over and responsibility for fabricating their own existence. Signifying systems like dress are one such site of simultaneous autonomy and governance. While a strict dress code may feel like a threat to personal control, implicit, unenforced dress codes render social reality more governable. Clothes provide the context for interaction, creating expectations in others about the wearer’s identity. Outfits that clash with the identificatory narrative of an academic department misrepresent the wearer as a “too casual” or “unserious” scholar; the wearer becomes responsible for selecting future outfits that more accurately portray academic identity.

The body in academic dress serves as a hinge between dominant norms enforced and disseminated through professional dress codes, as casual as those codes might appear to be. For instance, academic dress codes socially regulate perception of intellect, often measuring academic status, productivity, and collegiality in sartorial expressions of able-mindedness. Mental acuity finds its fashion correlate in “smart” casual dress code, which combines elements of formalwear with informal articles. Failing to conform to smart casual as a junior faculty woman of color translates into a failure of intellect or indifference to scholarly pursuits.

Pain might be construed as incommunicable (Scarry, 1985) but adornments on the pained body signify. As a visual metaphor for identity, clothing can disguise or exaggerate disability, as in Siebers’ (2004) disability masquerade, a strategic semiotic performance of passing as disabled when you possess a non-apparent disability and would otherwise pass as able-bodyminded. He asserts that “passing is possible not only because people have a general tendency to repress the embodiment of difference” (p. 3). Passing preserves social hierarchies, reinforcing the dominant social position—able—as normative, desirable, and moral. Bodies like mine have difficulty consistently passing or masquerading, as dress is contingent on my fluctuating pain tolerance. My dressed body creates a gestalt combining smart casual, athleisure, and fetish-inspired clothing. Even departments that permit smart casual dress pause at the latter two categories, as activewear signifies a focus on the physical body for reasons of fitness or vanity and thus excessive concern with appearance, and fetishwear textiles signal deviance, sensuousness, and prurience.

To preserve prescribed social distance and Cartesian dualism, academic culture wants fibromyalgia to pass. American academic culture still presents itself as a purveyor of bourgeois taste and decency, due to its nineteenth-century religious and cultural heritage (Marsden, 1993), and neutral style is most in keeping with this sensibility. However, clothing style, fit, and textile become incredibly significant when assembling the professional wardrobe of fibromyalgia. In professional settings, I must dress to preserve what I can of my body schema, balancing my body image with the social perception of academic culture, while accounting for my affect transmission, leaving me vulnerable to collegial and moral sanctions. “Good fashion” might boost my self-confidence on a painful day, but also suggests a narcissistic reallocation of thought from scholarly endeavor to personal style. Additionally, the presence of pain undermines the moral intellectual enterprise, since pain is popularly, socially constructed as an incapacitating flaw of the self. Hiding pain becomes imperative, and clothing comprises the props by which to do so.

Academic dress codes often enjoy an unquestioned stability, until you fail to conform. The lack of freedom in this governance praxis becomes highly apparent when pain forces me to make contentious sartorial decisions. Athleisure apparel or risqué cutouts render the fibromyalgic academic legible, but the body image that portrays apparent pain through expression or clothing is a felt body that stages spectatorial sympathy and is therefore unwelcome in professional spaces (Halttunen, 1995; Siebers, 2004). It’s disability masquerade enacted not necessarily to publicize non-apparent chronic pain, but because pain will indulge no other clothes. Where the refusal to pass should offer a kind of agency as a personal decision to step out of the closet, even though it risks marginalization, repression, or violence, pain takes even this choice away. Even so, as with patient-driven self-care, I remain responsible for how well or ill I look, and how seriously I am taken as a result.