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

Black Slacks

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Neutralizing embodiment and techniques of the self Academic dress codes regulate the appearance and social perception of the profession by disciplining the bodily appearance of its members, attempting to place them into predetermined and fixed social, moral, and economic categories, using mainstream criteria of “appropriate” femininity, whiteness, ability, and bourgeois class consciousness. Neoliberal responsibilization invests the aesthetic labor expected of nonwhite women academics in particular, who are tacitly expected to expend a considerable amount of unacknowledged, unpaid time and energy on techniques of the self, which constitute the intersection between technologies of domination, the subject’s recourse to acting upon herself, and the integration of techniques of the self into structures of coercion (Foucault, 1993, p. 203).

Academic departments often possess an institutionalized white, male, middle-class ethos that impacts the interactional dynamics of junior faculty who are nonwhite, female or non-binary, paid less than their tenured senior colleagues (Archer, 2008, p. 394). Women academics might be perceived as too intellectual for mainstream consumer culture but are still interpellated as normatively feminine. Unpacking consumer culture’s “look good, feel good” transformational logic, Featherstone (2010) notes that beauty and morality are tightly coupled, and that techniques of the self that repair body image will also repair the self, but that “this entails a particular view of the body, as bounded and compartmentalized into separate domains, each of which can be renovated or upgraded: a view which encourages people to judge their bodies in terms of social norms” (p. 205).

Academic norms colonize, neuter, and sterilize faculty bodies, privileging those that respect “the niceties of etiquette relating to what is considered proper and improper to wear and display as well as severe sanctions against breaking strongly held beliefs about covering the body” (p. 6). Beliefs about propriety and modesty are culturally situated, however, and so are prohibitions deriving from those beliefs. For instance, crop-tops, low-back or backless blouses, and necklines that accentuate the breasts are seen as streetwear or clubwear that signal immorality and promiscuity and don’t belong in the academic workplace; in Sri Lanka, the sari often exposes the midriff and upper back but is traditionally worn even in professional settings. Similarly, the staple of the academic wardrobe, the white button-down shirt, is marketed to women as inspired by menswear, encoding the male ethos into the wearer despite pretensions of gender neutrality. A conservative short-sleeved crewneck silk blouse is made improper with the addition of leather, suede, or lace, as such accents are haptically perceived through visual-tactile activation that indecorously invites touch and reminds viewers that the life of the mind lives in flesh.

Western academic dress codes for women, as a signifying system invested by governance, disciplines decolonial dress practices as it disciplines alternative femininities: with normalizing judgment (Foucault, 1975/1995). The only time I wore an airy salwar-style blouse to work, a colleague gasped, “You look so different,” suggesting I was responsible for Othering myself in a predominantly white department. When I moved into my office in the hottest weeks of August in a racerback runner top with red short shorts, I felt colleagues’ eyes on my back tattoos and thigh scarifications, although nothing was said.

In Archer’s (2008) study of how younger academics construct their professional identity, women reported being positioned as novices based on embodied femininities. As such, they felt pressured to dress in ways signifying age, maturity, and wisdom: that is, in formal, unflattering, bookish, “bad fashion” in neutral colors. They also felt that proving their academic credentials rested on sacrificing personal comfort and self-concept (pp. 392-393). Similarly, Brown (2017) discusses her own experiences of being told she was “not professional enough” in appearance, saying that “treating professionalism as something achieved simply by wearing the right clothes established emotional distance between my identity as a feminist researcher and the demand that I focus on my appearance” (p. 155). She describes being surprised at “how often professionalism meant concealing or suppressing my sense of self and identity and/or disciplining my body” (p. 157). When body image fails to express self-concept, feelings of disjunction and dysphoria result. When I choose clothes that are painless and better align with my post-illness body image, I cease looking like the life of the mind and start resembling the life of libido.

This starkly opposes the disembodied professorial look nonwhite women should cultivate, dressing to look “neither head-turningly feminine nor inattentively androgynous” (Zwicker, 2009, pp. 6-8), asexual but not unsexed, emotionally approachable but authoritatively expert, independent but cooperative, cool but not subversive, sartorially colonized. Certain of my physical traits, such as slimness, the appearance of muscle tone, and my South Asian heritage, mark me as appropriately feminine, conventionally attractive, and an intelligent model minority. At the same time, being a woman of color Otherizes me as a potentially aggressive, meritless diversity hire, and appearing physically feminine, toned, and (re)productive masks my fibromyalgia almost too well. These norms ask me to whitewash, to conform to mainstream femininity, and to inflict pain on myself to be taken seriously as a researcher, which also aligns with the biopolitical imperative to domesticate chronic pain, an epidemic of the postmodern era with high social and economic costs in the U.S. (Morris, 1998, p. 109).

Foucault (1975/1995) tells us that bodily practices belong to the operations of power that strive to discipline citizens into docile obedience. Academic dress practices, as part of a moral institution, normalize palatable forms of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism through clothing. The rules of the game are internalized by academics, who recognize and value forms of academic capital, and so are likely—and expected—to enact what the norm sanctions. Dress practices that breach decorum—that make difference visible—in disciplinary institutions like school, where occupational dress tend to be conservative, isolate the wearer as a problematic element in the system. Fibromyalgia already singles me out as a potentially unproductive cog in the neoliberal capitalist machine. When pain leaves me with no other recourse, I challenge the construction of academic identity through garments that expose my tattoos and connote alternative femininities, or that signify physical rehabilitation more than professorial aplomb, implicitly revaluing the body and bodily style as transformative sites for discovery and knowledge.