Faux Suede Leggings (Close-Up)
1 2019-05-23T22:21:37-07:00 Vyshali Manivannan dc3d5257e938c70914fe0d76a4dca55376a2a698 33657 1 Suede is luxury. The appearance of elitism while on the inside, everything that got me to this point in my career withers from pain to nil. These are mistaken for skinny pants or the real textile, allowing me to teach, stretch, sleep between classes with my legs encased in pajamas. plain 2019-05-23T22:21:37-07:00 0,0 Vyshali Manivannan dc3d5257e938c70914fe0d76a4dca55376a2a698This page has paths:
- 1 2019-05-23T17:10:30-07:00 Vyshali Manivannan dc3d5257e938c70914fe0d76a4dca55376a2a698 Black Sweatpants (Close-Up) Vyshali Manivannan 2 I tucked the drawstring into the waistband and paired it with a loose, long blouse to preserve a semblance of professional dignity. I was back in the classroom, one week after an appendectomy found fusion and sepsis in my abdomen. I was weak. My diaphragm resisted speech. I could neither laugh nor cough, and sneezes I couldn't prevent picked at the stitches, made the room spin. My body was a garment sewn with glue, masked by a professional airy blouse, sweatpants folded below the navel in case of pain, in case of bleeding, in case of emergency. plain 2019-05-24T02:27:58-07:00 0,0 Vyshali Manivannan dc3d5257e938c70914fe0d76a4dca55376a2a698
- 1 2019-05-24T03:55:18-07:00 Vyshali Manivannan dc3d5257e938c70914fe0d76a4dca55376a2a698 Opening the Closet Door Vyshali Manivannan 1 plain 2019-05-24T03:55:18-07:00 Vyshali Manivannan dc3d5257e938c70914fe0d76a4dca55376a2a698
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2019-05-25T19:01:36-07:00
Argument
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Fibromyalgia means workplace clothing is a commitment with no room for error. My sartorial decisions balance academic identity with sporting femininities or the queer punk sensibility that boosts my self-confidence and accommodates my pain. These dress practices ensure I can modulate my pain expressions to shield others from my affects, in the department and in the classroom.
plain
2021-06-11T09:23:25-07:00
As an academic with fibromyalgia, a non-apparent chronic pain disorder of unknown etiology, I dress to manage both the pain of wearing clothes and students’ and colleagues’ perception of my pain behaviors. My dress practices often complicate the performance of academic professionalism, as I wear sweatshirts, racerback T-shirts, gendered form-fitting clothes, and blouses accented with hardware, mesh, leather, and cutouts that reveal my tattoos, as well as conservative attire. I select my outfits for comfort, temperature regulation, and feelings of adequacy and competency, but the queer punk or sporty style associated with many of my clothes (Hebdige, 1979; Toffoletti et al., 2018) conflicts with norms of academic dress. I visibly become a deviant body in multiple ways:
- as a woman professor embodying femininity and sexuality in a field that insists on disembodied intellectual seriousness (Gill & Scharff, 2011);
- as a disabled academic whose athleisure apparel points to a stigmatized disability identity and a casual attitude towards research (Brown, 2017; Toffoletti et al., 2018);
- and as an academic embodying iconographies of alternative, fetishistic, queer body styles that mask my visible pain behaviors with signifiers of “bad girl” stoicism (Commane, 2009; Pitts, 2003).
I dress to strategically modulate my pain awareness and associated feelings of competence, toughness, and acuity, and to triage sensations so I can better perform my academic duties. Irritating at best, agonizing at worst, workplace clothing for the fibromyalgic academic is—unlike makeup, shoes, jewelry, or hairstyle, all of which can be changed or removed over the course of the day—a commitment made in the morning that can only be minimally altered while at work. That said, body modifications impinge on how many layers can be removed, and clothes that suffice in the classroom might form an inappropriate identificatory narrative in a department meeting or at an academic conference. Skin exposure and clothing style must generally respect the careful boundaries drawn by the professoriate around gender, race, sexuality, and ability, focusing attention on the mind and not the body, on Western dispositions and not international cultural meanings, on a felt presence that is sexless and defanged.
My clothing assemblages must serve as a disciplinary self-fashioning that most suitably encodes “academic identity” (Devereaux et al., 2009, p. 3), with the least amount of pain and with an aesthetic that imbues me with a sense of postfeminist empowerment (Donaghue, 2017) and that creates bodily sensations that distract me from pain. Additionally, pain being intersubjective and affectively contagious (Morris, 1998; Halttunen, 1995), my clothing doubles as your protection. My disorder may not be infectious but its affective intensities are, provoking spectatorial sympathy or mirror pain in viewers and reminding them of their own corporeality.
Ultimately, I argue that the academic performance of embodiment is detrimentally preoccupied with disappearing bodies, particularly non-normative ones. For the fibromyalgic academic, whose body can’t be dismissed, campus sartorial practices must be inflected to accommodate nomadic intensities and reframe colleagues perception of chronic pain and brain fog as trivial and surmountable, not debilitating, discrediting stigmas. My dress practices contend that the life of the mind does not erase the body, that academic dress codes are never neutral or universally applicable, that the embodiment of stigma is practically as well as aesthetically motivated, and that legibility through clothes has pedagogical value.