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

Green Sleeveless Blouse with Bow (Close-Up)

What possessed me to buy a blouse like this--overly feminine, glossy for attention, a bow poised at the throat like gift wrapping--except that it screams normatively professional? The academic workplace is soaked with gendered expectations, and I've always interviewed successfully in this shirt, but when I wore it to a GI appointment I was complimented on how pretty I looked, and my medical concerns went unaddressed.

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1. White Short-Sleeved Button-Down (Close-Up) Beloved with a tie, preppy with or without it, mildly toughened by the zipper detail, this shirt rubs the skin but breathes. I've sailed through classes, conference presentations, and interviews in it. It's a standard of professional that also aspires to be me. This remains the only white button-down shirt I've ever consistently worn and loved. The more stubbornly stained it becomes, the more I know the day is coming when I'll have to discard it and cry.
3. Black Shirt Retro Tie (Close-Up)
4. Black Long-Sleeved Button-Down with Brass Zippers and Epaulets (Close-Up)
5. Green Sleeveless Blouse with Bow (Close-Up) What possessed me to buy a blouse like this--overly feminine, glossy for attention, a bow poised at the throat like gift wrapping--except that it screams normatively professional? The academic workplace is soaked with gendered expectations, and I've always interviewed successfully in this shirt, but when I wore it to a GI appointment I was complimented on how pretty I looked, and my medical concerns went unaddressed.
6. Gray Cigarette Pants (Close-Up)
7. Black Shirt with Ruffled Collar (Close-Up)
9. Gray Piped Slacks with Ankle Zippers (Close-Up) These read like soft denim, from a distance. High-waisted, with pockets scalloped in at the waist. I never wear belts, it's too much pressure near the stomach, but these make a belt look good. Worn with black, they dress up. Worn with T-shirts, they dress down. I've worn them to the doctor's office after teaching with unzipped ankles to enhance the appearance of incapability. Their versatility is useful. So often I find the zippers everyone calls "decorative" to possess incredible performative force.
10. Black Skinny Pants with Brass Ankle Zippers (Close-Up)
12. Black Snakeskin and Leather Shirt with Silver Zippers (Close-Up)
13. Green and Sage Blouse with Black Leather Trim (Close-Up)
14. Pink and Black Lace (Close-Up) Pink silk, black lace, vaguely punk, with my black J Brands, boots, and drape-front blazer, I feel untouchable, and the shirt itself barely touches me. I teach first or last classes in it, attend advising meetings in it, present at conferences in it, anything where I need to feel more confident than pain makes me feel, but not in environments where supervisors might see brown skin and bra strap through the lace trim, and think I'm too sexual for academia.
16. Maroon Blazer (Close-Up)
17. Bright Blue Blouse with Leather Trim (Close-Up) So lightweight the polyester barely touches the skin. I've worn this many times, but notably, the day I turned 31, also the day I was supposed to be fully recovered from a complicated appendectomy I still suffer from, four years later. I tattooed my ribs that day, with a snail crawling across a straight razor because it too has to endure without dying, and I attended a conference presentation directly after, and this blouse masked it all: saran-wrapped ink and blood, pain around the navel where the gluey clot of stitches was freshly removed. I almost looked human again, and by human I mean stylish, stoic, able to produce.
18. Orange Cowl-Neck Shirt (Close-Up)
19. Dark Gray Tank Top with Buttons (Close-Up)
20. Gray and Black Striped Long-Sleeved Shirt (Close-Up)
21. Green Sweatshirt with Black Sleeves and Leather Accents (Close-Up)
22. Black T-Shirt with Mesh Trim and Slits (Close-Up)
23. Faux Suede Leggings (Close-Up)
24. Black Sweatpants (Close-Up) 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.

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Argument 3 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).
The game of academia, in which “good” players acquire capital by performing the rules by which that capital is attained, stigmatizes nonconforming dress practices implicitly and concretely. The scandalized sidelong glances of an old white man department chair. The white woman colleague who takes me aside as a kindness to say students are paying for a professional education, not instructors who teach in loungewear or biker clothes. A white woman department chair informing me that students will be distracted by my tattoos. Two white men at two different conferences asking if I was a dominatrix. Reminders by senior colleagues, men and women alike, that regardless of my disability status, professional academics are the ones who abide by an implicit dress code.

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.