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

Self-responsibilization, pain, and dress

To avoid the appearance of brain fog and unfitness for academic work, I tracked my daily outfits and pain levels. These trackers epitomize my complicity in techniques of the self and institutional management and reinforcement of traditional femininities and dominant norms around race, sexuality, and ability. By subscribing to the notion of academia as a vocation sustained through personal responsibility and internalization of hierarchical judgment (Foucault, 1975/1995), I'm supposed to see how the pain or judging eyes are my fault and police my behavior accordingly. 


Instead, I ended up seeing opportunities to harness the transformative potential of non-normative professional dress practices, such as athleisure or fetish-inspired garments, to highlight the fluctuating visibility of pain and endurance. Neutral, timeless academic style is not fashioned for all bodies, and by dressing in ways that reflect my post-illness self-concept and heighten my sense of my competency, thus distracting me from my own pain, I can better perform my academic duties. Additionally, I can teach my students and remind my peers that academic dress is a series of often ableist, sexist, and colonialist norms reproducing themselves through fashion (Crawford, 2009; Zwicker, 2009; Toffoletti et al., 2018), and that pain is only interior because of the academy's (moral) mandate against spectatorial sympathy, which would expose viewers as corporeal and titillated by voyeurism of suffering (Halttunen, 1995). 


The blank lines on the outfit trackers indicate that I forgot what I was wearing the moment I took it off; on the pain trackers, blankness signals that the pain that day was unbearable, beyond language. In the two trackers that line up in September 2016, during my usual autumnal flare-up, I record outfits with low levels of pain and feelings of adequacy, or high pain levels and a strong sense of competency, such as Splendid, J Brand pants, loose slacks; athleisure-style cotton colorblock T-shirts, leather and silk textiles, cutouts that show off my tattoos and insist that I can take the pain. These records make me self-responsibilized, but they don't help me internalize the discourses of academic culture and appearance any more than fibromyalgia already permits.