Thesis Excerpts

Thesis excerpts

Imagine yourself boarding an elevator. When you enter, there is one other passenger aboard. The other passenger is about 5’8”, medium build, dressed in a plain button-front, collared shirt, a light, boxy, fifties retro jacket, and black Dickies pants (the kind restaurant employees, plumbers, and locksmiths wear). On the passenger’s feet are heavy, lug-soled boots. Your fellow elevator user wears glasses, black, small, and stylish, and short, shiny, spiky hair. Who do you imagine this person to be? What do you perceive to be true of this person? Is the person male or female? Rich or poor? Friendly or threatening? Do you feel safe in the elevator? On what do you base this judgment? What else do you want to know? What is missing from this description?
As you may have guessed, this description is deliberately ambiguous. The sartorial description “says” very little without a context in which to place this utterance. If your fellow passenger is a young, white, middle class female, her clothing might indicate a refusal of femininity; it might be “read” as a declaration of lesbianism. If he is male, this ensemble will say very little. It might be a uniform or, if the “retro” jacket is actually a vintage garment, it might indicate identification with a “hipster” counterculture. “[O]ne and the same message, inscribed on a male or a female body, does not always or even usually mean the same thing or result in the same text” (Grosz 156). While clothing can communicate a great deal of information about its wearer, it does not necessarily. The messages sent by clothing are very context specific; they depend upon who is wearing the clothes, and therefore on other physical markers of social identity. Furthermore, the message sent by a particular clothing utterance will depend not only upon where, when and for what purpose the clothing is worn, but also upon the stylistic literacy of the receiver. As Diana Crane explains, “clothing styles are significant to the social groups in which they originate or to whom they are targeted but are not often incomprehensible to people outside of these social contexts” (15). In her book, The Language of Clothes, Allison Lurie illustrates this point by describing the subtle differences among blue jeans to which teens are attuned. She cites a teen-aged friend who explains, “freaks always wear Lees, greasers wear Wranglers, and everyone else wears Levis” (17). An outsider would be unlikely to recognize these distinctions.
In what ways, then, does clothing function as a symbolic system, a language? In her book Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture, Ruth Rubinstein explains, “When applied to clothing, the term ‘language’ refers to the use of a particular vocabulary derived from the storehouse of images that support the structure of social interaction, the system of statuses and roles” (7). In her analysis, articles of clothing function as signs, similar to words in written or spoken language. Roland Barthes also explores the relationship between clothing and language in his book The Fashion System. Barthes defines language as “an institution, an abstract body of constraints; speech is the momentary part of this institution which the individual extracts and actualizes for purposes of communication” (17). Barthes argues that “the structural, institutional form of what is worn,” clothing, corresponds to language; whereas, “this same form when actualized, worn” can be referred to as dress and corresponds to speech (18). Rubinstein echoes this interpretation of instances of dress as speech. She writes, “Clothing speech can be defined as an individual’s manipulation of the language of clothing to produce specific utterances characterized by personal intonation and style” (11).
Thus, dress is a form of communication, albeit an ambiguous and imprecise one. This use of dress and adornment as a communicative system seems to be nearly universal. In her book Fashioned Bodies, cultural theorist and sociologist Joanne Entwhistle writes, “Human bodies are dressed bodies. The social world is a world of dressed bodies…. No culture leaves the body unadorned but adds to, embellishes, enhances or decorates the body” (6). Dress is used in subtle and dramatic ways to represent the wearer’s social identity. Within capitalist consumer culture, clothing and style are often understood as an expression of one’s personality. For example, people often explain their dislike for a particular garment by saying, “It’s just not me.” The language of clothing is “written on” and expressed through the body. Bodies themselves are often read as expressions of the self. Fat bodies, for example, are frequently read as indicators of laziness and lack of discipline. Many activist communities, for example those of people with disabilities or transgendered people, often refute the assumption of the body as an expression of the self. How then are we to understand the relationship between the body and the self? If we are emitting messages through our bodies, where do those messages originate?

The BodyandMind Self
The mind, in Western philosophy, has been conceptualized as the “self,” the spirit, the soul, which is temporarily, and unfortunately chained to the body.   Western philosophy and Western religion have made it possible to imagine a disembodied spirit, a soul that lives on, even in the body’s absence. The mind, in Western philosophy, symbolizes the “true self,” a self that is more “real” than the body precisely because it is less material. While the body deteriorates, disintegrates, decomposes, the “mind,” the spirit, the soul is eternal.
In her book Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz, argues for a “corporeal feminism” that overcomes this mind /body split, which was institutionalized in Western philosophy by Descartes. Cartesian dualism “is the assumption that there are two distinct, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive substances, mind and body, each of which inhabits its own self contained sphere” (6). I agree with Grosz that the “common view of the human subject as being made up of two dichotomously opposed characteristics…” necessarily leads to a dichotomous way of thinking (3). Dichotomous thought not only makes sense of concepts by posing them as opposites, it also tends to posit one side of the opposition as more valuable than the other. Grosz writes, “Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms…” (3). Thus, the mind becomes the superior term and the body is devalued. If mind is self, then body is other.
The mind/body dichotomy sets into motion a series of similar dichotomies and a dualistic approach to the world. According to Grosz, “[t]he mind/body relation is frequently correlated with the distinctions between reason and passion, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance…and so on” (3). In each of these binaries one term is privileged over the other. One term is valued at the other’s expense. The same is true of the male/female dichotomy. Therefore, the subject who embodies a female body is doubly devalued. She is always already linked to the body, if only by virtue of falling on the devalued side of the binary pair. Man has been equated with culture and the mind, while woman is connected to the body and nature. Woman is reduced to a body; woman is other.
Although Cartesian dualism has held sway in Western philosophy for centuries, it is possible to conceptualize the mind and body as interconnected, interdependent, as “bodyandmind.” Grosz draws upon the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in her conceptualization of the mind and body as interconnected. According to Grosz, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, "the subject’s psychical interior, or ‘soul,’ can be seen as nothing but the self-inversion of the body’s forces…. In this sense, there is and has always been only body. Consciousness, soul, or subjectivity is nothing but the play of the body’s forces…. Consciousness…is an effect or consequence of the modulations and impulses of the body" (124). To say that “there is and always has been only body” is not to deny the existence of the mind. Instead, it redefines the mind in relationship to the body; it connects the mind and body rather than separating them into separate spheres.
If the self is the “bodyandmind,” then the self must be expressed through the body. The self, however, does not control the body. On the contrary, the self exists only insofar as the body exists. Furthermore, one’s expression of her “bodyandmind” self is constrained by culture. To a certain extent, the body is always already written by culture. Grosz argues that “[t]here are always only specific types of body” (19). Cultural discourse creates and limits the imaginable bodies, and therefore, the inhabitable bodies.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault explores the ways in which bodies are managed and defined by culture. According to Foucault, “the body is…directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (466). In her essay “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault,” Susan R. Bordo argues with Foucault that the body “is a direct locus of social control” (13). Bordo contends that the body “is a medium of culture.”   The body is inscribed with “the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture.” Culture is “reinforced through the concrete language of the body” (13). The values and norms of a culture are “written” or inscribed upon the body. Grosz notes, “the inscription of the surface of the body is the tracing of…texts, laws and practices onto the flesh to carve out a social subject …capable of being deciphered, interpreted, understood” (117). Furthermore, culturally constituted bodies are binarized and hierarchized: male/female bodies, white bodies/bodies of color, strong/weak bodies, normal/abnormal bodies. These binaries are used to discipline rebellious bodies and to establish a cultural “self” in relation to a cultural other. Thus, “othered” bodies often experience the cultural inscription of the body as a sort of symbolic violence.
Since the body is always culturally inscribed, it cannot be conceptualized as a blank page, a tabula rasa on which the “bodyandmind” self can freely “write” itself to be “read” by others. The body is a palimpsest on which is “written” one’s race, class, gender, sexuality, politics, and so on. Thus, any self is specific to a gendered, classed, racialized, sexualized, politicized and thoroughly socialized body. The culturally constructed body is the site of symbolic violence and domination; it is both produced by society and resistant to society. It is culturally inscribed, but also reinscribed by the self. The “bodyandmind” self is neither entirely its own nor entirely a product of culture.

Fashion as Cultural Inscription
According to Elizabeth Grosz, “[t]he body is involuntarily marked, but it is also incised through ‘voluntary’ procedures, lifestyles, habits and behaviors” (142). Sartorial choices are one of the means by which individuals reinscribe or resist cultural inscription. Feminist interpretations of fashion have tended to focus on the ways in which fashion and beauty rituals reinscribe cultural norms of femininity, often ignoring the possibilities for resistance through clothing. As noted above, dichotomous thinking has tended not only to link woman with the body, but also to reduce her to only body. Furthermore, since the nineteenth century, women have often served as objects on which their husbands displayed their wealth. For these reasons, women have long been associated with fashion, dress, “vain display and indulgent narcissism” (Entwhistle 145). Clearly, today’s capitalist, consumerist American culture, strongly encourages women to participate in these practices. Feminists have also resisted participation in beauty rituals because practices of dress have often had harmful physical and psychological impacts on women’s lives. Fashion has been of concern for feminists for decades.
Feminists have repeatedly argued that the “fashion system” enslaves, objectifies, and diminishes women. In their introduction to their book On Fashion, Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss explain, "Feminists of a generation ago, echoing their suffragist precursors, taught women that interest in dress and beauty was the result of a socially produced false consciousness that placed women in league with patriarchal and capitalist power structures. High fashion signaled (hetero)sexual and social oppression, and even ‘real clothes’ – what we wore everyday – cinched waists, smoothed out curves and bumps, and constrained our movements" (4). Espousing a very similar critique of the dominant practices of fashion and beauty, a group of women protested the Miss America pageant in 1968. They argued that the pageant represented the objectification of women and noted that the values represented in the pageant were the values of the culture at large. According to their argument, women are judged and rewarded only for their beauty.
In 1969, Dana Densmore explored the “double bind” with which beauty presents women. In an essay entitled “On the Temptation To Be A Beautiful Object,” she describes the paradox of beauty: women must be beautiful to be of value; however, beauty will earn neither respect nor a forum to be heard. If a woman is beautiful, only her beauty will be valued. Rita Freedman, clinical psychologist and author of Beauty Bound, comments, “Beauty is not only expected but is heavily rewarded” (4).
Although attractiveness is rewarded in both men and women, women are strongly encouraged to measure their self worth based upon their success in being attractive. Girls learn quickly in our society that a woman’s power is intimately linked with her appearance. “Because beauty is asymmetrically assigned to the feminine role, women are defined as much by their looks as by their deeds” (1).   That is, “appearance is emphasized and valued more highly in females than in males. Women are more critically judged for attractiveness and more severely rejected when they lack it” (10). Thus, girls and women are wise to attend to their appearance. In her book Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier writes, “Any sane and observant girl is bound to conclude that looks matter and that she can control her face as she controls her body…staying on guard and paying attention and thinking about it, really thinking about it” (224).
Fashion discourse serves to inculcate women with the image of the “perfect” body; women are then expected to force their bodies into this mold. Susan Bordo explains the effects of such a futile pursuit. "Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity—a pursuit without a terminus, a resting point, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion—female bodies become what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies’—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, transformation, ‘improvement’" (14). This enforced focus on the female body is a form of social control. Cultural norms of femininity and beauty promote total preoccupation with appearance, an infinite policing of the boundaries of femininity. This commitment to appearance draws energy and focus away from other pursuits. Bordo notes,"Viewed historically, the discipline and normalization of the female body—perhaps the only gender oppression that exercises itself although to different degrees and in different forms, across age, race, class, and sexual orientation—has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control" (14). While fashion discourse promotes a singular focus on the body, women participate in this discourse via specific practices.
Feminists have objected not only to the objectification of women, but also to the ways in which fashion discourse and modes of dress intersect to harm women’s health and to limit their mobility. High-heeled shoes represent the epitome of this type of clothing. High heels graphically represent the wearer’s femininity and sexual desirability; they function as a sign of culturally acceptable femininity. Meanwhile, high-heels pose medical risks such as bunions and orthopedic problems in the legs, hips, and spine (Maine 110), and, more importantly, dramatically decrease women’s mobility. In fact, much of the clothing promoted within fashion discourse, tube tops, short skirts and tights require constant attention and adjustment and substantially limit mobility. They keep the wearer distracted and focused almost exclusively on her body and the maintenance of her “look.” Even more seriously, such clothes prevent her from being able to protect herself or to escape in the event of an assault. High heels have a hobbling effect, promoting a concept of femininity that posits woman as vulnerable and incapable of fending for herself.
In current modes of dress and their interpretations, we see the same sort of circular logic that trapped women in the corset and then blamed her for its negative consequences. Freedman writes, “on the one hand, a corseted waist was viewed as the essence of femininity and reason enough to love a woman madly. On the other hand, it was proof of a women’s mental deficiency” (55). Woman’s interest in clothing has been explained in terms of her role as “temptress.” That is, she is believed to use her beauty and adornment to “ensnare men” (Entwhistle 148). When a woman does not use dress to enhance her sex appeal, when she fails to wear a bra or shave her legs, she will be ridiculed and deemed “ugly.” At the same time, when a woman is assaulted, harassed, violated, or otherwise victimized, her clothing is thoroughly scrutinized to prove that she “asked for it.” This has been witnessed repeatedly in court trials. Thus, “what a woman wears is still a matter of greater moral concern than what a man wears” (Entwhistle 22).
Furthermore, “the beauty industry thrives off of women’s traditional role to please others, to do well for their men, and to be as attractive as possible” (Maine 63). The means by which women strive “to be as attractive as possible” require that she accentuate her “femininity,” that she highlight her difference from men. This serves to enforce gender roles and the ideology of gender difference. “The myth of the woman as the fair sex perpetuates the feminine mystique. Petticoats and veils, padded bras and packaged bodies, everything that accentuates difference, confirms woman as ‘other’” (Freedman 21). This construction of woman as “other” contributes to a culture in which women are objectified, sexualized, and often violated physically and sexually. Fashion, dress, and codes of beauty are potent cultural factors in the maintenance of this ideology. “Beauty maintains the erotic mystery of a woman by concealing the human being beneath” (Freedman 22).
Dress codes have often been used to mark and maintain differences. Prior to the Nineteenth century, “sumptuary laws” that enforced codes of dress were designed to mark social class. Sumptuary laws created an environment in which “clothing behavior indicated very precisely a person’s position in the social structure. Clothing revealed not only social class and gender, but frequently occupation, religious affiliation, and regional origin, as well” (Crane 3). Marjorie Garber explains that clothing that conveys such specific information has become very rare. "Where once sumptuary laws tried to ensure that class, rank, occupation and (to a certain extent) gender were immediately readable in and through details of costume, by the close of the twentieth century only the likes of cardinals, monks, nuns (in habits), uniformed police officers and lieutenant colonels can be decoded with certainty, by rank and hierarchy, according to established items of signifying dress" (211). Ewen and Ewen offer two explanations for the change in dress codes. First, as the industrial revolution proceeded, men’s wear became reserved and sedate. After the French Revolution, the sumptuous style of the aristocratic man of leisure who had no need to work became unpopular, and a “plain style” took its place. Flamboyance, ostentation, and conspicuous consumption were no longer culturally accepted practices for wealthy men. Instead, affluent men strove for an appearance of diligence and moderation. This shift in sartorial ideology caused men’s clothing to be differentiated across class only by, often subtle, differences in the quality of a garment’s material and construction. The styles worn by men of all classes became more similar. In addition, this mandate for conservative dress for men increased the importance of decorative dress on women. It was no longer acceptable for men to adorn themselves in showy displays of wealth. This became one of the roles played by the wives and daughters of wealthy men.
   In addition, the changes in technology wrought by the industrial revolution had a huge impact on the production of clothing. “By the early twentieth century, clothing would undergo dramatic change in its production, distribution, and meaning. Clothes would increasingly be bought, not made, by the wearer. Moreover, fashion – long the preserve of wealth – would enter, more and more, the symbolic vernacular of common people” (Ewen 116). The language of clothing became available to the masses. Therefore, while clothing still marks class to some extent, the most salient difference it marks in modern dress codes is gender.
Despite changes in sartorial codes, “the categories of adornment, dating to the aristocratic tradition, still hold sway. The great difference,” according to Ewen and Ewen, “is that this continuity of meaning has persisted more in the clothing of women than of men in the era of capitalism” (89). Because women’s clothing has continued to mark her place in society fairly dramatically, while men’s clothing has become relatively uniform, clothing has become a dominant marker of gender. In addition, gendered dress codes tend to be policed much more vehemently than class based codes. According to Diana Crane, “Fashionable clothes are used to make statements about social class and social identity, but their principle messages are about the ways in which women and men perceive their gender roles or are expected to perceive them” (16). The ways in which the body is decorated are gender specific. Entwhistle argues, “dress delivers gender as self-evident and natural when in fact it is a cultural construction that dress helps reproduce” (21). In her discussion of nineteenth century dress reform, Kathleen Torrens explains, “Clothing decorated the body, but also symbolized and enforced gender and social station” (3). Entwhistle contends that this continues to be the case, arguing that “clothing, as an aspect of culture, is a crucial feature in the production of masculinity and femininity: it turns nature into culture, layering meanings on the body.”

Fashion, Dress, and Consumption
Clothing occupies a space between the individual and culture. While clothing can be used to make statements about one’s own sense of identity, this always take place within a cultural fashion discourse. The relationship between fashion and dress is similar to that which exists between la langue and parole, between discourse and practice. Fashion is a complex system including modes of invention, production, promotion, and consumption. Dress, on the other hand, is an everyday practice. Where fashion is abstract or theoretical, dress is material. Entwhistle describes three characteristics that define fashion. Fashion is “a system of dress found in societies where social mobility is possible,” that has its own “relations of production and consumption,” and is “characterized by regular and systematic change” (63). The cause for this systematic change has been explained by various theories. One suggestion is that change is the result of status competition. That is, by the time the lower classes have caught on to the trends promoted by the upper classes, the upper classes must change their style to differentiate their elite status. Others have promoted the idea that fashion is a system by which women seduce men. In this case, change is explained by the idea of the “shifting erogenous zone.” In order to keep men interested and attracted, women must continually accentuate different parts of their bodies. Thus, the rapid changes in fashion can be understood as women’s attempts to maintain male intrigue. Finally, the rapid change in fashion has been explained as a result of the zeitgeist.   That is, “fashion responds to social and political change” (Entwhistle 63).
Each of these theories is too simple to explain the complex relationships between fashion and culture. Furthermore, most of them neglect the reality of people’s day-to-day dress, which is often slow to respond to changes in fashion.   Because social bodies must be dressed, social subjects must engage in daily negotiation with dress and fashion. According to Entwhistle, “Dress in everyday life is a practical negotiation between the fashion system as a structured system, the social conditions of everyday life such as class, gender and the like as well as the ‘rules’ or norms governing particular social situations”(37). Thus, fashion plays an important role in determining dress, but it cannot be conflated with dress. In fact, fashion depends upon dress in that “fashion becomes widely recognized only when it is translated into dress on the part of individuals.”
Fashion is an ideological discourse that influences and is influenced by everyday dress.   Fashion plays a role in structuring the choices that are available for dressing the body. It is not, however, the only factor that influences these choices.   Social subjects dress their bodies according to the dominant fashion discourse, but also according to the specific demands of their particular body and its particular time, place, social class, and activity. Entwhistle explains, “Examining the structuring influences on the dressed body requires taking account of the historical and social constraints which impact upon the act of dressing at a given time.”
Jean Baudrillard in his essay “The System of Objects,” argues that postmodern individuals attempt to “actualize themselves through consumption” (408). Rather than developing a social identity through real and sustained connection to a community, Baudrillard argues that individuals attempt to purchase an identity. “[S]tyle becomes a substitute for identity” (Tseëlon 122). This imposes severe restrictions on acceptable identities, limiting identity formation to a multiple-choice question. According to Baudrillard social meanings are policed to the extent that “the significations they engender are controlled” (413). The consuming subject cannot actually create an identity through consumption; (s)he can only select an identity from the available options.
Diana Crane, on the other hand, contends that consumption can represent resistance. She agrees that social subjects construct “a sense of identity” through consumption. She argues, however, that “the variety of choices in lifestyle available in contemporary society liberates the individual from tradition and enables her to make choices that create a meaningful self-identity” (10).   The “bodyandmind” self can choose to construct a self that is resistant to cultural inscription. Grosz notes: “All of us…are caught up in modes of self-production and self-observation; the modes may entwine us in various networks of power, but never do they render us merely passive and compliant” (144). A “bodyandmind” self can, and perhaps always will, resist cultural inscription, symbolic violence, and domination. Through this resistance, the “bodyandmind” self reinscribes itself, layers meaning over meaning, revises a text, and potentially recreates its meaning.

Resistance Through Clothing
The postmodern body is not a body separate from the mind, nor is it separate from culture. The body is not a blank page on which the self is free to inscribe a text of its choice. Bodies are always already culturally inscribed; culture exists and reproduces through the bodies of social subjects. Nonetheless, the “bodyandmind” self exerts a force against the forces of culture. Grosz notes, “The body is not simply a sign to be read, a symptom to be deciphered, but also a force to be reckoned with” (120). We, as “bodyandmind” selves, are “written” by cultural discourse; however, through our bodies, we also “actively construct and ‘write’ ourselves” (Brook 2).
If, as David Muggleton suggests in his book Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style, clothing “performs a major role in the construction of identity,” then resistance to cultural inscription of the body can be performed through creative use of the language of clothing (1). Muggleton argues that clothing is “ one of the most visible markers of social status and gender.” As such, it is “useful in maintaining or subverting symbolic boundaries” (4). While “clothing can be a straitjacket, constraining (literally) a person’s movement and manners,” it can also “be viewed as a vast reservoir of meanings that can be manipulated or reconstructed so as to enhance a person’s sense of identity” (2).
Fashion can be a forum in which to enact one’s resistance publicly and visibly. “Within the expansive parameters of fashion, questions of class; sexuality and gender; and conflicting vectors of resistance and conformity have played themselves out visibly and dramatically” (Denesi 173). Dress, as much as fashion can be a political tool. Fashion “is a piece in the political discourse of consent, and of revolution. It is a keystone in the shifting architecture of class, sexuality, national identity. Fashion is situated within the framework of industrial development; it interacts with the rise of consumer capitalism and mass media imagery. It is a way in which people identify themselves as individuals and collectively” (Denesi 81).
The ability to participate in this form of resistance is itself of political consequence. Fashion as resistance requires consumption and participation in the dominant fashion discourse. Susan Bordo notes the contradictions contained within stylistic forms of resistance. "[T]he very participation in the playful carnival of fashion with its floating signs is already inscribed in signification. It is a form of cultural capital. Paradoxically, the act of subverting signification itself becomes a signifier. It is a status marker of the rich and famous, those powerful enough or distinguished enough to flaunt conventions, those creative enough and confident enough to invent, or those marginalized enough not to care" (134). While resistance through style is often visually stunning, it often communicates as much information about the wearer’s privileged status as it does about the wearer’s discontent with the status quo.
Furthermore, resistance to cultural inscription through clothing is always a response to dominant cultural attitudes. In his study of subcultural style, Dick Hebdige notes the following characteristics of subcultural styles: they challenge the values of the “parent culture;” they resist the way the dominant culture is portrayed in the media; and they adapt the “images, styles and ideologies” portrayed in the dominant culture “in order to construct an alternative identity which communicate[s] a perceived difference: an Otherness” (88-89). Hebdige argues that subcultural styles challenge, “at the symbolic level the ‘inevitability,’ the ‘naturalness’ of class and gender stereotypes” (89).
In Hebdige’s description of subcultural style, we see the connections between clothing and language clearly. Just as “a speaker’s utterances are understood by others only because they are already virtual contained within the language,” successful resistance through clothing must restate concepts, ideas and stereotypes that are already understood within dominant understandings of the language of clothing (Culler, Structuralist 29). Thus, manipulation of the language of clothing is often an act of reappropriation. Bordo notes, “Features are borrowed from one context and appropriated into another together with a whole new set of meanings” (122). Hebdige argues that “commodities can be symbolically ‘repossessed’ in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings” (16). Often this can be achieved through the juxtaposition of oppositional clothing signs. For example, combat boots are an indication of militancy, while fishnet hose tend to represent feminine sexual availability. Consider how the meanings of each of theses clothing signs are altered when the two items are paired. Hebdige sees this as a “semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation” (90).