The presentation of self in everyday life
Dec. 5th, 2006 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus"When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them." So begins Erving Goffman's symbolic interactionist classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This 1959 study of how we "perform" ourselves visually for others proposes social interaction as essentially theatrical. The self is a carefully-controlled, artificial construct we perform, taking care to remain consistent and credible. We project ourselves using "impression management" skills which parallel theatrical direction, costumery and "business". But the largely visual nature of these skills means that Goffman could as easily have chosen graphic design as his metaphor.
Wearing an eyepatch certainly makes you think about this stuff -- it's a rather extreme visual statement. But since buying a secondhand wig at a Sunday market and playing with it in public places, I've been thinking about Goffman's ideas some more. We don't just dress to include ourselves in desireable social contexts, he says, or to match those around us. We also dress to exclude, baffle, repel and perplex, to "prevent outsiders from coming into a performance that is not addressed to them".
Perhaps this is why I can weather with equanimity my mother's complaints ("I can't walk down the street with you without feeling embarrassed, Nicholas!"); I know that my rather bizarre self-presentation is just as likely to attract the adventurous as repel the upstanding citizens of Edinburgh's New Town. I was once at a reception for a Robert Rauschenberg show in Washington DC. Everybody there was wearing a boring business suit, except me and Rauschenberg. The artist walked right up to me and said "I've been rather intrigued by this fur waistcoat you're wearing!" We had a short conversation about secondhand clothes shopping. I don't think I'd have dared talk to him otherwise. Luckily my clothes did the talking for me.
But what happens when you concoct a self-presentation for someone else's self? When friends visit Berlin I often take them up to the four-floor Humana charity store at the Frankfurter Tor. Here, for next to nothing, you can assemble new and eccentric looks. These photos show clothes I picked out for an American friend called Sarah when she passed through Berlin. Trying these clothes on (she ended up buying some of them), Sarah became more European, more feminine, more burikko, more playful. The hard, dark, serious and practical style of her American clothes (jeans and t-shirts) gave way to something more ludic, friendly, feminine, soft... and slightly silly.
I wonder if these outfits -- the ones she ended up taking home, anyway -- changed Sarah, or just changed her self-presentation? Was agreeing to try and buy styles I found appealing a mere concession to me and my values, or was it a liberation from cultural habits Sarah was never particularly invested in? How did these looks go down on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn when she got home? Did the clothes conjur a slightly different parallel world -- a kinder, more playful one, with different gender relations -- and did wearing them, perhaps, force the real world to converge a few centimeters towards it?
Wearing an eyepatch certainly makes you think about this stuff -- it's a rather extreme visual statement. But since buying a secondhand wig at a Sunday market and playing with it in public places, I've been thinking about Goffman's ideas some more. We don't just dress to include ourselves in desireable social contexts, he says, or to match those around us. We also dress to exclude, baffle, repel and perplex, to "prevent outsiders from coming into a performance that is not addressed to them".
Perhaps this is why I can weather with equanimity my mother's complaints ("I can't walk down the street with you without feeling embarrassed, Nicholas!"); I know that my rather bizarre self-presentation is just as likely to attract the adventurous as repel the upstanding citizens of Edinburgh's New Town. I was once at a reception for a Robert Rauschenberg show in Washington DC. Everybody there was wearing a boring business suit, except me and Rauschenberg. The artist walked right up to me and said "I've been rather intrigued by this fur waistcoat you're wearing!" We had a short conversation about secondhand clothes shopping. I don't think I'd have dared talk to him otherwise. Luckily my clothes did the talking for me.
But what happens when you concoct a self-presentation for someone else's self? When friends visit Berlin I often take them up to the four-floor Humana charity store at the Frankfurter Tor. Here, for next to nothing, you can assemble new and eccentric looks. These photos show clothes I picked out for an American friend called Sarah when she passed through Berlin. Trying these clothes on (she ended up buying some of them), Sarah became more European, more feminine, more burikko, more playful. The hard, dark, serious and practical style of her American clothes (jeans and t-shirts) gave way to something more ludic, friendly, feminine, soft... and slightly silly.
I wonder if these outfits -- the ones she ended up taking home, anyway -- changed Sarah, or just changed her self-presentation? Was agreeing to try and buy styles I found appealing a mere concession to me and my values, or was it a liberation from cultural habits Sarah was never particularly invested in? How did these looks go down on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn when she got home? Did the clothes conjur a slightly different parallel world -- a kinder, more playful one, with different gender relations -- and did wearing them, perhaps, force the real world to converge a few centimeters towards it?
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-05 04:41 pm (UTC)It was really interesting. Particularly the MTF woman. She'd been living as a woman for about five years and had done hormones and surgery. She's asian, so she's already small and slight of figure, which worked to her advantage such that when dressed in women's clothes, she is totally passable. Virtually no one who saw those pictures considered whether she might be another gender. As soon as she put on her old clothes from when she "used to be a boy," her entire posture changed. People who saw these photographs almost immediately assumed she was male. What's even more interesting is that the clothes were almost identical - she showed up wearing jeans and a fitted women's tshirt, and when she changed, she just changed into a men's tshirt.
Similarly, the funniest thing about the photo of this very masculine older guy (a friend's father that she sort of coerced into the project) was the way he sat on my chair, shoulders slightly hunched and legs wide open (though wearing a very short skirt).
In all the photos, the posture is almost more identifying than the clothes, in terms of gender. I've come to believe that, while everything you say above is absolutely true, the way we feel in the clothes we put on is of almost equal importance to the clothes themselves.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-05 05:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-05 10:28 pm (UTC)Is the project online anywhere? I guess not, if you didn't link it.
Virtually no one who saw those pictures considered whether she might be another gender.
Just a nitpick from someone who's perhaps oversensitive. I woulda said "sex" instead of "gender" at the end of that sentence. Gender's internal, sex is physical. Even then, "whether she had been born physically female" would be even better, since she was already post-op and such.
Sorry if this seems too PC or something. Just sayin'. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-06 04:25 am (UTC)One thing that was really funny is that the teacher from the class I did the project for came to my home and let me photograph her. I showed the slides of her dressed as a boy first - and *no one* recognized her. People who had been staring at her twice a week for three months had no idea.
Re the nitpick, I see what you mean. Perhaps I meant to say that people did not question her gender when they saw her dressed as a woman.