Abigail L. Ureña
Prof. Sara Jacobson
ENGL 11000 R
27 September 2019
How fashion affects gender stereotypes from a rhetorical perspective
Clothing is an essential part of life. What people wear everyday has an impact on how they go about their day. What a person wears can determine how they feel, look, or act. The way people dress reveals more about a person than some of their actions do, this is true especially for those who struggle with their identity, and dress not according to their gender stereotype. What a person wears will have an impact on how they are perceived to be. This very true for men and women, however, for women this is a constant dilemma. One of the main purposes of clothing is to be able to identify the proper gender. Our clothing, like many other material things, becomes part of our identity. Although the gender identifying and creating duty has been served by clothing for hundreds of years, several articles of clothing have recently been adopted by both sexes. Despite significant changes and leaps forward in the roles and opportunities open to women, the U.S. is still in large part a patriarchal society; this is partly due to the fact that the associations with women’s clothing is not the same as men’s. This essay will analyze the functions and effects of gender roles associated with clothing on the female population.
In a thesis, written by Rosa Crepax, the author sets the mood for her analysis by using tone and purpose to argue that modern androgyny, in fact leads to more defined gender roles. Crepax does not focus on one singular view, instead she focuses on multiple points of view and how they are all related.
Accounting for the fluid phenomenon of contemporary androgynous fashion, I consider the ways in which fashion intermediaries produce and circulate meanings, and how different audiences receive them, but, instead of explaining such meanings in terms of simple paradigms of production and reception, the focus is placed on the dynamics between all of the various actors that participate in the development of the new androgyny (Crepax 11).
Women walk around everyday being judged; from the cradle to their grave women are groomed to act a certain way and to dress a certain way. When women stray away from these social norms they are judged even more harshly by patronizers. Since society has normalized these very specific gender roles and stereotypes, new forms of dressing have been introduced into the mainstream world. One of these newer methods of dressing, is called ‘androgynous’: this is basically like dressing ‘unisex’, this was intended to transcend gender roles in fashion and make them more ambigious when dressing. Androgyny has revolutionized the world of fashion, because, it would essentially be meant to break the barrier of dressing according to a specific gender; however, this seems to be doing the opposite.
Articles associated with the new androgynous fashion describe pairs of jeans as boyfriend jeans and t-shirts as tomboyish, they teach women how to wear masculine clothes and look sexy and feminine rather than “mannish”, or suggest they wear their androgynous coats without their arms in, so that it will look like it was draped on them by their man (Crepax 13).
In the newspaper article, the author uses stance and language to try to persuade her audience that clothes, are the ones that create these gender stereotypes. She starts by stating the harmonious hatred towards rugby in her family. She mentions that if she were allowed to practice this sport as a child she would feel less resentment towards it; however, she says that “if I’d been allowed to play rugby league as a kid growing up in Sydney, rather than suffering under the gender apartheid that barred girls from participating.” (Dux) The author mentions rugby as a way to introduce the reader to the prejudiced gender stereotypes when it comes to clothing. She later describes a humiliating experience her mother suffered when trying to enter a rugby club to have a fancy dinner. The author describing her personal experiences, serves as a catalyst to persuade her audience. Dux, explains that fashion and gender rules are still enforced very apparently in every walk of life. She gives examples of the implied dress codes in a professional workplace and at the beach;
Consider the corporate world, where office dress etiquette is premised on a strict gender divide, with men in mandatory suits and ties and women forced into skirts, blouses and uncomfortable heels. Then there’s the beach, where each summer countless women are traumatised by having to fit into flimsy lycra undies, also known as “swimwear”, while men get to wear comfortable, baggy shorts. (Dux)
Monica Dux even mentions the gender stereotypes embedded in society. She describes the discrepancies between children’s clothing and uniforms. The author concludes by saying that clothes can’t only be blamed in this situation, but instead we should discuss the value that we attach to masculinity and femininity, “underlying these reactions is a profound disrespect for women and all that we associate with femininity” (Dux).
The third source I used was an essay by Hammad Raza on the role of fashion and the construction of gender identities. Raza successfully used tone to inform his audience about the affiliation of gender role stereotypes and fashion. According to Raza, “Fashion generates and alters identities based on the gender-based relations in a society.” (Raza 1) He supports his claims by including many studies done on the relationship between fashion and gender. The author states that, “Clothes mark a line of difference between the social world and the naked body, thus acting as an agency wherein social expectations with regard to gender can be coagulated into reality and are made obvious in the body”(Raza 2). This is an example of how Raza used tone that is appropriate for his audience to describe how the relationship between, the world of fashion and social constructs is fostered. The author persuades the audience that gender roles and stereotypes, are due to fashion, and that this has many negative connotations on society. Raza says that, “fashion has not only adversely affected women, but also men by robbing them off their masculinity and natural outlook” (Raza 4) and “ blame fashion for begetting [sic] womanly men and manly women” (Raza 4). The author further claims his idea by saying that, “the modern world, fashion has been diffused vertically in class-formulation and horizontally blurring the gendered differentiation with the help of highly mediatized fashion industry, costume magnates and dress designers, it has become a zeitgeist of our times”. Raza successfully informed his audience, and he stated that the modern fashion world and the way of dressing is largely to blame for the increasingly segregated and prejudiced gender roles.
On the website source, the author asserts that the stereotypes of gender that are created by fashion is due to every individual culture. They use the ideas of cultural norms and dress to captivate the audience, and parallel them to modern fashion teach them about how fashion affects gender stereotypes. As an example, the author states that in some parts of the world such as Indonesia, West Africa and Scotland, men use an article of clothing that would correspond to the definition of a skirt in the United States. In Indonesia and West Africa, these ‘skirts’ are used by both sexes; however, in Scotland the kilt is worn to display the specific gender roles, and it “ represents the height of masculinity”(Gender, Dress, and Fashion). On the website source, the author also claims that color cue and gender specific color of clothing increase the development of a socially constructed gender identity; “Gender-specific attire enhances the internalization of expectations for gender-specific behavior”(Gender, Dress, and Fashion). The author of this article, uses examples from pop culture to encourage their audience to keep reading and learn about gender as a social construct. In mentioning, Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus, Chris), the author uses pathos to persuade their audience.By using a popular movie, the author is using something that will resonate with the audience and help the audience relate to what the author has written. The author says, “Gender is a socially constructed phenomenon, and not all cultures aspire to the same physical ideal for men and women as those in Western societies. Likewise, dress can symbolically convey meanings about gender specific to a culture” (Gender, Dress, and Fashion). The author also states that, cultural standards of beauty and dress codes are a reason why gender roles exist and why they are often very stereotypical.
The “rules” that surround gendered clothes aren’t about fashion, or about taste. They are about how society emphasizes a difference, enforcing and reiterating restrictive ideas about what it is to be a girl or a boy, or a man or woman. Perhaps the only solution is to challenge the rules of fashion is to challenge our settled ideas about gender roles in society. The clothes we choose to wear can speak volumes about our identity, and the way we interpret the choices of others’ clothing can define our relationships and communication with them before we ever say a word.
Works Cited
Akdemir, Assist. Prof. Doc Nihan. “Deconstruction of Gender Stereotypes Through Fashion.” Semantic Scholar, European Journal of Social Science, 2018, Volume 5, Issue 2 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fbda/9b3aeff20dc30d4924032f07f792b88fa611.pdf.
Columbus, Chris, director. Mrs. Doubtfire. Twentieth Century Fox, 1993.
Crepax, Rosa. The Aesthetics of Mainstream Androgyny: A Feminist Analysis of a Fashion Trend. University of London, May 2016, http://research.gold.ac.uk/19832/1/SOC_EditedThesis_CrepaxR_2017.pdf.
“Defining Gender Roles.” Gender Roles and Gender Stratification, http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jmahoney/gender101.htm#Genderequality.
Dux, Monica. “Clothes Maketh the Gender Stereotypes.” The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Feb. 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/clothes-maketh-the-gender-stereotypes-20170223-gujgpu.html.
“Gender, Dress, and Fashion.” Encyclopedia.com, Encyclopedia.com, 28 Aug. 2019, https://www.encyclopedia.com/fashion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gender-dress-and-fashion.
Raza, Hammad. “Fashion and Gender Roles.” Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/5349062/Fashion_and_Gender_Roles.
Shibboleth Authentication Request, https://journals-sagepub-com.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/doi/full/10.1177/0891241612466108.
