Dress provides a window through which we might look into a culture, because it visually attests to the salient ideas, concepts and categories fundamental to that culture. Age, gender, ethnicity and religion help to define a person’s social location and are made visible when cultures make dress salient. The term ‘dress’ is used in the most global sense to refer to all of the ways the body is used in the expression of identity. Dress is the most obvious of the many symbolic boundary markers used by conservative religious groups. This article examines how the metaphor of appearance is used within religious groups in the United States to simultaneously express religiosity, ethnicity and gender norms. In many of the most conservative groups, we will see that dress codes are used as gender norms that reinforce the existing power system.
Through conformance to a strict religious value system, the most conservative of the religious social bodies exert control over their members’ physical bodies. Since strict conformity is equated with religiosity, compliance to strict codes of behavior is demanded. The internal body is controlled, in that emotion is restrained, voices and laughter are muffled and appetite for food, knowledge and sex are constrained. The external body, however, is more visibly restrained. Strict dress codes are enforced because dress is considered symbolic of religiosity. Hence, dress becomes a symbol of social control as it controls the external body. While a person’s level of religiosity can not be objectively perceived, symbols such as clothing are used as evidence that s/he is on the ‘right and true path.’
Although the body is central to personal identity, social interaction and thus society at large, the body has been relatively neglected in sociology (Synnott, 1993). The sociology of the body is in its infancy; this new area of sociological research attempts to study the self as embodied, the body as a symbolic system (Shilling, 1993). Behavioral and dress codes are used in conservative religious groups as symbols of religiosity and social control. This follows Douglas’s (1966) argument that ‘the body provides a basic theme for all symbolism’ (p. 163–4).
Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) pioneered the study of the body as a symbol of the social order. Goffman (1963, 1971) followed with his examination of the management of the body in social interaction and showed the body as central to human agency. Fueled by the writings of Michel Foucault (1974, 1979, 1980), scholarship that examined the human body as a vehicle of social inquiry began to proliferate during the 1980s. Foucault (1974) saw the body as governed by political systems and focused on an epistemological view of the body as existing in discourse. Foucault noted that the soul is more than an ideological construct; it exists and has a reality in that it is produced within, around and on the body (1979). According to Foucault’s notion that the soul is both real and produced on the body through a dynamic system of power relationships between individuals, their bodies and cultures. Burroughs and Erenreich (1993) showed that social systems stamp messages about the dynamics of power relationships onto individuals’ bodies as the process of the social construction of the body in turn creates culture. To use Bourdieu’s own language, ‘the social determinations attached to a determinate position in the social space tend, through relationship to one’s own body, to shape the dispositions constituting social identity’ (1990, p. 71).
Pierre Bourdieu’s (1973) theory of social reproduction has at its very heart a concern for the body as a bearer of symbolic value. The body, for Bourdieu, is an unfinished entity that develops in conjunction with various social forces and is integral to the maintenance of social inequalities. As a natural phenomenon that both constitutes and is constituted by society, analysis of the body is a necessary component of post-modern social life. The body is constantly affected by social, cultural and economic processes. Social groups adopt a particular style of dress in relation to the meanings given to alternative styles, the orientation to the body that style of dress encourages and to the relationship between the fields of fashion and other social fields (Bourdieu, 1973).
The sociology of the body turns out to be, according to Turner (1984, p. 114) ‘crucially about the control of female sexuality by men exercising patriarchal power.’ Turner argues that every society must solve the Hobbesian problem of order and to do so means to solve four problems, two of which concern the political body in terms of reproduction and regulation, both considered by Turner to be ‘political problems.’ At the ‘individual body’ level, the two problems Turner cites are the need for restraint of desire, a problem of the internal body; and the importance of representation of bodies to each other, a problem of the external body (Synnott, 1993). Turner, then, provides a model for analysis of the social control of dress. The investigation of dress as a vital component of the social control system of cultures is, unfortunately, rarely the topic of research.
Dress includes both body supplements, such as clothing and accessories and behaviors, such as dieting, plastic surgery and cosmetics, leading to changes in body shape. Holistically, then, dress functions as an effective means of non-verbal communication during social interaction; it influences the establishment and projection of identity (Roach-Higgins and Eicher, 1992). That dress is a visible manifestation of cultural values is well known, as dress code research tends to show (Davis, 1989; Hall, 1993; Lipp, 1989; Rivere, 1992). In examining the effects of conformity to gender-role expectations for dress, Workman and Johnson (1994) found that evaluations of individuals were influenced by perceptions of deviance from expected norms. Similarly, Micklin (1977) found low tolerance for marginal behavior and deviant dress, leading to the exercise of social control. Research on social control tends to be macroscopic in nature and focuses on the use of formal or legal means of control. Goffman (1963) reminded us that symbols operate at the microscopic level of normative social control. Normative social control begins with personal social control through selfregulation, followed by informal social control. When the individual begins to offend, peers may disapprove and pressure the individual to conform to the norms. Finally, the threat that an offender introduces to the social order is managed through formal social control measures, administered by specialized agents. Thus, norms are managed through social control to inhibit deviation and insure conformity to social norms at even the most minute level (Goffman, 1971).
Through symbolic devices, the physical body exhibits the normative values of the social body (Douglas, 1982). Symbols, such as dress, help delineate the social unit and visually define its boundaries because they give non-verbal information about the individual. Unique dress attached to specific cultural groups, then, can function to insulate group members from outsiders, while bonding the members to each other. Normative behavior within the culture re-affirms loyalty to the group and can be evidenced by the wearing of a uniform type of attire (Joseph, 1986).