Dressed to Suppress

Ella Dame

Abstract: “Dressed to Suppress” is an autoethnography exploring the relationship between maturing girls, the clothes they wear, and their peers' perception of them as a result of their gender expression. After an adolescence characterized by awkwardness, a misunderstanding of femininity, and a battle between truth and conformity, the narrator reflects on how her socialization reinforced her behavior. Afraid to speak up and increasingly injured by her own actions, the narrator rediscovers herself after trials of gender expression through clothing that was less than feminine and more than affirming. This paper educates the presence of gender roles in queer American youth and the euphoria created through expression of self.

Keywords: Socialization, Male Gaze, Gender Identity, Femininity

Prologue

I write this piece to the little girl who once saw people like me as fictional.

I am wearing men's jeans that are two sizes too big, hanging off of my wide hips. My top, an XL jersey, hides any hint of my figure and matches my favorite black men's sneakers.

When my blue eyes meet my reflection, I am content with what I see. Unlearning the cemented standards I had once contorted to fit was a process both confronting and longstanding.

From the time I was playing house to now, I have learned to conform to a structure inherently straight and gendered. I was taught my gender role before I knew what gender expression was.

This process of being taught gendered norms is known as gender socialization and is defined as, “The process by which an individual is taught how they should behave as a boy or girl. Parents, teachers, peers, media, and books are some of the many agents of gender socialization.” (Giorgio, 2024a, Pg. 11). These developmental reinforcements followed me through many stages of life and still surface now through media, peers, and school.

These expectations have molded the way I think, interact with others and express myself. Clothing is a common and familiar vehicle to externalize my identity. Paralleled to my exploration of gender, sexuality, and self has been my evolving style.

The Bombshell

  When I was 13, dressing to suppress had become a thoughtless daily practice. Each article of clothing was a strategic move, a step closer to integrating into the clique of girls most revered in our grade. I was cautious, a single misstep could catalyze the foundation of security I had built from the first day of sixth grade.

I remember being in the fitting room of a Victoria’s Secret with three other girls my age. We each took turns trying on the most padded and lifted bras we could find. There was an air of secrecy and delinquency in that pink mirrored room but, I felt like the biggest secret was one I had been left out of.

We’d wanted to catch a glimpse of womanhood, and I was on board with this voyage of friendship. I joined in with many giggles of uncertainty and wearing foreign lacey bras. Although, the whispers about boys in our grade seeing us wearing these to school made me sick not excited.

As sensual music blared and my friends began pooling money to buy a shared pushup bra, I felt a creeping feeling of uncomfortable otherness that I couldn’t quite place. Being a girl with friends was not just about wearing a bombshell bra but wearing it for others to see.

Feigned Femininity

As I got older, I resented that I still felt my self-worth and my friends was tied to an all-powerful male gaze.

 Entering high school, I traded in my comfy leggings for tighter high waisted ones. My wide necked blouses became v-necks and the baggiest shirt I owned was no longer to be worn outside of the house.

My wardrobe of shame and feigned femininity haunted me each morning before school. Pangs of suppression and disconnect had become interwoven into my daily rituals.

My sophomore year, I sat on my mom's bed with my closest friend, Viola. We had just finished watching “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”, a rom-com about a girl and boy who get into a fake relationship. Due to the artificial nature of their relationship, the boy was not allowed to kiss the girl, and she wore anything she wanted not needing his approval.

 I brought this up to Viola, asking her why boys couldn’t be like him, non-physical or perceiving. She gave me this look that silenced the tone of silliness that had filled the room just seconds ago. It was a warning that I was dangerously close to making myself an outsider in this moment of shared girlhood.

I backtracked, explaining that boys at our school were overly sexual and every compliment hid an ulterior motive. Losing some alarm, she assured me that all boys were like that. I nodded and changed the topic to how badly I wanted a boyfriend.

A Redefinition

I had thought I might be gay since I was 11, taking sexuality quizzes religiously and rewatching the Hayley Kiyoko “Girls like Girls” music video secretly. At that time, being gay wasn’t a piece that fit into my idealization of femininity. I struggled to see how I could fit in without the need for men's approval.

After almost a decade of suppression and costumed assimilation, I came out. It was triggered after overwhelming frustration, mistrials with men and a performance of womanhood that self-harmed more than self-soothed.

The summer after I had revealed my secret, I indulged in an experimental redefinition of womanhood.

Our neighborhood pool became my lab. My primary experiment was the most frightening. I swapped my bikini bottoms for trunks. Swimming had always been performative, an exhibition of bare skin and attempted appeal. Wearing something untraditional felt as rebellious as it did comfortable.

I looked in the pool house mirrors and saw myself, no falsified frills attached. Realizing falling into my authentic expression of femininity had always been married to my sexuality. I felt the most beautiful I had in a long time.

The Female Gaze

The following fall, my style had adapted to represent a collection of past and present identities. I kept old clothes, added new ones I’d always wanted, and shopped without gender or heteronormative barriers.

When my now girlfriend looked at me for the first time, I kept wishing she would hold her glance longer. I had never wanted to be looked at more in my life. We were at a house show, and I was wearing my favorite black dress with an oversized flannel draped over my shoulders.

In that same dress, men had touched me in ways I didn’t like and gazed at me without hiding their unwanted desires, making me nervous to wear it again. But this time was different. This gaze was different.

As we exchanged our names and introductory details, I felt my heart beating so fast I wondered if she could hear it. My face felt like fire and my brain became a scrambled mess.

 She was so beautiful, uniquely herself. Her face framing brown soft curls moved as she laughed. Her black tank top perfectly framed her strong arms meeting her men’s khaki pants that she secured with a black belt. Her green eyes were bright, and I could tell she really saw me, not an inauthentic image I forced myself to be.

I didn’t feel like the woman I had been taught to be, I don’t know if I even felt like a woman at all in that moment. I felt the absence of burdening social expectations and reveled in a self I wanted to share with others.

Through friends, I had viewed femininity as a link in our relationship; in strangers a point of solidarity. After falling in love with a woman, femininity became a love language.

I’ve relearned that femininity is a dynamic expression of self. Loving someone else’s femininity reminds me that it doesn’t exist singularly. Femininity is not a single story.

When I sit at the edge of my bed in the morning, 22 now, watching my girlfriend get dressed I witness a physical composition of her identity. She sleepily slips a men's cotton t-shirt over her grey sports bra before stepping into men's jeans.  She catches me watching her smittenly and gives me a gentle kiss on my head, tapping my eyebrows with her silver star necklace and filling my nose with my favorite smell, a mixture of cologne and her scent.

She is the most masculine, most feminine and most undeniably perfect thing I have ever seen. She is a rejection of the male centered imprisonment of confining clothes and ingenuine friendships I’d been trapped in as I grew up.

In these mundane moments, I think of all the times a younger version of myself could've been spared from having a diminished self-worth rooted in misguided gendered socialization, if she would have known how euphoric it can feel to be gazed at and truly seen– to be known.

Works Cited

1.     Giorgio, G (2024a). Constructing Gender Femininity [PowerPoint slides]. Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

2.     Giorgio, G (2024b). Gendered Communication [PowerPoint slides]. Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

3.     Kebirungi, L. (2024, December 2). Sewn into being: The intersection of fashion and identity. CanCulture Magazine. https://canculturemag.com/fashion/sewn-into-being-the-intersection-of-fashion-and-identity/

4.     Lopez, M. (2023) Becoming Camila

5.     Hofbauer, D. (2021) The Power of Dress: Expressing gender identity through fashion. Vox Magazine, https://www.voxmagazine.com/features/fashion-identity-expression-lgbtq-gender-outfits/article_19464a90-b410-11eb-ac21-b71e3a6aba42.html

6.     Miriam (2023) Why is clothing gendered? Planned Parenthood, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/blog/why-is-clothing-gendered

7.     Manzella, S. (2023) What does “dressing gay” even mean anymore?, Highsnobiety. https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/dressing-gay-meaning/