Psychology
University of the West of England, Bristol
hannah.frith@uwe.ac.uk
Hannah Frith is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology and Qualitative Research Methods. She is an active member of the Centre for Appearance Research based in the University of the West of England and is currently researching young people's use of clothing to construct and maintain identities. This includes exploring the intersection between embodiment, visibility and subjectivity.
Doing Looks and Looking: Young Women Fashioning the Gaze
Identity is at the core of psychological investigation, but it is only recently that psychologists have begun to consider clothing practices as discursive tools for the construction of identities. Youth identities have been constructed as inherently troubled and troubling; but while sociologists have examined (male dominated) youth subcultures and those engaged in spectacular displays of identity, less attention has been paid to more mundane, everyday appearances. In this paper we focus on 'ordinary' young women's everyday clothing practices. Drawing on interview data with women aged 11-18, we explore the active management and construction of identity and appearance and examine the ways in which this operates in relation to a complex web of gazes. We explore young women's everyday negotiation of visibility, being seen and surveillance through clothing practices and in relation to different audiences including parents, friends, 'boys', and men. We describe the ways in which they use clothing to present themselves as both loud, outrageous and sexual, and as invisible, 'ordinary', and uncontentious. We examine their desire to be 'seen' and their pleasure in being looked at. Young women's accounts are interpreted in relation to Mulvey's work on the patriarchal male gaze and post-Foucauldian notions of internalised self-surveillance.
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