Section III Bridging Theory and Practice
Step 2: Use your answers to the above questions to help you write your bio-poem
3. Appearance as Identity, A Double-Edged Sword
A few posts ago, we looked at how the differences in style between womenswear and menswear can lead women to shop often. In this second part of a mini-investigation
Artifact B Instructing
into the link between women and shopping, I wanted to look at the way woman’s identity is shaped and defined, and the influences this has on our buying behavior.
I hardly need to explain how often women are judged by their looks. Unfortunately, a huge part of women’s identity is linked to their appearance, and this can have strong effects on our shopping habits.
This appearance as identity issue came up for me as I read the article Why Can’t A Smart Woman Love Fashion by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It looks at an idea that lurks not too far from many a conservatively dressed politician, from many a woman who walks past the bright colours with a sad smile and chooses a navy dress with a conservative neckline instead.
It’s an idea that goes a little like this:
Fashion is frivolous and flighty.
Women who enjoy fashion are frivolous and flighty.
We don’t want frivolous and flighty in serious, influential roles.
Women in serious, influential roles need to abandon fashion.
Basically, it’s the idea that you are what you wear. In this case, Ngozi Adichie is saying that being in intellectual or otherwise “serious” roles shouldn’t hold women back from enjoying fashion, because having a penchant for prints doesn’t affect your decision making abilities. She’s absolutely right, and she definitely knows how to rock a print.
But.
Appearance as identity is a double-edged sword. For women in environments that are considered intellectual, serious or are male-dominated, this might mean reaching for the black blazer when we’d rather not (although I would like to point out that if that’s exactly what you’d like to reach for, that’s just as valid. It’s about choice). But for other women, or in other situations, this can cut another way.
“The rare woman who did not appear well dressed and well lotioned was frowned upon, as though her appearance were a character failing. “She doesn’t look like a
person,” my mother would say.”
This quote is also taken from that same article, and it stopped me in my tracks. Here we have the same idea – the way you look is the person you are. Or the lack of person.
Now, I know that the writer is talking about her mother’s opinion, and we don’t always agree with our mothers… So I won’t hold it against her. But this idea that a woman’s character is compromised if she isn’t well-dressed is a common one.
It pops up in obvious, look-at-me ways through studies that indicate that women wearing just the right amount of makeup appear more trustworthy and likable to most observers. (which Sally McGraw wrotea great counterpoint to)
It pops up more subtly in TV shows, movies and books whose badly dressed or
“sloppy” characters are not just badly dressed or sloppy. No, they are also lazy, unstable, socially inept or naive. This both reflects and reinforces the idea that the way we look is who we are.
And it makes us buy. It makes us buy, because we are told that if we don’t, we’re not just lacking the latest bag, dress or lipstick. We are lacking in identity, in personality, and in value as people.
Culture, ethnicity and identity
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84 4. Does White Identity Predict Positive or Negative Attitudes Towards Diversity? What else do you know if you know someone identifies with being White?
In recent years, research on White identity has gained traction in the psychological literature, as researchers and clinicians have grown to realize that this group also struggles with questions such as, "what does it mean to be White in my culture," and "what does being White mean to me?"
One of the most interesting—and important—questions relevant to White identity has to do with its relationship to intergroup attitudes. Research looking into this question is all over the map, with some findings suggesting a positive link (that is, greater identification leading to more positive intergroup attitudes), other findings suggesting a negative link, and still others finding suggesting no link at all.
When science stumbles on these kinds of inconsistent, "all over the map"
relationships, it usually means that there is another factor playing a role that researchers have not yet accounted for. For example, ethnic identity among minority students has sometimes been linked to better academic outcomes, and sometimes linked to worse academic outcomes. My own research (Mendoza-Denton, Pietrzak, and Downey, 2008) has found that whether students worry that they may be discriminated against in their schooling context determines whether their ethnic identity serves as a strength or a risk factor.
My colleagues Matt Goren and Victoria Plaut at UC Berkeley have tackled the confusing relationship between White identity and intergroup attitudes in a 2011 paper published in the journal Self and Identity. Goren and Plaut recognized that White identity is not a unitary phenomenon; rather, that it can take different forms. The researchers
discovered that although some Whites were indeed weakly identified, those who identified strongly fell into two primary groups. One group very much identified with being White, but in a way that allowed them to recognize White privilege. The researchers called this group the power cognizant group. The other group also identified with being White, but described their experience much more in terms of how proud they were to be a part of the group. This group the researchers termed the prideful group.
Once the researchers divided the highly identified Whites into these two groups, the picture rapidly came into focus. Even though these two groups had similar levels of White identification, the power-cognizant group held significantly more positive attitudes towards diversity, as measured with items such as "universities should foster environments where differences are valued," and "a university education should expose students to the
important differences in ideas and values that exist in the world." The prideful group, by contrast, did not endorse these items as strongly, and showed a greater tendency towards prejudice than the power-cognizant group. The key here is that if one were not to
distinguish between these two groups, the research would have found no relationship at all between White identification and attitudes towards diversity!
There are two take home points: the first is that our scientific conclusions are limited by the types of questions we ask, so that few, if any, scientific findings are really the last word on a given topic. The second is subtler, and extremely important for positive
intergroup relations. Just because someone has a strong ethnic identity, we cannot make direct conclusions about their attitudes on other topics. This applies not just to Whites, but to members of other groups as well.
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