Dress coded: How middle school dress codes compromise girls' sexual subjectivity and neglect agency


Lacey Bobier, University of Toronto

Clarifying everyday mechanisms of embodied inequality, this project shows how schools’ practices of body management sexualize and target female-bodied students, shaping their developing sexual subjectivity (i.e. the feeling of control over and pleasure in one’s sexuality). This study examines school dress codes for their pervasive, constant, everyday role in girls’ experiences with evolving bodies and gendered and sexualized experiences. Middle school is a pivotal time of identity development that coincides with a significant physiological transition and consequent shift in social expectations and experiences of embodiment. This is when girls exit a space of childhood innocence (or, at least, a space with fewer sexual overtones attributed to their bodies, clothing, and behaviors) and transition to a sexualized adult realm, accompanied by new expectations and interpretations of their bodies and behaviors. Merging in-depth interviews with 34 middle school students and 27 middle school educators with content analysis of 103 middle school handbooks, this study highlights the voices of those whose everyday experiences of embodiment are most shaped by school dress codes: girls. Educators and students demonstrated conflicting understandings of students’ dress code violations. When intentional, students offered three reasons for breaking the rules: a desire for physical comfort; self-expression through fashion; and/or to make statements about gender/sexual biases in dress codes. Meanwhile, educators focused on troublemaking, trends, and mistakes. In doing so, they failed to recognize: (1) the effort students, but especially girls, put into avoiding violations; (2) students’ agency in choosing comfort, fashion, and activism; and (3) students’ broader concerns about gender/sexual discrimination. Students were especially critical of how dress codes and their implementation sexualized girls by positioning their bodies as distractions and sites of risk. Girls learned their bodies could distract boys from classroom lessons and teachers from educating. At the same time, girls understood that their bodies were not just problematic because of the distraction they posed, but the potential danger they could bring to the girl should she make poor choices with her dress. Girls voiced frustration with these messages and the associated surveillance and punishment. They thoughtfully articulated how their developing sexual subjectivity and agency were compromised by policies that sexually objectified them and diminished their feelings of control over and pleasure in their bodies. In other words, girls’ experiences with dress coding emphasized how such policies resulted in their compulsory self-objectification (i.e. the internalization of an outsider’s view of one’s body, or judging bodily attractiveness and value through an external lens, and the resulting treatment of oneself as an object to be viewed and evaluated). Girls resisted and combated sexualizing discourses and policies through their accounts and actions, but nevertheless experienced an emotional toll because of the inescapable omnipresence of surveillance and its detrimental consequences.

This paper will be presented at the following session: