(Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)
Like most women, I had thought about appearance in terms of audience since just about always, but once I began to seriously work toward becoming a rhetorician that awareness increased. Appearance has everything to do with audience and kairos and other elements of persuasion, and it also has to do with communicative ethics. The fine line between persuasion and manipulation is one that women face constant pressure to deal with. (The effortlessly persuasive outfit = “She’s so confident and well-dressed.” On the other hand, an outfit that’s perceived as self-consciously constructed and manipulative = slut. Not so unlike the broad difference between conceptions of rhetorician and sophist.)
So I had to figure out how to manage my physical presentation within a new professional/rhetorical situation. Specifically: how would I transition from a corporate-business-development-type into a humanities-writer-type? Idgie and Bridget both commented on the specifics of this problem. The sort of pretty that plays in one sector of the academy doesn’t work in another. Luckily, my particular brand of pretty adjusted fairly well to my field. I have never been able to do super-girly-glitter-pink-femme. Never even wanted to. My brand of femme (corporate era) tended toward being a broad. Shoulder-length or longer red hair, curvy, v-necks-but-otherwise-covered, good bras, good leather shoes. Dark and neutral colors, strong tailoring. Smart, quick, a fair amount of cursing. Drink your liquor straight, no blended drinks and forgodsakes no fruity cocktails. A dame, in the American sense of the word. Played correctly, this sort of construction is approachable-yet-reasonably-intimidating, reasonably hot-but-not-necessarily-obtainable. It’s for a woman who’s one of the guys, only completely not. It works fairly well for me, and I still use it in particular situations — when I was working frequently with my lawyer last year, for instance.
I probably could have just transitioned it into my academic persona wholesale, but for several seasons. The primary problem was pragmatic: it’s a very expensive construct to keep going. To make it work, you have to be buying quality stuff. You can shop sales, but good wool costs what good wool costs, and so do Cole Haans. A $300 piece on a steep, steep sale is still $125 or maybe $80, if you’re really lucky. It’s not a look for a grad student to maintain, and I hadn’t kept my closet in shape, as I described in the last entry. Secondly, it’s a look for a woman who works in a heavily male-dominated profession. I could have just kept it without any problems except money had I gone to law school. But at the time, I assumed that it would never work in a female-dominated profession like Rhet-Comp. It especially doesn’t play well with southern women. Up here, I could probably get away with it more easily, assuming I was faculty. And finally, I wanted something easier. I had already gone from full-on broad to khakis-and-a-polo in my last year on the job, and I was purposefully leaving corporate life. In other words: I really wanted to wear jeans.
Which is what I did. I took some of the elements of my work-look and casual-ized them. It worked just fine, except that it made me look like a well put-together co-ed in sort of a contemporary, slightly edgy Nancy Drew sense of the term. (If that makes any sense at all.) And that accorded me just as much respect as you might expect the patriarchy is willing to give: “Well, aren’t you just so cute and smart? You’ll go so far.” Pat you on your head. Pat you on your ass. And when I say ‘patriarchy’ here, I don’t necessarily mean just men. I mean the people who were in charge. Professorial crushes by students are always strange, but even stranger is the reverse professorial crush. What do you do when a professor develops a crush on you? You accept the friendship, if you genuinely like the person (which I did and still do), and you accept the encouragement and help and just don’t mention it, but it’s still an issue. There’s still subjectivity and power imposed, despite everyone’s best intentions. It encourages a smart woman to feel like she’s not being evaluated strictly on her work, that she’s not really being taken seriously. And so one begins to look for ways to negate the issue.
I won’t pretend that I consciously decided to gain weight as a way of being taken more seriously. I have a tall, sturdy peasant frame, and Irish peasant genes that are always storing up for the next potato famine. All that exercise and dieting that I mentioned back in Part 1? That sort of obsessive attention will whittle me down to a woman’s 14 (American). On my frame, that size generates compliments. (A period of disordered eating in my mid-teens — which eventually contributed to a raging case of pneumonia — brought me down to the mid-150s and comments that I was actually becoming rather thin. When I finally went back to eating more than just a small french fries in a day, I regained every bit of my normal weight as well as a decent amount of nutrition. Don’t ask me why I chose fries and sometimes calamari. I don’t know.) Without constant vigilance that borders on the obsessive, I will gain weight. So will anyone else in my family. That’s the way we’re built. And as anyone knows, grad school has a reputation for encouraging one to pack on the pounds.
I especially gained during my thesis push and PhD program search. It appalled me so much that I became much more vigilant after we moved to Minnesota. I actually lost weight during my first semester of PhD work, which says something. But during my second semester I broke my ankle, and that meant four months of sitting and a pretty solid year of pain. This, combined with the professional pressure to sit and read and write, set up very strong sedentary habits that I’ve not yet successfully broken.
I’m not happy with my current weight, and don’t want to maintain here. But it is also not lost on me that transitioning from big-boned to thick to fat has solved a lot of my pretty problems. Out in the world, everyone knows that heaviness causes credibility problems. If I was still in business development or if I had gone to law school, this weight would be a huge problem that would have to be dealt with immediately. (Or really, I would never have let it get this far in the first place.) But here within the academy, and especially within Letters, we have a higher tolerance of freaks and geeks and less tolerance for pretty. At this weight, I am simply taken more seriously. People look me in the face instead of in the chest. They pay closer attention to what I’m saying and writing. When I sit in a committee meeting full of men or go to breakfast with a male colleague, the dynamics indicate that they are more generally registering me as ‘colleague’ or ‘additional mind/opinion’ rather than ‘omg female!’. My heft and height contribute to my authority in the classroom (and I’ve been lucky enough to keep a reasonably pretty face, so there hasn’t been much evident appearance-based impact on my teaching evaluations.)
Of course, there are other factors. The realities of shopping for a plus-sized body means that I’m dressing less hawt than before. I’ve experienced these bodily changes in a very liberal part of the country; it might be different if I was still living down South. As I’ve become more educated, I’ve simply become more confident in my arguments and public speaking.
But I read so many blogs written by smart women academics in various disciplines all over the country. They’re publishing and speaking and making names for themselves. And I can’t help but notice that the ones who most rigorously defend their right to the pretty (as they should; everybody’s got a right to be pretty) are the ones who also complain most often about physical and verbal sexual harassment, about not being taken seriously, and about issues with classroom authority. One old colleague of mine, who is simply wired up to like pink and glitter and girlieness and works hard for her slenderness, has had so many problems along these lines. The sad cultural fact of the matter is that pretty is not often respected. Even the academy, which theoretically evaluates on smarts and merits*, isn’t so sure that pretty and smart can really exist in the same human package. And for me, oddly enough, weight has been a way out of this problem. So much so that when I think about getting back to my former weight, I also can’t help but think about the price I might pay for doing so.
*Yes, I know this is a fiction.
