Person: Steigerwald Schnall, Zachary
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Steigerwald Schnall
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Zachary
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Steigerwald Schnall, Zachary
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Publication Dressing Down, Looking Up: Unmasking Self-Determination in Student Dress Through the Covid-19 PandemicSteigerwald Schnall, Zachary; Viterna, JocelynThe daily act of getting dressed is a universal experience in modern society, a way of expressing one’s sense of self. Clothes, in turn, are a key marker of identity, shaping onlookers’perceptions and categorization of passersby into social groups. From these groups (e.g., men and women, professionals and workers), boundaries emerge. Despite the power of dress as a tool of categorization, sociologists have paid surprisingly little attention to what we wear and why. Specifically, it is unclear how much control individuals have over their own attire. Dress codes and mask mandates constrain freedom, of course, but how much agency do individuals have—or feel like they have—to wear what they want outside of these restrictions? And how might identifying these hidden constraints extend our understanding of symbolic boundaries and social categorization processes? This thesis explores how agency and autonomy in youth sartorial decisions have shifted during an unsettled time, and then leverages those insights to build theory on the role of clothing in boundary work. Through a set of 10 panel interviews with Harvard undergraduates conducted a year apart, 35 additional interviews, and a survey administered to over 200 undergraduates and 150 local high school students, I find that youth sartorial autonomy and agency have temporarily expanded during the pandemic. Post-pandemic, students anticipate returning to pre-pandemic attire. For both clothes and masks, boundary work and autonomy operate in a cyclical fashion: as individuals feel constrained in their clothing choice, they increasingly draw boundaries that further constrain others; conversely, as individuals perceive a greater level of control over their attire, these boundaries fade, empowering others to dress to their liking. By drawing this conceptual link, findings offer a new vantage point for cultural sociologists to analyze the structural processes undergirding boundary work writ large. With striking shifts in gendered dress during the pandemic, findings also have implications for social change theorists interested in (un)doing gender.