If you were on Elon University’s campus Oct. 3, you just might have seen a young man sporting a pair of red high heels.
Senior Logan Sutton bravely donned the heels for a project for his Performance Studies class, in which students were asked to cross dress in public and interact with others without telling them it was an assignment.
“Our clothes come to define who we are, so by altering that in some way that is distinctly the opposite gender, we get to perceive what other people think about it through our interactions,” Sutton said.
This analysis of gender construction through clothing is all part of the concept of the class, taught by Elizabeth Patterson, assistant professor of theatre, who said the purpose of this upper-level course is to analyze the relationship between a dramatic performance onstage and social performance, which is how individuals interact with others on a daily basis.
Cultural expression through dress
Clothing is just one example of how individuals communicate with each other, Patterson said, so the project serves as a way for students to see first-hand how others respond to how they dress, particularly if what they wear isn’t typically associated with their sex.
“Fashion is the only element of cultural expression in which we participate everyday, whether we are aware that we’re doing it or not,” Patterson said. “We all engage in this medium of cultural expression, so that’s why it was so interesting to me to charge these students with doing something that presses their own boundaries of what they think as gender.”
Luckily for Patterson, most students responded positively to the assignment, especially since Patterson said she made it clear from the beginning that the project would only go as far as students wanted to take it.
“The project does require 100 percent full commitment – the students were told that however far they wanted to take it was up to them,” she said. “If you’re a male, maybe just putting on make-up is fine, or wearing a different pair of shoes. We have quite a few folks who are not in the performing arts department who have never been onstage, so the concept of a costume in general is pretty unfamiliar to them.”
Getting into character
Though junior Chelsea Wingo is a Cinema major, the stage is not a foreign concept to her. She’s a Theater Arts minor who enjoyed performing onstage in high school, so she was excited that the project gave her an opportunity to assume a new role – and a new gender, at that.
“I immediately thought, ‘Oh wow, how fun!’ when I heard about the assignment,” Wingo said. “You have to have an open mind because you never really know what a situation will be like.”
For her project, Wingo wore a baggy t-shirt, jeans with exposed boxers and a pair of men’s shoes she borrowed from a male friend to portray the role of ‘Chase,’ her self-declared alter ego for the night. Although Wingo said she got a triple-take from one man when she went to Starbucks in her outfit, she didn’t receive as many reactions as she thought she would.
“It’s not as startling when a girl dresses as a guy as when a guy dresses a girl because that makes a bigger statement,” she said. “Nonetheless, I was hoping to get more reactions, but it was still a fun process to get into someone else’s skin.”
An unsettling reaction
Despite his experience with taking on roles onstage as a BFA Acting major, senior Sean Liang said he was not at all excited about the project when he first heard about it.
“I was a mall rat in middle school who dressed very gothic, so social experiments back then were fun, but now that I’m older, I was really nervous,” Liang said. “I wasn’t really looking forward to the project, but it ended up being worth it.”
Liang went to Target with senior Mallory Marcus, another student in the class, wearing one of Marcus’ pink tie-dye tops as well as some of her make-up. Marcus wore sweatpants, a tank top, a baseball cap and a fake mustache, which ended up being the catalyst for the only verbal reaction the pair got during their public outing.
“Mal had to pick up a prescription, and the girl at the pharmacy asked her why she was wearing a mustache,” Liang said. “She was actually friendly and polite, and it made us feel better because she was willing to talk about it and confront us. I saw a lot of people whispering about us, so I was glad that someone was comfortable enough to actually say something and ask us about it.”
The fact that most people avoided confrontation and would rather make their own internal assumptions says something about the way society deals with problems today, according to Liang.
“The project is meant to stir up social norms and see how people react to throwing a wrench in the machine to see how we react in society,” he said. “It’s interesting to see that other people know something’s up, but choose to ignore it instead of being open enough to confront you straight on, and there’s a lot to say about that.
Significance in society today
Patterson understands that this cultural pattern of avoiding confrontation of an issue exists, but decided to do the project now because of the variety of controversies in society surrounding gender issues and equality.
“We’re going into an election cycle that is deeply rooted in sex, gender and equality,” she said. “They’re not only issues at the ballot box but are also issues on our campus, so I felt it was important to do this project because of the current calendar agenda. I hope projects like this will continue to poke at what we consider ‘normal’ in terms of gender construction.”
Liang knows that “normal” doesn’t have a concrete definition – he said he believes people must open up their minds to other lifestyles, and the interesting results of the cross dressing project serve as a perfect example of why.
“There are some people who (dress as a different gender) and they aren’t trying to be someone else,” he said. “It’s not a role – it’s who they are, and I think it’s important to respect that.”