Let me just begin this post with a little
personal anecdote. When I was 12 years old I dressed up as a rich lady for Halloween. Knowing little about the world beyond the
monkey bars and gummy bears, I did not realize that stuffing the fake dollar
bills in my dress straps (to be seen by the neighbors handing out candy)
represented any type of promiscuous conduct. The following years I dressed as a
teenager and an elf- Needless to say, I accidentally sported the lewd Halloween
look very early in life and have basically been making up for it by being a
ghost or a pumpkin the last couple of years. This Halloween, I was dressed as
an alien- very modestly by protocol- including a green face, antennas, and a
third eyeball painted on my forehead. Against my usual weekend routine, I
sported my super weird costume right into the labyrinth of frat basement where
I was confronted with what I could only recognize as an unusual cultural
experience. A little intimidated by the sexy skin and bones costumes on the
other girls at the party, I was quiet at first. I then realized that my
preconceptions of how people would react to me for dressing up like a freaky
alien instead of a bunny were probably unfairly judgmental. In effect, I
toughened up and said hello to the boy standing next to me, who responded with,
“Woah, you look scary!” With that, he vanished into the darkness of the sticky
basement leaving me to evaluate how hilarious and relevant this was to the
practicalities of human interactions that we have been evaluating all semester.
Watch this video for a reenactment of
the events that were the culmination of my costume.
Max Gluckman talks about Rituals of Rebellion
as a way for societal tensions to ease through controlled expressions of
hostility or unusual behavior. Noting that they are inherent phenomena in societies
that can accommodate them without falling apart, he explains that they ease
tensions between the oppressed and those in power. Halloween is in fact rooted
in a Ritual of Rebellion that involved giving children one day in the year in
which they are in power- where they can demand candy from the adults who have
been telling them what to do with the
threat of being pranked. In the college setting, many Halloween parties are
“the one night a year where girls can dress like a total slut and no other
girls can say anything about it” (Mean Girls). While comical, this is totally
relative to Gluckman’s proposal- girls face dualistic pressures in college to
be smart in class yet sexy and mindless in the dark frat basement. There is
clearly no easier way to fulfill the sexy quota than to capitalize on the
wardrobe freedoms that Halloween grants. So while the rebellious acts shift
from childhood trickery to sporting your lingerie at a party, they are evermore
still existent, bringing me to my next point.. Where exactly does the
motivation lie in drinking beer and socializing in a corset or some other cold
little outfit? Sigmund Freud answers this question through his analysis of
human developmental stages.
Freud’s psychosexual analysis of human development
is rooted in the idea that people pass through 5 stages in life: the oral,
anal, phallic, latency, and genital stage. The genital stage comes during
puberty and lasts through your adult life, and indicates the period where men
and women can finally express their pent up sexual frustrations from the
earlier stages in the form of sexual relationships. Sexy nurse and cop costumes
are solid evidence of college kids in their genital stage- where you wear your desire
for sex like you wear those bunny ears at a Halloween party. With girls
attending parties in their skimpiest getup, Freud offers the analysis that it gives
other attendees the opportunity to shop for their favorite looking girls on the
basis of how well they will be able to satisfy their sexual cravings- quite
animalistic really, but cool to see Freud’s perspective really unfolding so
accurately. Returning to my own experience, Freud would have said, “Of course,
stupid Amelia, why would you have expected that poor boy to waste his time swapping
ideas with a freaky looking alien when there was a hot nurse in her genital stage standing alone by
the keg?”
I can't BELIEVE I am the only person to comment on this AMAZING post! Amelia manages to weave together structural-functionalism and Freudian theory with her own autobiographical Halloween experience, with a perfect video clip thrown in to boot! Gracefully done.
ReplyDeleteAmelia, I really enjoyed reading this blog post about the undertones of Gluckman in Halloween antics, as well as your Freudian explanation of inevitable sexual desires which, suppressed in the “light” of daily activities, are able to be explored without consequence when masked by sexy Halloween costumes. Although you don’t necessarily articulate this in the beginning of your post, I think that in showing the trajectory of your costume choices you’ve foregrounded the aspect of Halloween which would be of interest to feminist anthropologists as well. In “Language, Gender, and Power: An Anthropological Review,” Susan Gal identifies that there are two ways through which resistance to domination and power can be achieved. These are a.) “when devalued linguistic forms and practices are practiced and celebrated despite widespread denigration and stigmatization” and b.) when “these devalued practices (often) propose or embody alternate models of the social world.” (319) Providing a new facet of this research, Gal then points out that “Missing from these theories, however, is a concept of gender as a structure of social relations that is reproduced and sometimes challenged in everyday practice.” (319)
ReplyDeleteI see in your choice of the alien costume a push against this dominant expectation of young women’s’ Halloween costumes that is very similar to the poetry of the Bedouin women which Gal discusses. Here, I’m agreeing with you that the subliminal symbolic domination which is internalized through cultural representations of women is that their Halloween costumes, though they can and should be sensationalized (we have to go with the theme of the holiday, of course), must incorporate some element of femininity and sexiness into the concept and the construction of the costume. The rich lady costume, especially with the dollar bills under the dress, evokes the idea of a woman desirable to a man- both for her outfit and for her money. The teenager and elf costumes are similarly feminine and perpetuate the dominant view that on Halloween a girl can be something else, but only as long as the outfit is recognized as appropriately feminine/desirable.
However, with your alien costume you absolutely subvert the expectations of Halloween costumes for women. Not only is an alien desexualized as it is neither feminine nor masculine, but you also chose to wear a costume which covers you as opposed to the “sexy skin and bones costumes on the other girls at the party.” Recalling Katy Perry’s “E.T.” video, even an alien can be conformed into a sex symbol, or one that can be enticing. Your Freudian explanation of why the boy chooses to move away at the party is very convincing and I agree with this psychoanalytic take on the situation. Freud’s perspective even plays into how the sexualized expectations of women’s Halloween costumes have become the dominant position in society by showing how they are biologically a normal and necessary part of the trajectory of the individual’s development. In other words, it’s natural to expect you to show up in a Playboy bunny costume, while it’s unnatural to sport an alien ensemble. However, I think that your move away from your childhood costumes which go with the grain of this symbolic domination to this year’s alien costume is as much a feminine form of resistance as it is a ritual of rebellion. In fact, I see your alien costume as a valid “discourse of opposition to the [dominant] system and of defiance of those who represent it.” (Gal 320) I definitely think that Gal would approve of your bold and unexpected choice of Halloween wear this year.
Erin, thanks a lot!! I think now I really will never again be able to sport a sexy costume on Halloween as the ideas of you and Gal will resurface every year and inspire me to celebrate my own ritual of rebellion of showing up to Halloween parties in covering attire.
ReplyDeleteThe post by the blogger fatsac called “Halloween- A Rite of Rebellion in More Ways Than One” uses Freud’s and Gluckman’s theory to explain the relationship of the holiday Halloween to women in Western society (the author also uses children, but for this response I will be focusing on women). The blogger explains that the essence of rebellion is not only expressed in the stage of being a child demanding sweets from strangers, but it still continues on, specifically for women, by wearing outfits that sexualize them. It also gives a chance, according to the author, for men (I would also insert other women as well) to “shop” for their sexual partner, to see if any of these women fit their idea of what they think being “sexual” is.
ReplyDeleteI believe this idea of women, specifically dressing in a more sexual way on Halloween than on any other holiday (or even on a daily basis) illustrates how the idea of sex and being sexual is not entirely accepted in Western society. Why is it not appropriate for women to dress this way on a regular basis? But the thing is that women do still dress in such ways, maybe not through overt costumes, but through the attire they wear. For instance, when women go to certain events that are held at clubs, the majority of them are wearing the same amount of fabric that women wear during holidays, when they wish to come off as being “sexy”. The cleavage, legs, arms, neck are all shown in the outfits that are worn to clubs. To simply put it, it is not just on Halloween that women get a chance to be rebellious, it is in their daily lives as well that they can express their sexuality, because it is in fact socially and culturally accepted.