[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_20

Disobedient Bodies, Emma Dabiri, 2023

“For the most part, my presentation is extremely feminine. I’ve often contemplated what that means from a feminist perspective. When I first started

teaching at university, I looked much younger than I was. To be taken more seriously, I stopped wearing make-up and dressed in a way that was intentionally more “frumpy.” But I thought that was what I needed to do to “look the part.” This could be seen as an evolution of the teen “pretty-clever” binary, whereby a woman can’t be seen as taking an interest in beauty, should she wish to be taken seriously. It didn’t last long - it wasn’t me, and in the end, I thought, why should I present myself in a way that conforms to narrow perspectives of what a female academic should look like?”. I smiled when I read these introductory lines, thinking about my first year of university and the house I shared with other students. I was 19 years old, and I had always dressed in second-hand clothes without ever paying attention to the outfit. On the other hand, my roommates lived for fashion; it represented a way of expressing themselves and communicating. Until that moment, I had considered fashion something superficial; I thought that anyone who paid so much attention to appearance was a vain person; a bit like Emma Dabiri says: I remained "frumpy" so as not to be seen as vain.

“Look, sometimes the form is substance,” my roommate once told me, responding to one of my many unpleasant arguments in defense of being and not appearing, “and if you dress badly so as not to appear vain, you're giving importance to appearance. With the difference that you add ugliness to this world." His slogan was, “Life is too short to surround yourself with bad things.” And people who dressed badly were, for him, bad things: “You are young, you must be beautiful! To be beautiful is not superficial; it’s a thank you for life!”. His response left me disarmed: I realized how judgmental I was towards others and how much I felt beyond judgment.

I wondered what outfit would suit me and how to express my personality through clothing and realized I didn't know. So, I took my roommate's Dostoevskian reading of beauty with me and decided that as a first step, I would try to be beautiful. “Do you know what you look like?” he said one evening, commenting on my clothing while we were going to a party, "you look like someone who covered herself in vinyl glue and then rolled into a wardrobe." Everyone burst out laughing. I laughed, too, but the joke hurt me.

A part of me had realized that not understanding what I liked to wear was also linked to not knowing who I wanted to be. I started looking for my beauty, believing that if I convinced others that I was beautiful, then I would end up believing it, too. But to be beautiful, I wore too tight or short clothes. I felt my body was not valued but exposed, forced into clothes not designed for comfort. It's challenging to feel good when the size is too small, the skirt is too short, the shoe is uncomfortable, and the fabrics are too light. It's hard to feel beautiful when you feel like your body is too much for your clothes and your clothes are not designed for your body but for the gaze of others. “It's all in how you move,” I was told, “You walk like a stick; try to be sensual.” So I tried to be sensual, swaying as I had seen some friends do, but "you're not sensual," I was told again, "You move like someone with an itchy ass." So when I dressed to look beautiful, I tried to move as little as possible; I sat most of the time, only moving when I was sure no one was looking. I would freeze if we were outside, hold my stomach, or my dress would come undone, and watch my steps so as not to fall off my heels. Trying to be beautiful was hellish: I spent a lot of time getting ready, I suffered like a caged animal, and, above all, I didn’t have fun.

Clothes began to resemble costumes, and the dress resembled dressing up. It didn't last long, just enough time to catch a cold on yet another outing in a miniskirt during January, asking, “Why should I present myself in a way that conforms to narrow perspectives of what a young girl should look like?” and then I went back to second-hand oversized sweaters in which I could hide my whole body and not have an impostor syndrome.