A Dressing-Down for Not Dressing Up

Top 10 Hallowe’en Costumes I Have Worn (in no particular order):

1. Witch
2. Devil
3. Ninja
4. Ghostbuster
5. Flapper
6. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
7. A two-headed, four-armed monster
8. 1950s bobby-soxer in a poodle skirt
9. Hot dog liberator
10. Cowboy

Next to my birthday, Hallowe’en is my favourite holiday (okay, I know, my birthday isn’t a holiday, but the way I treat it, it really should be). I like the origins of Hallowe’en (check out http://www.albany.edu/~dp1252/isp523/halloween.html or http://www.halloweenishere.com/history.html for thoughtful, if short, discussions of the beginnings of Hallowe’en), its trappings (I can carve a pumpkin like nobody’s business), and its foods (specifically, candy). But most of all, I love dressing up, and costumes, and masks, and disguises.

Selecting a Hallowe’en costume was always a very deliberate process: you had to not look like a goofball in your costume, that was the most important thing. Then you had to wear something that could adapt to the unpredictable weather found in Southwestern Ontario in late October. Then you had to check with your friends to make sure your costume was unique (there’s nothing worse than showing up to trick-or-treat in the same sheet, for example). But the choice of costume always resonated deeply with me, because I believe that a costume should indicate some hidden feature of your personality, some half-concealed identity that you permitted the world to see on that night and that night alone.

Now, I’m sure you, and Mark Bracher, would have a fantastic time psychoanalyzing exactly in what ways I see myself as a Ghostbuster, for instance, or a revolutionary leader for the hot dogs of the world, but I stand by my claim. Imagine, then, how delighted I was to read this in Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation:

The strongest identities are those whose structures are complex enough to incorporate all significant components of the self in a manner that minimizes conflict among them, providing a time and place, a context, and a mode in which each component can be enacted in a way that produces minimal threats to other components. (2006, p. 59)

A strong identity, then, for Bracher, is one that works in conjunction with those contradictory parts of itself so that many/all elements can be expressed without undermining the overall identity.

This accurately describes my attempts to wear a costume and still see. My eyesight is catastrophically bad, so from the age of 9 I had glasses with lenses so thick that Coca-Cola bottles envied them. Now, picture trying to pull off a fantastic, historically accurate ninja costume while wearing 1980s glasses that looked something like this…

Yet, undubitably, my identity as a nerd who cared about school and reading was at least as valid as my perspective of myself as sly and disciplined and coordinated (!!), just like a ninja.

Similarly, the Hallowe’en costumes I chose were also a useful means of distinguishing myself from my peers, who were all pursuing their own identity elements in selecting their costumes. I can honestly say, for instance, that I know of no other 7-year-old who has ever asked – asked – to dress up as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I certainly felt an unspoken affinity to the role of the outcast, whereas I think my best friend that year dressed up as a princess.

Bracher references Greenspan in characterizing this understanding:

Greenspan describes this development in terms of an increasingly large context within which one’s identity is located. First the child differentiates a dyadic sense of me and you, where the child recognizes an other that is separate from but nonetheless linked with herself, such that her actions affect the other and the other’s actions affect her (Greenspan in Bracher, 2006, p. 61).  

Bracher situates this relationship as a reciprocal affective relationship, but the link between an other and oneself seems to have a greater effect on identity. Whereas Greenspan (via Bracher) sees this identity-shaping as occurring contextually (say, in the messy wig and pillow-enhanced hump of a Hunchback of Notre Dame costume), Tomasello, in his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, finds instead a definition of learning that distinguishes humans from primates:

At nine months of age human infants begin engaging in a number of so-called joint attentional behaviours that seem to indicate an emerging understanding of other persons as intentional agents like the self whose relations to outside entities may be followed into, directed or shared. (1999, p. 61)

But the distinction between one and the other is paramount, whether identity is being shaped or learning is taking place. These two concepts, identity and learning, were for me merged in the attitude of my mother, who not only proposed the two-headed, four-armed monster costume, but bent umpteen wire hangers and bought me suspenders to hold up the whole contraption. She was fully supportive of my flair for the dramatic, making scary noises tapes to play at our front door long before the idea became a holiday industry, and never vetoed any preposterous costume idea. What I now understand is that both my identity (as a strange kid with weird Hallowe’en costumes) and my learning (to encourage and foster the dreams and passions of others) was wrapped up in my mother’s faithful dedication to creating or helping me create memorable Hallowe’en costumes. I am familiar with many ways in which I owe large parts of my various identities to my mother, but I confess, Bracher has led me to find this one anew.

And, since you asked, yes, I do have a costume in mind for Hallowe’en this year: I am dressing up as a Muppet. Which one? Well, that’s for my identity to know, and me to find out…

 

References:

Anonymous. 2012. Silhouette vintage large style designer spectacles. [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.theoldglassesshop.co.uk/categories/Choose-by-COLOUR/Red/.

Bracher, M. (2006). Radical pedagogy: Identity, generativity, and social transformation. New York: Palgrave.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.