Abstract:
This study investigates how students at George Mason University negotiate and construct
their identities through dress, hairstyles, and other alterations to the body. Whether we
see ourselves as an environmentalist or feminist, Muslim or Christian, female or male,
black or white, we employ clothing and hair styles that both reflect and reify these
affiliations. Style is also deeply imbedded within youth culture and shown to be a
primary mode of distinction in which youth are involved in positioning themselves within
the social, cultural, and political landscape. Through clothing and hairstyle, the students
in this research consume cultural materials in an effort to express and represent individual
identity claims that simultaneously locate them within social categories relating to race,
class, gender, and sexuality. The politics of style emerge as students use marks of
distinction to draw symbolic boundaries in which they align and distance themselves with
moral and ideological belief systems.
