Dressing up

I recently attended a concert by Natalie Merchant, an alternative rock singer from my college years, who, with her stunning voice. has experimented with different music platforms over the years. This time, she performed with the Seattle Symphony so her songs had a different sound and beat than her recordings and other performances do.  Perhaps to go along with that more stripped down style, Merchant was dressed simply and elegantly, swirling around in a black form-fitting dress with a lovely wide skirt, accompanied with heeled Mary Janes.  She seemed comfortable and confident in her mid-life body and I was also impressed by her long, now fully gray, smooth, loose hair.  It was as much a part of her act as her exceptional voice.  She looked real, she looked like an adult, she was beautiful.

Celebrities know more than most that outward appearances matter, as it is these that we use to present ourselves to others and manage impressions.  Some of us are more calculating about our appearances, striving to make a statement, or to express ourselves (this is how I interpreted Merchant's style), but for most of us, (those of us with the means to choose what to wear), we are just trying to not stand out too much.  To do this, we first have to know what is normative.  In the Pacific NW, for example, dressing for the symphony or dressing for church, well, these are fairly indistinguishable from dressing for the every day, and all involve a fair amount of earth tones, denims and khakis, flat shoes.  There are no real uniforms for different events, and comfort is the operative word.  The symphony crowd at the Merchant concert was dressed in this typical (in my mind uninspiring and somewhat sloppy) manner. Despite my opinion, this is simply the dressing norm where I now live, the Seattle aesthetic so to speak.  In contrast,  the French style has been described as real, adult, respectful (see two descriptions:  http://www.vogue.com/1648381/lauren-santo-domingo-parisian-style-french-women-make-coffee/ and http://www.parisescapes.com/paris_wear.html )  All this means is that the French have stronger expectations for what is appropriate dress for different settings and they do not consider sweats and running shoes as regular streetwear (see my earlier discussion of this: Les tenues, April 2013).  The French are no more real or adult than Americans, but their social conception of how an adult dresses is simply different.

In the U.S. we might call the French style 'dressing up'.  I hear that often when I have a skirt on in the driving rain, or have worn something other than sneakers to an athletic event.  I don't think of these as dressing up but as normal, or authentic for me.  I prefer styles that imply effort, thought, care, creativity, purpose (is this 'conscious dressing'?).  I also like the new attention placed on the dressing choices of older adults.  Before, it seemed that creative dressing was reserved for the young.  But, creativity and effort and style are ageless: here's a street-style blog I recently discovered that explores the style choices of older people: http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ (see below).   Dressing up?  Dressing one's age?  How about a style where one dresses authentically for the real, adult person that one is?
Ps. There is no reason that such authenticity must be maintained when it comes to naturally graying hair. That's the adult prerogative!

The Sociological Observer by Anne Katriina Tuominen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Longhand reading

Since my family's return to Seattle five months ago, we've noticed all kinds of differences and similarities between our brief French life and our American one.  (See The big (and) easy, 11 Dec. 2013, for some of those initial discoveries.)  More recently, I've noticed how tethered I've become to my smart devices, and how that has affected my concentration and memory.  Because I'm now in the same time zone as my students and colleagues, their emails bombard my various inboxes in real time all day long.  I am jumpier and reactive and spend little time reflecting.  By the next day, if I haven't taken notes about what I did or with whom, I forget some of the more mundane interactions and transactions of the previous days.  Similar effects are now being documented by the scientific community, such as the one about note taking.  UCLA psychologists have found that students who take notes longhand have much better retention and more sophisticated understanding of what they are learning than those that take notes onto their laptops or tablets. The latter mode tends to discourage students from engaging actively with the ideas but promotes instead the tendency to just transcribe word-for-word what is being presented.  (See Barbash, Fred. April 28, 2014. "Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes" Morning Mix. The Washington Post.)

For me, the more laborious, tactile, longhand approach also applies to reading.  In France, I read a lot of books, magazines, newspapers, usually in print, in French, English, Finnish.  Aix-en-Provence is a bookish town, and we were surrounded by bookstores, even a well-stocked English-language one. We bought books in London, in Helsinki, and occasionally, supplemented with orders to Amazon.uk.   A few times during our French sojourn, I used my ipad and the Barnes and Noble nook store to order and read some books for an Anglophone book group I had joined and during our final months in France when I did not want to add any more books to the numbers of boxes we were shipping back.  It is those books that I read electronically that I can scarcely remember.  For example, this past fall I read two such books on the ipad that I remember finding riveting and sociologically relevant but that I did not remember to add to my blog's book list.  I recently found the books again while idly tapping on my device and now I have had to skim them in order to refresh my memory. I believe my forgetfulness is partly due to the lack of my physical engagement with either book.  I saw the covers perhaps once, when I opened the books electronically initially, but the physical books were never lying around on my bedside table or on a chair so I do not have a very strong visual memory of them.  And with e-books, flipping pages and re-reading a passage or section, or skimming is awkward so I don't engage much in these ways.  It's no wonder Appassionata by Hoffman and Ousby's Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-44 both slipped out of my mind entirely: I simply had not had a 'longhand' reading experience with them.  Touching the physical book DOES matter to me, sometimes, however quaint this sounds.  (Mireille Silcoff writes about this quaintness amid the death and fetishization of books in this past weekend's New York Times Magazine. The online article is titled and dated: "On Their Death Bed, Physical Books Have Finally Become Sexy." Riff column, Apr. 25, 2014.  The picture on this post shows my color-coordinated but unsexy bookshelf of some of my English language reading over the past few years, and a small piece of the Berlin Wall that I brought home in 1990.)  I certainly read work documents, student work, and journal articles online regularly, but it seems that depending upon what I'm reading, the tangible physical experience may matter.  An academic journal article doesn't come with a great deal of visual 'personality' so reading it online doesn't change my experience much, but reading a book, a popular magazine, and even a newspaper is a much more colorful and lively experience when it's in my hand and I can feel the pages.  If that makes me fusty, then I embrace that characteristic.  Now my challenge is to keep finding those physical books and print media: one unfortunate discovery since my return to Seattle is that the local shopping center no longer has a single bookstore!

Adieu mademoiselle

In sociology we speak a great deal about the symbolism tied to our social roles and to our interactions with others.  How we name things and refer to them is also symbolic, as language signifies all kinds of social meanings, for the people, objects, or actions to which we are referring.  The names we give our social roles--mother, father, daughter--have symbolic meanings tied up with them as do the names we give ourselves.  I can use myself easily here as I have not only firmly held on to my name upon marriage, but I have also maintained its Finnish pronunciation for much of my life.  Both the name and the pronunciation are symbols for me, of both my ethnolinguistic identity and my feminist orientation, that I affirm to myself and project to others.  I've already talked about my surprise and frustration with the challenges in using my legal nom (last name) here (see Une féministe, October 9, 2011).  By now, it's on the bank account and checkbook, and on one utility bill (thanks to a clever French friend who suggested I open one utility in my name and the other in my spouse's).  I am still the good wife with her spouse's last name on the rental agreement, and the spouse receives all school correspondence, even though I am the parent who signs every single absence or late attendance/early arrival slip and who attends the school meetings and conferences and corresponds with the school staff.  His name is also on my cell phone bill (because I did not have a utility in my name at the time we set it up).  As for my first name  I have generally always introduced myself by pronouncing my first name as it is pronounced in Finnish (on'-neh), but strangely enough, in France, this works about as well as it does in the U.S.  The French consistently refer to me as 'Ann' because that's also how they pronounce a name spelled as mine.

Despite these little challenges, in one significant way, the French have made a big change just this week in how it names its people.  The use of Mademoiselle (Miss) on any government documents will no longer be permitted; French women will no longer have to signify their marital status by selecting Madame or Mademoiselle on government forms.  Instead, all are Madame, like men are all Monsieur.  This is akin to the U.S. convention, of using Ms. as the honorific for all women.  All of the teachers in our boys' elementary school were called Ms. unless they expressly indicated a preference for Mrs.  To be fair, in France despite what we learned in our French 101 classes back home, Mlle (the abbreviation for Miss) has not been widely or practically used in some time.  In the fall, I made the mistake of addressing an unmarried school official as Mlle So-and-So in an email (because I heard someone referring to her as such), but she swiftly and professionally corrected me, and I've come to notice that any women from their 20's on are generally called Madame.  As the New York Times calls Madame the 'senior' honorific, it is a little jarring to me to hear a young college student being called Madame, but that is the moniker here and apparently also in Quebec for unmarried and married women alike. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/europe/france-drops-mademoiselle-from-official-use.html 

The French government though apparently will not be rushing to make new forms.  The New York Times article linked here notes that in not wanting to waste the old forms, the government will create new ones after the old ones run out.  On the one hand, that makes sense during this challenging economic time in Europe where the French government along with its neighbors is trying to save the Euro currency by limiting public sector spending, but there is something symbolic, from the perspective of gender equality, in making the change immediately apparent.  I will have a good opportunity in the next few months to see if the government recognizes this symbolic opportunity, as the spouse and I will need to see about getting our permis de conduire (driver's licenses).  (We have just one year in which we can use our American ones here.)  One rendition of the current application asks one to indicate one's status as M., Mme or Mlle, which will obviously change with the new forms.  The current form then asks for one's last name at birth, one's first name and nom d'époux (s'il ya lieu) (married name or literally, husband's name, if applicable).  Apparently, this literal reference to one's spouse will also be removed, from this line, and one will simply be asked to indicate the last name being used now.  From my perspective, this latter change may be the more significant one!