This way of thinking about identity is contextual and relational. Identity is not felt as the same in all situations, but shifts and adapts within a given social setting. For girls, identities might change in different contexts: school, home, mall, work, friends' houses, and elsewhere-as well as in relation to different people: teachers, parents, peers, boys, siblings, best friends. Not only are girls constructed differently in each of these contexts, but they engage in different performances of girlhood. They are positioned by others (“this is my little girl,” “act your age”) and they seek to reposition themselves (“I am not a little girl any more”). Girlsbecome attached to particular storylines of the self, but when the context changes, other storylines become prominent and identity shifts yet again.
Style operates as a tool for playing with identity precisely because it enables girls to shape how they have been positioned by others. Their embodied self, or embodied subjectivity, as scholars call it, suggests that the mind and body are not split, but rather operate in tandem as a single unit. The mind (on the inside) and the body (on the outside) work in the formation of conscious expression. Yet the body is never naked in society; it is always dressed. As such, style is an elaboration of the body, adding dimensions and details that would otherwise not exist. As an unavoidable feature of social existence, style operates as a vital locus of embodied subjectivity enabling girls to shape how they have been positioned by gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and other constituting forces.
Style operates as a type of social skin. As social skin, style is more than an extension of the body-it is the body in public space. Style grants not just visibility but meaning to the body, revealing and releasing it, cloaking and confining it, shaping it and giving it definitions, borders, and folds. Style fashions the body into a social text that can be “read.” When girls dress for a given situation or social event, such as a trip to the mall or getting ready for the prom, they do so knowingly and with forethought about how they wish to represent themselves. Girls' style announces to others how they want to be seen, treated, and experienced as embodied subjects. Girls' social visibility is wrapped up in style; their identities are contingent upon it.
Nowhere is the connection between style and identity more apparent for girls than in the school. As the place where girls spend the majority of their time, the school functions as a central social world where belonging and the cultivation of an image are often seen as crucial features of survival. The school is also a key site for the construction of girlhood through discourses that describe, define, and restrain how girls “should” act and look. The school is therefore the stage upon which a particular performance of identity is rendered, one that relates specifically to how a girl wishes to be seen. Sometimes this is called a “symbolic economy of style.” A symbolic economy of style refers to the linking of specific items of clothing to specific lifestyle affiliations. For example, girls who wear a particular brand of jeans may be seen as popular, girls who wear particular sneakers may be seen as skaters, girls who wear dog collars may be seen as punks, girls who wear baggy track suits may be seen as hip hoppers, girls who wear bandanas of a certain color may be seen as gang bangers, and girls who wear particular brands may be seen as belonging to various racial and ethnic groups. As Julie Bettie (2003, p. 62) writes in her high school ethnography of girls' raced and classed identities, “Hairstyles, clothes, shoes, and the colors of lipstick, lip liner, and nail polish, in particular, were key markers in the symbolic economy that were employed to express group membership as the body became a resource and a site on which difference was inscribed.”
Group membership is based on an understanding of the symbolic economy of style that operates within each school context-a context that shifts from city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood, and even from school to school. What is cool in one school is not what is cool in another, causing the same item of clothing to operate quite differently in different contexts. While a girl cannot become “anything” or “anyone” just by changing her clothes, style serves as a visible code that enables girls to understand each other as the same. This process of identification is a central one for group formation and membership. If identity is the public performance of “who” a girl is in a given context, then identification is the private struggle for belonging that makes that performance possible. Identification is often based on desire, longing, acceptance, and feeling connected to others.
If a girl identifies with a particular social group, it means she recognizes herself in them and sees herself as one of them. Conversely, a girl experiences “dis-identification” when she feels no affinity for a social group and does not recognize herself as one of them. Style is one of the key ways in which identifications and dis-identifications occur in the school. Girls forge social groups based on the recognitions that take place through style. Style thus plays a key role in the struggle for inclusion and exclusion in the school. As social skin, style acts as a bridge between public performance and private thought, between action and emotion, between the body and the mind, between the self and the social. Because of these powerful convergences, style can be viewed as a porous covering enabling girls to transfer something of themselves into the social world, as well as enabling the social world to transfer something of itself to girls. Style is thus an entrance into and an exit out of girls' “in flux” identities, affecting how they understand themselves in relation to the social world and to each other.
