One of the courses I enjoy teaching is multicultural and social justice issues in therapy. It’s a powerful course that has many challenges; mainly, how to get students to understand the realities of inequality in our society and its impact on target populations while managing a variety of emotional reactions and resistance. As a result, I’m always trying to come up with innovated ways of engaging students. For example, last year, I came up with a brilliant idea on how to increase students’ awareness of the adverse effects that preconceived stereotypes have on certain targeted groups. 

I asked students to list characteristics that they knew about me (through observations, what I have said about myself or what they have heard about me), write them on the board, and compare them to an already established list of gay male stereotypes. I thought for sure there would be listed aspects that challenged these stereotypes, but I was wrong. Amongst the characteristics students registered were; good dancer (I’m known to dance in class), love of dance music and visual arts (expressed in class before), and stylish (well, this is just obvious). I had to think quick on how to make this unexpected turn of events into a teaching moment. It wasn’t easy, but I managed.

Anyways, as I was packing up after class and getting ready to clear the whiteboard, I stood back and looked at the list one more time. I began to question whether some of these characteristics were related to my identity as a gay male or to other identities I held. Was my ability to move with rhythm connected to my involvement in the gay community, or was it due to growing up in a Hispanic household where salsa dancing was a favorite past time? One particular listed “stereotype” stood out the most was being “stylish.” 

There are many reasons for clothing: To protect us from the elements, to display modesty, to express our individualization, and to affiliate ourselves with specific social groups. Our choice of dress is also used to express our social position, power and prestige, and moral standards. Clothing can also suggest the economic status or occupational role has in society. Consider our use of the term blue-collar and white-collar to indicate professional status. The use of blue-collar to mean working class originated in the early 1900s to describe manual laborers who used durable denim or chambray shirts for work. Eventually, white-collar to describe an office worker or administrative person who wore dress shirts for their work. We can look at our evolutionary history of life and know that all societies have used clothing to establish a social hierarchy. For example, Chinese emperors used specific color robes to show their status and special connection to the earth. Pharaohs in ancient Egypt wore different colors and shapes of headdresses to express their various roles in power. In certain Polynesian cultures, only high-ranking chiefs of both sexes could wear a lei niho palaoa, a neck ornament consisting of twisted hair and usually adorned by whale ivory. In fact, ancient societies around the world have used sumptuary laws to control consumption. These laws were regulated trade and controlled who had access to expensive goods. These laws also made it easy to identify social rank for discrimination purposes.

With this contextual understanding, I started to think more about my association with clothing and kept thinking about the messages I received from my mother about the importance of appearance. Like many Hispanic families, we experienced economic and social challenges because of a long history of institutionalized oppression, which can be traced to the colonialization of South America and the Caribbean from European settlers. It was important to my mother that we presented ourselves in public in a way that would not draw unwanted attention. She wanted to disguise any evidence of our working-class status. She knew that our cultural identity as Puertoricans before the Cuban migration to Miami in the early 1980s was different from the dominant culture at that time, and that being different opened us to criticism and “othering.” It was unacceptable for us, her children, to have soiled clothing or tousled hair, despite other White children in our neighborhood running around in this state. For my mother, we had to appear impeccable to minimize the perception that Puertorican children were squalid, a stereotypical judgment she was used to hearing. Although we could not afford fine clothing, my mother was a “seamstress” (a gender-biased term that was the norm at the time) and would bring home scraps of materials from her factory job and sew new clothes for us. I remember her working long hours and for days with her sisters to sew my confirmation suit, which included white pants, a vest, and a slightly oversized jacket. It wasn’t perfect, but she felt confident that no one would notice that it was homemade. 

Throughout my life and to the time of her death, she would notice and comment on my style. She approved much of what I wore and even kept me up to date on the latest fashions. She would point out well-known Puertorican celebrities as a model of how I should dress. I laughed at this and would often brush off her sartorialist advice with an “I know, I know” with a frustrated eye roll. Nevertheless, here I was, facing a whiteboard of “gay” stereotypes and analyzing the word stylish in the context of my Hispanic upbringing. I can imagine my mother sitting in this class and disagreeing with the students’ assessment with pride.