What’s wrong with pink pearls and cornrow braids? Employee dress codes and the semiotic performance of race and gender in the workplace

Abstract

American employers frequently impose dress and grooming restrictions on their employees, and courts routinely uphold their decisions to discipline and even fi reworkers for violating these dress codes. Workplace dress codes thus serve as a focus for contestation over the visual representation and performance of personal identity. The representation and performance of race and gender-two of the core social identities in contemporary American culture-is achieved in part through elaborate semiotic style codes in dress and grooming. The cases discussed in this chapter demonstrate worker resistance to dress codes that force them to perform core identity attributes in ways that contradict their individual sense of identity. By insisting that the performance on the job of identities such as race and gender by their workers is a matter for the employer to determine, courts are asserting the primacy for the workers of their identity as “employees” over their individualized racial and gender identities. Far from being about trivial matters of personal taste or style, con fl ict between employers and employees over dress codes serves both as an arena for worker resistance to employer assertions of control over the construction and performance of their “true selves” and as a prime site for cultural contests over the meaning and instantiation of race and gender identities more generally in the modern world.