Artifact 3: Personal Adornment
OBJECTIVES:
- Evaluate personal values and paradigms around body decoration and physical beauty.
- Investigate how physical appearance affects definitions of identity and belonging.
- Analyze values and belief systems of physical appearance across cultures, sub-cultures, and generations.
ARTIFACT:
People Herds: how style categorizes us; People watching Discussion – view the original post here.
REFLECTION:
I eventually decided that most of the people in the venue in which I decided to people-watch were “boring.” I think the cynicism I experienced about a lack of “individual” or “original” characters had a lot to do with the values we tend to place on attractiveness. Sanders said that “attractiveness greatly affects social experience,” (Sanders, 2), which leads to the need or drive for deviation if one does not fit acceptable norms for attractiveness. This issue is complex, but I feel that my own reactions to the people I wrote about revealed a lot about not only my personal values and paradigms surrounding physical beauty, but also that physical appearance clearly affects my definitions of identity and belong, which were two primary learning objectives for this unit. As someone who is not incredibly comfortable in my own skin, it is not necessarily surprising that I found some level of resentment towards socially “normal” looking individuals. It is also not surprising that I myself place an incredible amount of energy into personal appearance and adornment.
I have observed my own personal adornment choices and considered whether I made particular choices because they were consistent with societal norms of attractiveness, or if I made these choices for the exact opposite reason.
FOR THE FUTURE:
I think it would be valuable to spend some time researching this topic while somehow separating the issue of self-confidence. Is it possible that self-adornment has any place as a medium of art without the influence identity has on it? Perhaps the two truly cannot exist without the other, but I would like to delve deeper into this paradigm to find out. A good place to start might be to recreate this assignment with a bit more of an open mind. I believe I make far too many assumptions about people; if anything, it will be my goal to at least figure out where such assumptions are coming from.
Bibliography
Sanders, C. R. (1989). Introduction: Body Alteration, Artistic Production, and the Social World of Tattooing. In Customizing the Body (pp. 1-35). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
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