"Male hair cannot extend below plane of the shoulder" and "no cross dressing:" Critical queer analysis of high school dress codes in the United States
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The first national meeting of textile and clothing professors took place in Madison, Wisconsin in June 1959. With a mission to advance excellence in education, scholarship and innovation, and their global applications, the International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) is a professional and educational association of scholars, educators, and students in the textile, apparel, and merchandising disciplines in higher education.
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With a queer theory lens, we analyzed if high school dress codes outlined in official handbooks allowed for flexibility in expression of gender and sexual identity. We used the content analysis method and analyzed public high school handbooks from the 2016-2017 school year that contained dress codes. We were interested in analyzing for emergent themes across a variety of geographic locations; therefore, handbooks were sought from five rural, five urban cluster, and five urbanized areas in each state (excluding Hawaii) resulting in analysis of 735 handbooks. In many handbooks (n = 615) the dress codes were not separated by gender. Yet, analysis of the remaining dress codes revealed the theme that there was marginalization of gender non-conforming or transgender identities or expressions. This was evident in that the dress codes were sometimes (n = 120) separated by gender with gender or sex specific terms such as "ladies" or "guys."