Middle school project on Gender and clothing

1. Communication: Gender and
Clothes
By: Rachel, Hanna, Julien and Cameron

2. Topic Definition
● Clothing is a mode of paralinguistic communication much like gesture, tone, or
proximity
○ Different clothing and body decorations and modifications send different
signals depending on culture
● Gender determines how paralanguage is used- different genders communicate in
different ways
○ Paralanguage is used to indicate a person’s gender as well as being
determined by their gender, along with other factors (culture, age, status,
etc.)

3. Examples
Women and men can be identified by the type of clothing they wear (dresses/skirts or
pants) except in certain cultures such as Greek culture where men wearing skirts is
considered the “norm”.

4. The Limits of North American Norms
In North America, we have fairly strict standards for appropriate or typical dress,
especially in certain settings and depending on a person’s age and gender. We nearly
always expect people, regardless of their own culture, to conform to these standards,
and use different modes of dress to mark out social others. Relaxing our expectations,
or at least removing the demand for conformity, would foster unity between people,
especially in diverse communities.
Our paralinguistic norms about gender can also be repressive- men tend to use less
touch and limit their facial expressions, and women are expected to speak less or more
quietly and take up less physical space. We could achieve better communication,
especially between genders, if we did not have these kinds of limits on our expression.

5. Questions
● Is gender determined or expressed by paralanguage, or to what degree is it either?
● How might the world be different if paralanguage (signals and gestures) were the
/same/?