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Clothes Make the (Wo)Man
Roy R. Jeal (Booth College)
Garments not only cover and conceal bodies, but also function to display them in particular ways and with many meanings. The ways in which bodies are clothed have far-reaching implications for identity, for movement, for relationships with others, for behaviour, for economic, social and spiritual status, for sexual roles, and for religious, ideological and political discourse. Clothing is part of how people are presented to the world, of how they relate socially, and of how they are empowered morally and politically. Clothing is a feature of the body shapes and actions that are offered for view and that differentiate people from one another. Humans are frequently recognized and defined by the clothes that they wear. Dressing, undressing and redressing have literal, symbolic and rhetorical connotations that define people and social realities. In the Pauline letters a new rhetorical aspect of body is presented with the language and imagery of being clothed with a person, with Christ or a new anthropos (Gal. 3:27; Rom. 13:14; Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). While body and clothing imagery was well known in the ancient Mediterranean world, this picture of putting on a person is new with the New Testament. This essay offers a socio-rhetorical interpretation of the texts that speak of being clothed with a person, and considers the implications for those who become so clothed. The clothing refashions bodies with new religious, social and political identities and roles. Refashioned bodies become agents of social change. The new clothing makes new persons and elicits new social situations.
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