“The American Look”

Abstract

This chapter introduces the term 'body dressing work' to examine my experience negotiating the social norms and expectations of clothing a suburban American female body with the anxiety of living in a "deviant body" (Grimstad Klepp and Rysst 2016: 79) due to a spinal deformity. At the age of ten I was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, and by eleven was prescribed a corrective orthotic that I wore twenty-three hours a day