Masquerade of the Self: Identity and Capitalism on Halloween

It’s that time of the year. The leaves are crisp on the ground. The air is much cooler. It’s a nice day for a light sweater. And the spookiest celebration of all is coming up quite soon. That’s right, October 31st marks Halloween, a long-cherished holiday of spookiness and awesome (and lame) costumes.

If you live in the United States like your Memesletter writer, you may have memories as a child of going with your grownup to trick or treat, wearing a costume of whatever you asked your mom to cobble together. For me, personally, those were some of my best childhood memories, especially the dress my late mother purchased from a thrift store, cutting the bottom to become Morticia Addams (my earliest role model) at school.

When we think of Halloween, and the practice of wearing a costume (as in Carnivale or other related traditions), we consider assuming another identity. For just a night, we are not ourselves, but someone else. Which leads us to the question: Who are we, really? How do we assume our own identity? How do we define who we are?

Identity: What We Pick Up Along the Way?

When we think of what we use to identify ourselves to others, to share our own story, we might think of our gender presentation, our race, our religious background. Some of these identifiers come with us from birth, such as green eyes, black hair, your skintone. You might take on identity through the culture you were born into. If you were born to parent(s) in the Mexican community, you might identify in that way, even if you were not born in Mexico.

These are perhaps default identities, what you got when you were born. As you grow, however, you assume other identities, incorporating them into your overall identity. You identify yourself as a romance reader, as a sports aficionado, as a socialist, as a feminist, as a burger connoisseur. The possibilities are endless.

But at the end of the day, we gather, through social interaction and reflective thought, our own identities, based on the values we hold as core to our way of living. If I believe in animal rights and peanut butter for all, I am going to incorporate these into my own identity. And you don’t have to give everything a name or label to know this is part of you. You can know that you care about dogs without having to put that in your resume for a new job.

Identity is reflective, in the sense that we reflect on the world around us, and learn, over time, what we care about, and who, by proxy, we are. And yet, we have certain dispositions that will predispose us to certain ways of identifying. As an asexual person, perhaps I identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, for instance.

Subculture: Identity in Rejection of Cultural Norms

Let’s get a little more specific here, in terms of identity. Because identity isn’t just going through some kind of “things I believe in” buffet and choosing from among them. It is often much deeper than that, and very rarely expressed more obviously than in a subculture, like goth.

A subculture is a large group of people who band together to accept a certain way of living that is often very counter to the broader culture in which they live. Some subcultures we know and love include punk, goth, and BDSM. Living counter to the broader culture is not, of course, reserved only for these three.

Subcultures are weird, and not in the ways most people think. Subcultures are often not shared among family, definitely not shared among a broader cultural group, and members do not usually exhibit all of the same traits. Subcultures are often, in part, a protest of the broader culture, an invitation to live outside of its norms. 

Since the end of middle school, around the age of 13, for nearly 30 years, I have officially called myself a goth. Goth is a subculture that stemmed from punk in the 1980s and became its own macabre, mourning veiled movement of a sort. 

Unlike in punk, there are no overtly political tenets to goth, though many would suggest that the broader subculture demands certain political convictions. While most people on the internet for a second these days see goths as people who don black clothing, fishnets and black lipstick, there is a broader history and a broader ideology behind the aesthetic.

Goth, like punk, is a movement founded in music, one whose aesthetic evolved with and away from the music. Goth takes from gothic literature, Victorian mourning culture, and darker art and cinema, combining to create a very outward aesthetic that speaks to the broader world in symbols. For instance, the trappings of jet black hair and a black velvet are meant to convey difference, are meant to convey a certain moroseness, toward oneself, sometimes, but also toward the broader culture.

Goth is an assertion of individuality, and a visual protest against the established. I knew I was goth when I ate up the melancholic music, of course, but also when I made the explicit decision to visually set myself apart from others through my clothing. I was bullied horribly for this choice, but I obviously thought it was worth it, as I remain goth at 41.

How does this tie into identity? Identity can often bring together seemingly disparate elements of your personality or belief system and tie them together nicely. To identify as goth, for me, is to be a walking contradiction to the establishment, a visual assertion that you do not belong in the same category as the Karens, the Republicans, or the fascists.

For me, personally, to be goth has been to assert myself in saying no. As a teenager, I began to sit down during the daily saying of the Pledge of Allegiance. As the 9/11 wars rolled in, it made me sick to consider that we had to be indoctrinated to nationalism each morning at school. A teacher bullied me for this choice, but I was a good student. 

Later, when I returned to the outward aesthetic in Macon, it became a sort of test. I gained a fair few friends and many compliments because of the way I chose to look. On the other hand, I received looks down the nose, and the sight of an old woman walking into oncoming traffic to avoid me on the sidewalk. After a while, you know who good people are by how they treat goths.

The look became a sign of the mindset. Don’t blindly follow, and do think critically. Perhaps this is the mindset that got me into philosophy.

Today, the goth subculture has yet again reached the mainstream, with the Wednesday series bringing back the popularity of the goth girl, as well as some memeified internet personalities. For those of us in the subculture, we will always say that our identity lies not in the aesthetic, but in the music and the subcultural mindset.

Which brings us back to where we started.

Vanity (1889) by August Toulmouche, courtesy of Wiki Commons

Assuming the Costume: Identity and the ‘Spirit’ of Halloween

What happens when you assume an identity counter to your own? And can you simply package and wear someone else’s identity?

Costumes are items we wear to indicate we are something other than ourselves. When you get out the fake blood and sport the vampire teeth, you show (sometimes better, sometimes worse, depending on your skill) that you are pretending to be a vampire. Draw little whiskers and a pink nose on your face and you’re suddenly portraying a cat. Halloween and other such opportunities for socially sanctioned disguise offer this opportunity: to assume another identity.

And when it comes to assuming identities, there are some really fun costumes out there, from serious to sexy to silly. Characters from books and movies, creepy monsters and other supernatural beings, your favorite popstar–the list goes on and on. Each Halloween it’s often a fun game to see how well you can portray the character whose identity you are assuming. 

The costume industry certainly makes bank from selling prepackaged identities, so that you have to do very little of the work yourself. Bagged costumes came en vogue in the late 1990s, offering an at first expensive alternative to the DIY methods parents and children previously used to make their costumes. You have only to see the success (and memes) of Spirit Halloween and the lingerie clothier Yandy to see how well this shift worked.

Part of these prepackaged costumes, every year, is the various socio-cultural identities that some of the costumes become. Step into a Spirit and you will see religious habits, religious habits done up in a sexy way, and religious habits done up in a creepy way. Anti-Catholicism for the masses has long been a costume and a sort of joke, but an excursion this year showed that “redneck” is a costume, questionable medical personnel is a costume, and goth is a costume.

The joy of sporting a costume lies in being someone you are not. However, there are limits to this. Assuming another culture that is not your own would be called culture appropriation, and in bad taste at best, but likely offensive to at least one of your friends. Sexualizing nuns also breaks propriety, though you may think yourself edgy for having done so. In some respects, taking an identity in this way, for lighthearted entertainment, often plays on stupid stereotypes and insults the person bearing that identity.

But the neatly plasticly packaged retailers have no qualms about offering costumes that border on the offensive, that reduce people to three to five costume parts and accessories. In doing so, for instance, they commodify goth. It’s hot to be a goth girlfriend right now. Why not take on the trappings (albeit cheaply) and become one for one night. 

You commodify and take on an identity that represents a subculture you know nothing about, tearing at the reputation and stereotypes of that subculture as you stand there, drink in hand.

Is this to say that we should never dress in costumes? That we should never get into wearing that T-rex inflatable? Not by any means. But before we decide to purchase a goth-in-a-box or similar, it might be a good idea to think about not who this would offend, but who adopts this identity on the daily, and who it could hurt. And instead of slutty goth, you might consider a unique costume, screwing the mechanisms of capitalism and starting your DIY journey. DIY is pretty goth, by the way.