Boots, Indecency, and Secular Sacred Spaces: Implicit Religious Motives Underlying an Aspect of Airline Dress Codes
In this paper I shall draw on the distinction between "decent" and "indecent", a pair ofconcepts highlighted in religious studies by Althaus-Reid (2000), and also on the role of ritual in delimiting the sacred in a secular context (Smith 1987, Knott 2005, 2007, Knott and Franks 2...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Equinox
[2011]
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| In: |
Implicit religion
Year: 2011, Volume: 14, Issue: 2, Pages: 173-192 |
| Further subjects: | B
DRESS codes in the workplace
B Ethics B FLIGHT attendants B air stewards B indecent B BOOTS B AIR travelers B Implicit Religion B DRESS codes B Secularism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | In this paper I shall draw on the distinction between "decent" and "indecent", a pair ofconcepts highlighted in religious studies by Althaus-Reid (2000), and also on the role of ritual in delimiting the sacred in a secular context (Smith 1987, Knott 2005, 2007, Knott and Franks 2007), in order to show how the former can be seen to underlie a small part of the (female) flight attendant dress codes of commercial passenger airlines. It will be my argument that a widely adopted move away from allowingflight attendants to wear knee-high boots, especially inside the aircraft, stemsfrom a growing cultural evaluation ofthese boots as "in- decent, "and a simultaneous conceptualization ofthe aircraft's interior as a secular sacred space. Using this case study, I hope to illustrate that at least one aspect of the contemporary culture ofair travel can be usefully explored in terms of implicit religion (Bailey 1998), and a spatial approach to the sacred. I shall also suggest that the airline example has clear parallels in some other secular contexts. In section 1, I shall outline the relevant aspects ofthe theory of implicit religion and show how they relate to the notions of "decency" and "indecency. "Ishall then, in section 2, sketch out a brief history of knee-high boots within airline dress codes, before moving on to argue, in section 3, that they have become progressively entangled in a largely unconscious associative relationshij with "indecency. " In section 4, I shall draw attention to the requirement of many airlines that their flight attendants should remove their knee-high boots once they have boarded the aircraft, and I shall argue that this, in conjunction with other boundary markers and rituals, underlines the implicit sacrality ofthe aircraft cabin. Finally, in sec- tion 5, I shall anticipate and respond to some possible objections to this analysis. |
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| ISSN: | 1743-1697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Implicit religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1558/imre.v14i2.173 |