This essay will use some of the hats and veils worn (in representation) by medieval men and women to challenge the modernist notion that socially mandated dress codes infringe upon something called “freedom of expression” in modern times. In a famous article, “There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing Too,” first published in 1992, Stanley Fish argued that if speech could be free it would be meaningless, because all normal verbal interactions have an impact that “costs” in some way. In a nutshell: “Free speech is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance.” I am suggesting that “dress” or “costuming” could be substituted for “speech,” in the following citation: “The good news is that precisely because speech is never “free” in the two senses required – free of consequences and free from state pressure – speech always matters, is always doing work.” No matter how “free” an individual member of civil society believes their costuming to be, it has legal limits; it also has an impact on viewers, whether at cost or gain to the wearer. What people wear matters because it has consequences. Dress codes are signs that communicate group identity, and as such they are a part of identity politics. Even when an individual submits “willingly” to wearing a uniform as a condition of a wanted position, any such people – whether waiters, nannies, nuns, hospital workers, hard-hat construction workers, police officers, or military personnel – are donning a badge that connotes they do not own the means of production; the particulars of their uniform were decided for them, and wearing it is made a condition of employment. On the far end of the spectrum are the people who have been involuntarily coerced into wearing an identifying sign, such as a prison uniform. This paper is about the contested areas in which what appears from the outside to be coercion may be within the norms of social negotiation and even individual choice.

A decade after Fish wrote this piece, “freedom” was trumpeted by the Bush administration in the US as a justification for the American Oil Wars that are still being fought in Iraq (Wars I and III) and Afghanistan (Wars II and IV).