Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

soldiers in Confederate gray, and maybe there were two or three hundredhippies in officer’s coats of union dark-blue. (91-92)Dressed in inexpensive army surplus clothing, Sergeant Pepper coats, and homemadeNative American costume, the hippies ironically costumed themselves as warriors forpeace.The Yippie costume of Native beads, army surplus, and long hair was more thanjust an inexpensive alternative to mainstream fashion or a symbolic celebration ofalternative cultures. Worn habitually, day in and day out, the Yippie costume performed acounterculture identity for a wide audience of both other activists and the Establishmentas a whole. Performance theorists like Goffman and Judith Butler have argued thatidentity is a performance, built upon repetitions of behaviors for a social audience. Inworks such as her seminal Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity(1990), Butler argues that gender identity is not natural, but a temporal social illusionconstituted through a “stylized repetition of acts” such as gestures and physicalmovements [emphasis original] (“Performative” 270-271). The feminist Butler’s focus ison the formation of gender identities, but her thesis that identity is constructed throughrepeated acts for a social audience is a useful description of the creation and performanceof hippie and Yippie identities through repeated behaviors.Every day dedicated hippies dressed themselves in beads and cast-off militarygarb, draped themselves with mandalas and amulets, and refused to cut their hair as away of building their hippie identity. While the “hidden hippies” or “weekend hippies”used garments to construct a hippie identity for themselves on the weekends, far away138