It's not self-expression, it's sovereignty

Conventional wisdom is that being permitted to dress and do hair and makeup however you want allows you to express yourself. This often comes up when people are talking about teenagers, and I think I first met the concept in high school when (for reasons I forget) they were talking about having school uniforms.

But I don't think it's self-expression that people are actually talking about. I think they mean sovereignty over one's own body. That's why I find it liberating to wear make-up and heels and generally present as femme as I can muster. I'm asserting sovereignty over my own body by making it look how I want it to look (if my efforts are successful) or at least alluding to how I want it to look (if my efforts are unsuccessful). I'm in charge, I'm in control - not my genetics, not the expectations of my parents or employer or whomever. My body is my territory, but instead of planting a flag I leave my mark with lipstick and underwires.

I think this is also the rest of my objection to school uniforms. Previously I objected on the basis that a) it's Paul Bernardo's fetish, b) it's inherently punitive, as though we can't be trusted with clothes by virtue of the fact that we're teenagers, and c) a huge part of what made me realize that the world was bigger than the middle school cafeteria (thus mitigating some of my shyness, knocking some chips off my shoulder, and giving me perhaps a modicum of self-confidence) was going to high school and seeing people in a huge variety of different clothes all interacting civilly with each other, which made me realize that normal people aren't actually worrying about the shade of blue of my jeans. But there was another part of my objection that I couldn't articulate, and I think this is it. By putting students in uniforms, schools would not only be taking away the most obvious way for the student to assert sovereignty over their own bodies, the school would also be asserting its own sovereignty over the students in its place. And that's just dehumanizing.