Slutty Pumpkins: The production, circulation, and consumption of Halloween costumes


Tonya Davidson, Carleton University

The histories of Halloween, its origin in Celtic, Irish and Scottish traditions, as a synthesis and reworking of various nighttime rituals dating from the 1st century B.C Celtic feast of Samhain have been well-established (MacKillip 2004; Morton 2012; Rogers 2002). Sociologists have also devoted some scholarship to researching specific aspects of contemporary Halloween traditions like dressing up in costumes, and trick or treating in specific contexts. Some sociologists have found that, in the context of American college parties, White students feel comfortable dressing up in racially-coded costumes, while racialized students in turn experience the holiday as hostile, and parents use Halloween as an opportunity to express their identity, and class distinction through their children’s Halloween costumes (Levinson et al 1992; Mueller et al 2007). However, sociological research on the production, circulation, and donning of Halloween costumes is limited. Drawing on Simmel’s understanding of fashion, I understand wearing costumes to serve the twin functions of: individualization and social conformity. Costumes are key to identity-crafting practices at the individual and collective level. Wearing costumes (like wearing masks in many cultures around the world) is an identity-transforming moment for individuals. Yet options for costumes, the reception of costumes, and the procuring of costumes all happen within broader social contexts of local communities and Halloween industries. Costume wearing sets people apart, and a part of larger communities. The designing and wearing of costumes are also characterized by an overwhelming spirit of play, and joke-making, mockery, and also more straightforward frivolity. As such, costume wearing is amenable to a symbolic interactionist analysis. Considering the power dynamics inherent in joke-telling, larger structural analyses of various power structures. This is true of children’s and adults’ Halloween costumes. Sociologists have detailed how parents perform their parenting identities through the careful selection of costumes for their children (Levinson et al, 1992). The options for children’s store-bought Halloween costumes sit within what Beryl Langer refers to as the “paradox of childhood” (Langer 2002)— they are both enchanting, positioning childhood itself within the realm of the sacred, yet at the same time the costumes are mass-produced and consumed, and worn in the interests of the mass consumption of candy. This tension between individual creativity and conformity is at the crux of the debates around racist and culturally inappropriate Halloween costumes. Challenges to these costumes are often framed as assaults on freedom of speech, and more broadly individual freedom—freedom to individual creativity—which costumes are imagined to express. However, framing problematic costumes as expressions of creativity and individuality, ignores the ways into which so many of these costumes are explicitly expressions of imitation rather than individuality, that racism is something we are socialized into, that it has age-old histories, and articulations of racist and sexist logics, are, instead of being highly individual, expressions of group belonging—both in current moments (belonging to a school community, to a local community) and to broader historic belonging to certain structures (belonging to the un-maligned race, the gender with historic and ongoing power, etc). In this paper, drawing on contemporary stories of fraught (racist, sexist, otherwise offensive) costumes worn at adult parties, and extant research on children’s Halloween costume choices, I offer a sociological reading of the politics, solidarity-building and fracturing functions of designing and wearing Halloween costumes, with a focus on racist costumes, and highly sexualized costumes for women.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: