Reading Lolita In The Naked Citadel

One’s identity can ultimately define them as who they are as a person and what they can accomplish in their life. An identity can not only be seen as how others perceive you, but also how you perceive and understand yourself. Identity categories such as race, sexuality, and gender try to conform us to act in a certain way. Culture and society are just two examples of outside factors that try to construct these identity categories upon us. Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and the article “The Naked Citadel” by Susan Faludi are two pieces of work that help to demonstrate how outside factors attempt to enforce identity categories upon people. Conforming to and resisting identity categories help an individual to gain an identity
We all play a particular role that is assigned to us. At the Citadel, a public military college in Charleston, the students already have a script written out for them. The script is that the upperclassmen represent men who are powerful and dominant and the underclassmen represent females who are weak and thought of as little girls. This was to reinforce the masculinity of the upperclassmen. This is shown when the young cadets found their place in the “‘fourth-class system.’ This system is a nine-month regimen of small and large indignities intended to ‘strip’ each young recruit of his original identity and remold him into the ‘Whole Man,’ a vaguely defined ideal, half Christian soldier, half Dale Carnegie junior executive” (Faludi 75). This system at the Citadel was to impose masculinity upon the young cadets and enforce a specific identity upon them. Masculinity to them was holding power and being above the rest aka the underclassmen. Making the underclassmen feel inferior to them reinforced the fact that they had superiority; all “real men” had superiority. The identity forced upon the soldiers was the “Whole Man”, which consisted of an authoritative, dominant figure. The masculinity and the idea of the “Whole Man” went hand in hand with turning the cadets into the perfect cadet, and ultimately, the perfect man. Being inferior, the underclassmen did not get to choose
Your appearance can help you express yourself in two ways; to conceal who you really are and to show off who you really are. To Faludi, the Citadel was described as, “more like and architect’s rendering of a campus- almost preternaturally clean, orderly, antiseptic- than the messy real thing” (Faludi 73). The perfect appearance of the Citadel was just a cover up to hide the chaos and disorder happening on the inside. It seemed like a normal military school, but it was really full of hazing and harassment. This false portrayal was to give the Citadel a good name. The risk of this false advertisement was that no one would have to find out how hectic the school was unless they were inside. Also, this can be compared to the cadets; they don’t look like they are misbehaved, yet they haze the underclassmen. Similarly, this importance of appearance correlating with identity coincides with Nafisi and the rest of the girls in her class. Just as the Citadel’s outer appearance covered up how it actually was on the inside, the women in Tehran’s outer appearance did the same thing. As much as they could they, “took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves, insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity of our appearance…” (Nafisi 295). The