Plugging in through clothing: How children’s clothes influence perception and affective practices in day care

The article examines children’s clothes in the practices of everyday life in day care. The data for the article are drawn from an ethnography of three- to seven-year-old children’s day care groups in a day care centre intended for children of shift-working parents in southern Finland. Rather than focusing on the relations between identity, representation and clothing, the article examines what clothes do in the everyday practices of day care. Clothes are seen, first, as mediating perception, and, second, as taking part in and maintaining affective everyday practices. The effects of wearing clothes are analysed using the concept of plug-ins by Latour and that of affordances proposed by Gibson. The plug-ins detect the ways in which objects transmit selfhood, while affordances describe the relation between body and environment in perception. Through the analysis of everyday practices of wearing clothing, clothes are seen as connectors. They enhance, diminish or expand possibilities for perception, action and affective practices in which children engage, thereby altering the children’s ways of being. The article proposes that the wearing of clothing plays a role in constituting selfhood outside of mere representations.