10
“What’s under the Kilt?”

Playing (with) Scottishness

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, kilt is Middle English and originated in the mid-fourteenth century as a verb in the sense of “tuck up around the body.” It has Scandinavian connections, being related to the Danish kilte, meaning “tuck (up)” and the Old Norse kilting, meaning “a skirt.” The use of kilt as a noun dates to the mid-eighteenth century, but the history of the garment itself stretches back at least two centuries earlier to the end of the sixteenth century. Originally the “great kilt” was a full-length garment, the upper part of which could serve as a cloak. The bottom half eventually developed into the small, or walking kilt (similar to today’s modern kilt).

How the kilt became one of the most familiar markers of Scottishness is a matter of debate (see Trevor-Roper 2008), but its complex story brings together elements of Scottish culture, popular resistance, official military dress, and romantic nationalism. The kilt has been associated with Highland Scottish resistance since the British government attempted to exercise control over Scotland in 1746 through its Disarming Act (see Gibson 1998). The act prohibited the wearing of Highland clothing, including the kilt. Although the act was repealed in 1782, it has been the subject of romantic retellings since (e.g., the 1995 movies Braveheart and Rob Roy), so that the kilt is now linked not only to Scottish history but to the cultural oppression the Scots suffered at the hands of the English. Members of the British army’s Highland regiments who had adopted tartan and kilts as part of their uniform were exempted from the Disarming Act, and after the act’s repeal, these elements became even more widespread within the British military. As a result, other contemporary associations stem from the kilt’s military connections. After the revocation of the Disarming Act, Highland Societies were created, encouraging both the playing of Highland music and the wearing of Highland dress. King George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822 further strengthened the kilt’s position as a symbol of patriotism rather than rebellion. Sir Walter Scott and the Highland Societies celebrated the occasion with much tartan and pageantry that promoted the widespread wearing of Highland dress (Dunbar 1981, 79).

The kilt’s adoption and evolution outside Scotland is equally complicated. In my home province of Nova Scotia, Premier Angus L. Macdonald adopted Scottishness as the provincial identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century (McKay 1992, 8), even though some historians argue that neither the Scots settlers nor their descendents actually wore kilts (see Dunbar 1981, 13). By the 1950s, the Nova Scotia provincial government promoted what historian Ian McKay has termed “merry tartanism” (1992, 34) in an effort to sell the province to visitors. They adopted an official provincial tartan and installed a kilted piper at the border to welcome tourists. For some Nova Scotians, the kilt was also a complex expression of “critical nostalgia” (Cashman 2006) in that its evocation of earlier times represented a critique of modernity.

In geographical locations where Scottish ancestry is not promoted, arguably meanings are more convoluted still. In these contexts, the kilt can be read as a performance of Scottish “ethnic drag.” Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (1994) and Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity (1999), Katrin Sieg coined the term ethnic drag to refer to “not only cross-racial casting on stage, but more generally, the performance of ‘race’ as a masquerade.” She continues, “As a crossing of racial lines in performance, ethnic drag simultaneously erases and redraws boundaries posturing as ancient and immutable . . . As a technique of estrangement, drag denounces that which dominant ideology presents as normal, and inescapable, without always offering another truth” (2002, 2). Although Sieg was thinking of race, her comments apply equally to displays of ethnicity.

Take the experience of wearing a tartan kilt in Newfoundland, a province that constructs itself as English and Irish. It is something members of the City of St. John’s Pipe Band do every time they perform. Established in the mid-1970s, this is still Newfoundland and Labrador’s only pipe band more than thirty-five years later. Although the band presents itself as Scottish, playing Scottish tunes and wearing Scottish tartan kilts, most members do not have Scottish ancestry. Membership has fluctuated, peaking at approximately two dozen and ebbing at less than half that number; when Simon West’s picture circulated in late 2004, there were about twelve active members (nine men and three women). At that time, one piper was of Scottish birth, but only a few of the others could claim even distant Scottish roots. Rather, most pipers and drummers were graduates of the provincial cadets’ band program who simply wanted an opportunity to continue playing.

The vast majority of people who make up the band’s local audiences have no Scottish connections either. The province’s small population of Scottish descent is located on Newfoundland’s west coast, an eight- or ten-hour drive from the capital city, where the band is based. The band receives annual financial support from the City of St. John’s, for which it is named, presumably to ensure the availability of pipe music for municipally sponsored events. Although the band is regularly engaged to “pipe in” curlers at a tournament, participants on a pub crawl, members of a head table, or mourners at a funeral, it has difficulty securing performance gigs. In a city with little Scottish heritage, this band is not recognized by residents as their own, as was evidenced a few years ago when the band applied to play at the annual St. John’s Folk Festival and was refused.

A member of a Scottish pipe band is by definition an anomaly in a city and province that heavily promote themselves as Irish; he or she is certainly not conceived of as part of the folk culture. And yet, as Caitlin Fry (2007, 2) observed in Australia, “Scottishness is simply not exotic enough to be regarded as ‘ethnic.’” A Scottish kilt may symbolize cultural identification in Scotland itself or in places where it creates a feeling of kinship among individuals of Scots descent, such as Nova Scotia (see Crane, Hamilton, and Wilson 2004, 680). But to wear a kilt in St. John’s is to perform a form of “reconstructed ethnicity,” a term Dean MacCannell uses to refer to “the kinds of ethnic identities which have emerged in response to the pressures of tourism” (1984, 377). He writes:

MacCannell paints a bleak picture, noting that relationships between tourists and ethnic locals are at best perfunctory: “Any social relationship which is transitory, superficial and unequal is a primary breeding ground for deceit, exploitation, mistrust, dishonesty, and stereotype formation . . . When the touristic definition of an ethnic group or community prevails, the group is frozen in an image of itself museumized. The group becomes a thing” (388).

Today most Euro North Americans would recognize dressing in a costume using blackface as inappropriate except for a very few circumstances—such as, for example, when White actors play the title character in Shakespeare’s Othello or when White singers do the title role in Verdi’s opera Otello. Employing and/or parodying markers of Scottish identity in a performance of ethnic drag is less problematic, however. In 2006, two years after the photo of Simon West began making its rounds, the Nova Scotian brewery Alexander Keith’s continued the long history of stereotyping Scottish ethnicity in a series of popular television ads featuring an angry, stingy Scot. More recently, Scotts Miracle-Gro’s 2012 television ads parodied a blustery Scot, sometimes accompanied by his dog Haggis, teaching his neighbors about proper lawn care. Arguably, the depictions in these ads build on the earlier success of comedian Mike Myers and his memorable Scottish characters like Stuart MacKenzie, the stern father in So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) and Fat Bastard, the obese henchman in the second and third Austin Powers movies: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002). These are just a few examples, but it is safe to say that the number of Scottish caricatures in contemporary popular culture eclipses that of many other ethnic groups and that Scots are one of the few ethnic groups still joked about publicly.

Although the visibility of Scottish ethnic caricatures and the acceptability of laughing at Scots ethnicity undoubtedly heighten the play factor when members of the City of St. John’s Pipe Band perform, in the Newfoundland context, the kilt is not only a marker of Scottishness, it is an indicator of difference. Recent analyses of mummering traditions in Newfoundland demonstrate that the social meanings of blackface in the province drew on both popular constructions of race and ideas about strangers to create a culturally specific expression of otherness (see Best 2008). Similarly, I would argue that when a man wears a tartan kilt in Newfoundland, he is an indicator of otherness as well as a representative of Scottish ethnicity. Band members report being stared at by nearly everyone they meet as well as being stopped, and sometimes verbally harassed, by strangers passing by on foot or in cars. Of course I am not suggesting that it is only in Newfoundland that wearing a kilt attracts attention. One piper I spoke with, who has worn a kilt in cities across two continents, finds that it is only at Highland Games (where characteristically nearly all the male participants, and often a significant percentage of the audience, are in kilts) that he escapes special notice. In all other contexts he draws interest. Although more common in Scotland than other places, the kilt brings looks even on the streets of Edinburgh, where, he says: “People will stare at you because you’re either a tourist or you’re in the theater or doing a show.” The kilt may cue spectacle, but this reference to Scottish tourism both emphasizes how its meanings shift depending on the context and points to its complexity as a sign.

Playing (with) Sex/uality

“The young man joins the Royal Army, and after basic training he comes home on leave in his highland uniform. This first evening in the family parlor, his mother takes him aside and says, ‘Son, if you’re going to be a soldier, you’re going to have to learn to sit like a lady’” (Alex 2004).

Writing as both researcher and member of a Scottish bagpipe band in Australia, Caitlin Fry is quick to characterize the kilt as a “powerful symbol of masculinity, connecting the wearer with constructions of the Scottish Highlander, who embodies aspects of masculinity: toughness, stoicism, courage and embracing a life outdoors” (2007, 8). Fry argues:

As Fry’s comments suggest, female bagpipers have not presented a serious challenge to the kilt’s masculine identification. Discussion on the subject of women’s dress in an online forum for bagpipe players reflects a diversity of uniform choices (Dunsire 2001). After World War II, the number of women pipe bands increased, and while some issued their members a kilt, kilt jacket, and sporran, more often they chose a feminized version of a kilt or skirt. For example, the Canadian Women’s Army Corps Pipe Band, established in 1943, adopted a jacket, military skirt, and no sporran (Cape n.d.). From the 1970s, with the decline of all-women bands and the increased integration of women into co-ed bands that began as all-male organizations, many female pipers have worn the same clothing as their male counterparts, which often consists of a kilt jacket, kilt, and sporran.

Despite the kilt’s well-established masculine associations, male kilt wearers experience persistent challenges to their masculinity and repeated requests for clarification concerning their performances of it. The majority of kilt-related humor supports the claim that “the most fascinating and powerful element of wearing the kilt is not the garment, but rather what is underneath” (C. Fry 2007, 10). Some members of the City of St. John’s Pipe Band reported being asked the question “What’s under the kilt?” “all the time.” One admits, “I don’t know what it is about it. The women love it. They try to lift up under your kilt. They’re very open about it.” Other band members echo this when they describe how a man’s appearance in a kilt signals a time for play. It is as if when a man wears a kilt, everyone’s gender identity is called into question. On these occasions, the sense of personal liberation often associated with disguise is either extended or transferred to those female spectators who respond by laughing and asking flirtatiously, “What’s under the kilt?” (see Ray 2005, 238).

As Helga Kotthoff explains, “keying”—in this case laughter and a playful tone—is central to conversational humor: “Keying is a process, which regulates the particular reality and coherence relations of utterances . . . In humor the relationship to reality is loosened and special inferences are needed to create ‘sense in nonsense,’ to use Freud’s expression . . . Loosening the relationship between statement and reality means widening the possible scope of imagination. Laughter particles in utterances are important keying markers; they often index that a text is to be interpreted as humorous” (2006, 7). The kilt wearer shifts the context from spectacle to carnival for, as Bakhtin argues, the two are closely related. The exchange that follows invites participation (1968, 7) and temporarily suspends hierarchical order. The question “What under the kilt?” conforms to what Bakhtin describes as “a special type of communication impossible in everyday life” that is “frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating etiquette and decency imposed at other times” (10).

Based on the female challenge “What’s under the kilt?” I would argue, contra Fry, that the kilt is not read uniformly as “the only male garment left unconquered by women” (2007, 1). Rather, for some it more closely approximates female than male attire. By extension, my research with kilt wearers shows that to look like a woman is apparently read by some women as an invitation to treat a man as they themselves are treated. In fact, Fry herself notes that for a man to wear a kilt in public is to become “collective ‘property’” (11). Members of the City of St. John’s Pipe Band shared experiences that support this view, not only describing how they negotiated verbal harassment but also detailing physical assaults that ranged from a female passerby putting her hand, uninvited, under one’s kilt to more organized efforts. One piper describes, “With digital cameras people will, there’s a double team thing . . . You get set up. Somebody’s, ‘I’m really interested in that tie. Is that a regimental tie?’ And then of course the partner will go around with a camera and [whistles, demonstrating person taking picture up under kilt].”⁴ Another piper, a physician, describes encountering coercion that is almost impossible to resist:

The men’s experiences confirm Caitlin Fry’s observation that “while literature about dress and gender places emphasis on the visual, many do not simply observe a kilt; they approach and interact with the kilt-wearer” (2007, 11). Significantly, it seems that the question is not asked of women (see 11–12; Ray 2005, 237).

Historically, women have been socialized to be the appreciative recipients of jokes rather than joke tellers, so that when they adopt the medium of sexual humor, they are assuming what Regina Barreca terms “bad girls’ humor”: “Bad Girls say what they think. This is particularly important because what the Bad Girl says out loud is usually the same thing that everybody else is thinking but is too ashamed to admit. This is often at the heart of women’s humor—the ability to say out loud what nobody thought a girl was allowed to think, let alone say” (1991, 49). As women turn the tables on men, they physically show what it means to be read as sexually available because of one’s clothing. Their performances might be interpreted as a mimicry of how men more often regard and approach women’s bodies. Just as Homi Bhabha understands colonial mimicry to be “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” women’s mimicry exaggerates the usually (but not always) more distanced male gaze and transforms it into verbal and/or physical aggression. It demonstrates the complexities that Bhabha identifies as “the sign of a double articulation” and “complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power” (1994, 86).

In some contexts, the women’s joking takes on a teasing quality that builds commonality between a woman and a man perceived to be dressed like one. As Jennifer Hay writes, “Humor can challenge existing boundaries, attempt to set new ones, or create or maintain boundaries by making an example of someone present” (2000, 724). The reversal can be a time of education, showing men what it feels like to be under the gaze and even under threat. But the boundaries between acceptable behavior and sexual harassment are fluid where jokes are concerned (Kotthoff 2006, 17). Hay notes, “Some teasing primarily reinforces solidarity and expresses rapport, whereas other teases serve primarily to maintain the power of the teaser” (2000, 720). Whatever the humor’s intent, however, it can open up normally unspeakable topics for discussion: “Once speakers agree that they are engaging in humorous interaction, conversational postulates can be violated without interfering with communication . . . Socially unspeakable topics can more readily enter the discourse, because the ambiguity of the humor mode allows them to be talked about in disguised and deniable form” (Crawford 2003, 1420). Characteristic of studies that show women’s talk and humor to be subversive and challenging of larger societal discourse regarding gender and sexuality (e.g., see Coates and Jordan 1997; Crawford 2003), women’s humorous question “What’s under your kilt?” takes advantage of one of those “in-between spaces” that Bhabha identifies as crucial in the articulation of difference (1994, 1). The question takes both men and women out of their patriarchally constructed roles, exploring other social constructions of what it means to be either sex/gender, in an expression that arguably both confirms conventional femininity in its flirtatiousness and serves as a site of resistance to it in its forwardness.

Male audience members sometimes read, or pretend to read, the kilt either as a statement of homosexuality or as a mark of the cross-dresser. For example, a middle-aged piper in the City of St. John’s Pipe Band recalled a gig he played in the bar district of St. John’s when he was ridiculed: “We played with [the band] Abbey Road . . . [during] the George Street Festival . . . so myself and Jack are standing off to the side and . . . there’s this great big gronk behind us. You could hear, ‘Queers wearing skirts. Look at the queers wearing skirts.’” Another piper, in his twenties, recounted playing in the closing ceremonies of an ice stadium that had been a fixture in the city for fifty years. As the band played its way out of the building, a male spectator yelled, “Nice fucking skirt!” The drummer reports being “ready to put down the drum and go after him.” A third band member, now in his forties, reported encountering even more taunting when he was younger: “I remember before I was driving or if I didn’t have the car that night, I’d walk to curling club or whatever and if you’d meet another bunch of high school students then they are given to asinine comments.” Onlookers assert hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005) by distancing themselves through homophobic comments from the man whose dress displays visual ambiguity. When men position themselves against homosexuality, they adopt, as Deborah Cameron argues, a “kind of discursive strategy [that] is not only about masculinity, it is a sustained performance of masculinity” (1997, 590)

Performing Hegemonic Masculinity in a Kilt

Attacks clothed in humor are difficult to respond to (see Greenhill et al. 1993; Kotthoff 2006, 13), and many male kilt wearers report opting to stay within the play frame when probed about what’s under their kilt. Most band members have a stock answer; in fact, new kilt wearers are sometimes supplied with a selection of quick one-line replies such as “Shoes and socks” (see Miss Cellania 2010) because as the handbook So You’re Going to Wear a Kilt! advises, whatever underwear is actually chosen, “you must never admit you are wearing pants under the kilt. This is part of the mystique” (J. C. Thompson 1989, 98). One of the younger men in the St. John’s band responds with “Not a thread,” while a longtime piper reports, “I have a standard line that I use . . . when anyone asks, ‘What do you wear under the kilt?’ . . . I always turn it around: ‘So you’re asking what’s worn under the kilt?’ So, of course they say yes and I say, ‘There’s nothing worn under the kilt. It’s all in good working order.’” He goes on to explain the effectiveness of this response: “[The answer] is standard. It’s relatively polite. People smile at it. And you don’t ruin anyone’s fun really and you just go away.” The humorous reply, or wisecrack, disciplines the woman who oversteps her bounds at the same time as its one-upmanship elevates the teller’s status, a function that some researchers have identified as being more important to men than women (Hay 2000, 733).

Some of the male pipers and drummers describe feeling uncomfortable when drunken women in the audience try to grope under their kilt or when pranks are pulled with cameras. One piper comments, “The practice of having the throwaway cameras on the tables [at weddings is] disastrous. Especially—I mean, guys will pick them up themselves and woh ooh [mimics taking picture under kilt].” However, the band members often turn to humor to right any power imbalance and assert their hegemonic masculinity. A male kilt wearer can be the target of a prank with a camera, but he can also turn the tables. As another piper jokes, “When the bride starts to recognize [band members by what’s under their kilts], then you’ve got problems.” He pretends to be looking at wedding pictures with the bride when they come to a photo of a man’s genitals that she identifies as Peter: “‘How do you know that is Peter?’ [The bride answers,] ‘Oh, I recognize the tartan in the background [and] the mole at three o’clock.’” The close of his joke erases any question surrounding the kilt wearer’s “real” performance of masculinity, and the humor is targeted where it should be in any good patriarchal joke: at the real (biological) woman. Margaret Wetherell and Nigel Edley remind us that hegemony is not automatic but involves contest and constant struggle; male dominance must be continually reasserted at the expense of women and the alternative forms of masculinities it subordinates and marginalizes (1999, 336). While humorous exchanges that equate a man in a kilt with a woman or identify him as homosexual may create opportunities for straight men to rethink power dynamics around gender and sexual orientation, those chances generally seem not to be taken up.

The retorts build on a larger complex of humor depending on this kind of reversal. For example, a well-known folksong that now has countless parodies on YouTube describes the experience of a drunken Scotsman when two women can’t resist looking under his kilt as he lies passed out on the street:

The humor assures, just like the comeback, that “nothing is worn under the kilt” as well as that “everything is in working order.” In fact, some of the band members argue that women read the kilt primarily as an indication of sexual availability rather than ambiguity and that this interpretation can be to their advantage if they are heterosexual single men. For example, one of the pipers says he likes to think of the kilt as “eight yards of chick magnet” and prides himself on once picking up a girl when he piped at a funeral. Like the jokes, he transforms the kilt; it is not a feminine skirt but a tool of masculine bravado. He concludes, “That’s why you wear a kilt—because you can swagger in it. It’s a garment given to swaggering.”

Much of the kilt-related humor that band members of the City of St. John’s Pipe Band share among themselves reaffirms hegemonic, heterosexual masculinity. For example, walking kilted down the streets of St. John’s requires a certain amount of confidence, but one piper claims, “The musical instrument is primary and the costume is secondary.” Although his comment suggests that the kilt is almost inconsequential to a piper, he also intimates that this casual attitude is expected and that it distinguishes pipers from other male kilt wearers, like Scottish country dancers, for example, for whom he suggests “the kilt would be a big thing, a primary thing.” On the other hand, he argues that pipers don’t give the kilt a second thought; they are comfortable because other band members are similarly dressed: “You have your uniform on.” Stories of comfort level sometimes separate kilt wearers from those outside the band, as shown in the narrative one band member tells of a friend who fell asleep in his kilt after a night of drinking. He snuggled down and pulled the kilt up around his shoulders for warmth . . . much to the dismay of the cleaners who arrived at the barracks in the morning.

Jokes and pranks teach young men how to move, and apropos of Simon West, how to sit in a kilt, for as a younger drummer in the St. John’s band comments, “I know from experience that it is quite possible to have your little man showing and not know it.” Successfully maneuvering in a kilt represents a rite of passage, for in contrast to the mother’s advice to her son in the well-known joke above, the men actually sit any way but like ladies, with their legs spread open and kilts anchored in between. Knowing where to sit, how to sit, what underwear to wear, or how to march long distances without underwear all mark the experienced kilt wearer. The inexperienced—young men who perch on the side of a chair only to be flipped backward by their friends, those who lose underwear during a march, or those who are badly chafed by the tartan—become the brunt of joke and stories.

How well one wears a kilt helps establish one’s place in the band’s hierarchy. Misdemeanors are long remembered and, once recorded in the band annals, are difficult to shake. Former band members continue to live on in reputation. For example, the City of St. John’s band still comically refers to a former piper who, as one band member put it, “blew too hard and a certain sphincter didn’t hold and he was wearing his kilt and it was obvious down the leg and he got his name labeled to that act.” A more recent narrative concerns a drummer who, as the story goes “had his shower, puts on his kilt and goes out and comes back after six hours of hard marching and realizes, ‘Oh, I left my towel on underneath my kilt.’” While this story is particularly popular among the pipers in that it builds on an “inside” tradition of sharing disparaging narratives about drummers, the drummer at the center of the story also enjoys telling it on himself. Certainly his polished delivery indicates he has told it often.

These few examples illustrate humor’s conservative and disciplinary functions. As Christie Davies writes concerning the ethnic joke, people often turn to humor to define themselves in terms of who they are not: “Jokes are told about the members of a group that is recognizably similar and who, to the joke-tellers look like themselves as seen in a distorting mirror” (1998, 12–13). Assuring the world and themselves that “nothing is worn,” the men argue that despite any appearances to the contrary, as might be suggested by the kilt’s ambiguity, their performance should be read as hegemonic; they are “real men.”

Counter/Hegemonic Performances

Much “What’s under the kilt?” humor shared by male members of the band constitutes part of irreverent “lad” culture. Paul Fussell has written about the rise of “lads” in World War I, a designation characterized by its warmth (as opposed to “men,” which Fussell argues was largely neutral and “boys,” which was a little warmer term) as well as its erotic, homosocial overtones (2000, 282). The Oxford English Dictionary Online echoes these connections in its definition of “lad” as “informal[,] a boy or young man (often as a form of address) . . . a group of men sharing recreational, working, or other interests.” Echoing the focus on homosociality, Celeste Ray sees an emphasis of public ritual at Scottish heritage celebrations like Highland Games to be egalitarian male bonding (2005, 240). She argues that these kinds of public rituals exert a “public patriarchy . . . characterized by public domain processes that are simultaneously patriarchal (hierarchical domination by men) and fratriarchal (collective domination by men)” (241). “What’s under the kilt?” humor also operates simultaneously as homosocial and hypermasculine expression for, as the Oxford English Dictionary Online indicates, yet another meaning of “lad” is “a man who is boisterously macho in his behavior or actions, especially one who is interested in sexual conquest.” Whoever—male or female—may be the attraction of the kilt wearer’s sexual interest, as Caitlin Fry points out, the kilt covers but also can quickly expose “unbridled virility at the flick of a hem” (2007, 10).

There is an affectionate rebelliousness to the lad, as the pipers in the St. John’s band revealed when they described selecting pieces of music with subtexts: a retreat chosen to play for an unpopular politician or “The Clumsy Lover” selected for a wedding. This defiance might take the form of purposefully positioning a kilt at an opportune moment to expose what is underneath, as band members speculate was the case with Colonel Simon West. To make people laugh is to momentarily have control of the situation, and Simon West’s kilt, riding above his knees, photoshopped or not, shows the world that he has not been co-opted—and, by extension, nor have members of his regiment. The photo, taken in the throes of the controversial amalgamation of the Scottish regiments, may well protest the demise of the First Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Perhaps this was West’s intention, as members of the St. John’s band believe, or it may express the viewpoints of others who later engaged in some creative photoediting. In a military structure that allows little if any room for contestation of official decision making, jokes may be particularly valuable as a vehicle for protest. Rebellious humor provides momentary freedom from the constraints of social convention, or what Michael Billig terms “a moment of transcendence” (2005, 208), when power relations can be temporarily inverted without lasting consequences (Crawford 2003, 1420).

Multiple Readings

The ambiguity of the kilt is suited to humorous discourse, which is itself characterized by ambiguity, paradox, multiple interpretations of reality, and partially resolved incongruity. Elliott Oring writes: “Jokes are highly ambiguous forms of communication. Jokes are grounded in a system of relations that are ‘appropriately incongruous’ and thus to some extent self-contradictory. The techniques of jokes would be rejected were they employed in logical argument. Jokes are a species of play, and messages lodged within the play frame are often obscure. Even when particular ideas raised by a joke can be precisely identified, the position of the joke teller with respect to these ideas may be uncertain. Consequently, jokes are not transparent and their messages may not be simple, clear, or unambiguous” (2003, 59). While joking about those in power may provide a much-appreciated outlet for frustration and even create a temporary reversal, it does not bring about permanent transformation (see Billig 2005, 212). In fact, some analysts see the primary benefit of rebellious humor to be for the joke teller rather than any larger group or cause (Wetherell and Edley 1999, 350). Far from being transformative, rebellious constructions of masculinity may still function to reproduce male power (Crawford 2003, 1423).

Meanings behind “What’s under the kilt?” humor are multifaceted, sometimes contradictory, and support what Wetherell and Edley describe as “a multiplicity of hegemonic sense-making” (1999, 351). The kilt introduces a play frame that invites carnavalesque behavior by individuals—male kilt wearers as well as female and male spectators—engaged in accomplishing a wide variety of identity positions (352). Ray contends that “Scottish-American men are exploring the ‘plurality of masculinities’ modeled by forefathers and from which to draw a sense of male identity . . . They are also submitting themselves, in ritual and dress, as objects to the gaze of women and other men.” Although Ray suggests that putting patriarchy and masculinity “on a pedestal” reflects changes in the power of gender identities (2005, 257), I would argue that jokes directed toward, or told by, male kilt wearers do not have either immediately transformative or lasting consequences; at best they open up a space to explore hegemonic masculinity and to challenge power structures that support it. Conversely, much “What’s under the kilt?” humor supports hegemonic performances of ethnicity and gender; its challenges to official culture are easily contained. As Billig argues, “Far from subverting the serious world of power, the humor can strengthen it . . . The more we laugh and the more we imagine ourselves to be daringly free in the moments of our laughter, the more we are complying with the demands of the so-called free market. And the more we reveal ourselves captive to the demand that we possess a naughty sense of humor” (2005, 212). Simon West’s kilt, resting above his knees, may register serious objections to the closure of his regiment; it can be read as a sign that even though regiment members obey orders, they have not been silenced. At the same time, the humor reasserts male authority: the man in a skirt is a man.